hus dissolved."--FORDUNI
_Scotichronicon,_ Vol. I. p. 407, _cura_ GOODALL.

But it is rather in the classical character of an infernal deity, that
the elfin queen may be considered, than as _Hecate_, the patroness of
magic; for not only in the romance writers, but even in Chaucer, are the
Fairies identified with the ancient inhabitants of the classical hell.
Thus Chaucer, in his _Marchand's Tale_, mentions

Pluto that is king of fayrie--and
Proserpine and all her fayrie.

In the _Golden Terge_ of Dunbar, the same phraseology is adopted: Thus,

Thair was Pluto that elricke incubus
In cloke of grene, his court usit in sable.

Even so late as 1602, in Harsenet's _Declaration of Popish Imposture,_
p. 57, Mercury is called _Prince of the Fairies._

But Chaucer, and those poets who have adopted his phraseology, have only
followed the romance writers; for the same substitution occurs in the
romance of _Orfeo and Heurodis_, in which the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice is transformed into a beautiful romantic tale of faery, and
the Gothic mythology engrafted on the fables of Greece. _Heurodis_ is
represented as wife of _Orfeo_, and queen of Winchester, the ancient
name of which city the romancer, with unparalleled ingenuity, discovers
to have been Traciens, or Thrace. The monarch, her husband, had a
singular genealogy:

His fader was comen of King Pluto,
And his moder of King Juno;
That sum time were as godes y-holde,
For aventours that thai dede and tolde.

Reposing, unwarily, at noon, under the shade of an ymp tree,[A]
_Heurodis_ dreams that she is accosted by the King of Fairies,

With an hundred knights and mo,
And damisels an hundred also,
Al on snowe white stedes;
As white as milke were her wedes;
Y no seigh never yete bifore,
So fair creatours y-core:
The kinge hadde a croun on hed,
It nas of silver, no of golde red,
Ac it was of a precious ston:
As bright as the sonne it schon.

[Footnote A: _Ymp tree_--According to the general acceptation, this only
signifies a grafted tree; whether it should he here understood to mean a
tree consecrated to the imps, or fairies, is left with the reader.]

The King of Fairies, who had obtained power over the queen, perhaps from
her sleeping at noon in his domain, orders her, under the penalty of
being torn to pieces, to await him to-morrow under the ymp tree, and
accompany him to Fairy-Land. She relates her dream to her husband, who
r