ccount of an impress so valuable to medalists. It is not the less
edifying, as we are deprived of the more picturesque parts of the story,
to learn that Thomas's payment was as faithful as his prophecies. The
beautiful lady who bore the purse must have been undoubtedly the Fairy
Queen, whose affection, though, like that of his own heroine Yseult, we
cannot term it altogether laudable, seems yet to have borne a faithful
and firm character.

I have dwelt at some length on the story of Thomas the Rhymer, as the
oldest tradition of the kind which has reached us in detail, and as
pretending to show the fate of the first Scottish poet, whose existence,
and its date, are established both by history and records; and who, if
we consider him as writing in the Anglo-Norman language, was certainly
one among the earliest of its versifiers. But the legend is still more
curious, from its being the first and most distinguished instance of a
man alleged to have obtained supernatural knowledge by means of the
fairies.

Whence or how this singular community derived their more common popular
name, we may say has not as yet been very clearly established. It is the
opinion of the learned that the Persian word Peri, expressing an
unearthly being, of a species very similar, will afford the best
derivation, if we suppose it to have reached Europe through the medium
of the Arabians, in whose alphabet the letter P does not exist, so that
they pronounce the word Feri instead of Peri. Still there is something
uncertain in this etymology. We hesitate to ascribe either to the
Persians or the Arabians the distinguishing name of an ideal
commonwealth, the notion of which they certainly did not contribute to
us. Some are, therefore, tempted to suppose that the elves may have
obtained their most frequent name from their being _par excellence_ a
_fair_ or _comely_ people, a quality which they affected on all
occasions; while the superstition of the Scottish was likely enough to
give them a name which might propitiate the vanity for which they deemed
the race remarkable; just as, in other instances, they called the fays
"men of peace," "good neighbours," and by other titles of the like
import. It must be owned, at the same time, that the words _fay_ and
_fairy_ may have been mere adoptions of the French _fee_ and _feerie_,
though these terms, on the other side of the Channel, have reference to
a class of spirits corresponding, not to our fairies, but with