ir body. Seen by night, they are
very beautiful: in the daytime, you perceive that their hair is
grey--that their eyes are red--that their face is wrinkled. Accordingly,
they begin to show themselves only at the shut of eve; and they loathe
the light. _Every thing about them denotes fallen intelligences._ The
Breton peasants maintain that _they are high princesses, who, because
they would not embrace Christianity when the apostles came to preach in
Armorica, were stricken by the curse of God_. The Welsh recognise in
them, souls of Druids doomed to penance. This coincidence is remarkable.

"They are universally believed to feel a vehement hatred for the
clergy, and for our holy religion, which has confounded them with the
spirits of darkness--a grand motive, as it appears, of displeasure and
offence to them. The sight of a surplice, _the sound of bells_, scares
them away. The popular tales of all Europe would, meanwhile, tend to
support the church, in viewing them as maleficent genii. As in Britanny;
the blast of their breath is mortal in Wales, in Ireland, in Scotland,
and in Prussia. They cast weirds.{C} Whosoever has muddied the waters of
their spring, or caught them combing their hair, or counting their
treasures beside their _dolmen_, (for they there keep, it is believed,
concealed mines of gold and of diamonds,) almost inevitably dies;
especially should the misencounter fall upon a Saturday, which day, holy
to the Virgin Mother, is inauspicious for their kind,"{D} &c. &c. &c.

Here, in the stead of the joyously-sociable monarchal hive, you behold a
republic of solitarily-dwelling, and not unconditionally beautiful,
naiads! No dancing! And a stature, prodigiously disqualifying for the
asylum of an acorn cup! You are unsatisfied. Shakspeare has indeed
vividly portrayed one curiously-featured species, and M. De la
Villemarque another, of the air-made inscrutable beings evoked by your
question; but your question, from the beginning, struck at the GENERIC
notion in its purified logical shape--at the definition, then--of the
thing, a fairy.

Sir _Walter Scott_,{E} writing--the first in time of all men who have
written--at large and scientifically upon the fairies of Western Europe,
steps into disquisition by a description, duly loose for leaving his own
foot unentangled. "The general idea of SPIRITS, of A LIMITED POWER AND
SUBORDINATE NATURE, DWELLING AMONG THE WOODS AND MOUNTAINS, is perhaps
common to all nations."