f the kitchen, and the
functions of the servants; munificently rewarding, with silver
sixpence in shoe, the tidy housemaid, but venting their direful wrath,
in midnight bobs and pinches, upon the sluttish dairymaid. I think I
can trace the good effects of this ancient fairy sway over household
concerns, in the care that prevails to the present day among English
housemaids, to put their kitchens in order before they go to bed.

I have said, too, that these fairy superstitions seemed to me to
accord with the nature of English scenery. They suit these small
landscapes, which are divided by honeysuckled hedges into sheltered
fields and meadows, where the grass is mingled with daisies,
buttercups, and harebells. When I first found myself among English
scenery, I was continually reminded of the sweet pastoral images which
distinguish their fairy mythology; and when for the first time a
circle in the grass was pointed out to me as one of the rings where
they were formerly supposed to have held their moonlight revels, it
seemed for a moment as if fairy-land were no longer a fable. Brown, in
his Britannia's Pastorals, gives a picture of the kind of scenery to
which I allude:

"------A pleasant mead
Where fairies often did their measures tread;
Which in the meadows make such circles green,
As if with garlands it had crowned been.
Within one of these rounds was to be seen
A hillock rise, where oft the fairy queen
At twilight sat."

And there is another picture of the same, in a poem ascribed to Ben
Jonson.

"Bywells and rills in meadows green,
We nightly dance our heyday guise,
And to our fairy king and queen
We chant our moonlight minstrelsies."

Indeed, it seems to me, that the older British poets, with that true
feeling for nature which distinguishes them, have closely adhered to
the simple and familiar imagery which they found in these popular
superstitions; and have thus given to their fairy mythology those
continual allusions to the farm-house and the dairy, the green meadow
and the fountain-head, that fill our minds with the delightful
associations of rural life. It is curious to observe how the most
beautiful fictions have their origin among the rude and ignorant.
There is an indescribable charm about the illusions with which
chimerical ignorance once clothed every subject. These twilight views
of nature are often more captivating than any which are revealed by
the rays of enlightened p