So fierce, it stretched him on the plain
Beside the wounded Deloraine.
From the ground he rose dismayed,
And shook his huge and matted head;
One word he muttered, and no more,
'Man of age, thou smitest sore!'
&c. &c.
Now, if you ask who gave the stroke,
I cannot tell, so mot I thrive--
_It was not given by man alive._"

But he had read sufficient for the purposes of his mission, and we shall
see how he applies the knowledge so marvellously acquired.

By the glamour of this spell he was empowered to make one thing assume the
form of another.

"It had much of glamour might,
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall,
Seem tapestry in a lordly hall,"
&c. &c.

The first use he makes of his power is to convey the wounded knight, laid
across his weary horse, into Branksome Hall

"Before the beards of the warders all;
And each did after swear and say,
There only passed a wain of hay."

Having deposited him at the door of the Ladye's bower, he repasses the
outer court, and finding the young chief at play, entices him into the
woods under the guise _to him_ of a "comrade gay."

"Though on the drawbridge, the warders stout,
Saw a terrier and a lurcher passing out;"

and, leading him far away "o'er bank and fell," well nigh frightens the
fair boy to death by resuming his own elvish shape.

"Could he have had his pleasure wilde,
He had crippled the joints of the noble child;
&c. &c.
But his awful mother he had in dread,
_And also his power was limited_,"
&c. &c.

Here let me observe that all this contrivance is essential to the conduct
of the narrative, and if we simply grant the postulate which a legendary
minstrel has a right to demand, to wit, the potency of magic spells to
effect such delusions (pictoribus atque Poetis _Quidlibet audendi_ semper
fuit aequa potestas), all the remainder of the narrative is easy, natural,
and probable. This contrivance is necessary, because, in the first place,
if it had been known to the warders that William of Deloraine had been
brought into the castle wounded almost unto death, he could not be supposed
capable of engaging Richard Musgrave in single combat two days afterwards;
nor, in the second place, would the young chief have been permitted to
stroll out unattended from the guarded precincts.

To proceed: the boy thus bewildered in the forest falls into