their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of _The Wee Wee Man_;
while from _The Elfin Knight_ we learn that woman's wit as well as
woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and
riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing--

'A knight stands on yon high, high hill,
Blaw, blaw, ye cauld winds blaw!
He blaws a blast baith loud and shrill,
The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa,'

and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But
the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady
brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a
preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark
without a seam.'

It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and
with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the
glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer
of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than
others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a
basis similar to that which led the mediaeval mind to dub Virgil a
magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave
ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the
profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for
no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most
indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention
to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's
expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his
soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as
evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland,
research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made
on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,

'A ferlie he spied wi' his e'e;
And there he saw a ladye bright
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree,'

was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have
made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange
ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly
discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old
cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the
world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and
time. There are the Broad Pa