ilver, but in vile apparel, and send you back again
to your master, for a jewel." In "Much Ado About Nothing" (iii.
1) Hero speaks of a man as being "low, an agate very vilely
cut."

And Puck tells us, in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream" (ii. 1), that when
Oberon and Titania meet,

"they do square, that all their elves, for fear,
Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there."

Further on (ii. 3) the duties imposed by Titania upon her train point to
their tiny character:

"Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats."

And when enamoured of Bottom, she directs her elves that they should--

"Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;
The honey bags steal from the humble-bees,
And for night tapers crop their waxen thighs
And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,
To have my love to bed, and to arise;
And pluck the wings from painted butterflies
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes."

We may compare, too, Ariel's well-known song in "The Tempest" (v. 1):

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry,
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily,
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

Again, from the following passage in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (iv.
4) where Mrs. Page, after conferring with her husband, suggests that--

"Nan Page my daughter, and my little son,
And three or four more of their growth, we'll dress
Like urchins, ouphes, and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands"

it is evident that in Shakespeare's day fairies were supposed to be of
the size of children. The notion of their diminutiveness, too, it
appears was not confined to this country,[25] but existed in
Denmark,[26] for in the ballad of "Eline of Villenskov" we read:

"Out then spake the smallest Trold;
No bigger than an ant;--
Oh! here is come a Christian man,
His schemes I'll sure prevent."

[25] See Grimm's "Deutsche Mythologie."

[26] Thoms's "Three Notelet