kin like a negro, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and
are afraid when we hear one cry, Boh! and they have so frayd us with
bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs,
Pans, faunes, sylvans, Kitt-with-the-candlestick, tritons, centaurs,
dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, conjurers, nymphs, changelings, incubus,
Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the hellwain, the
fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless, and
such other bugbears, that we are afraid of our own shadows, insomuch
that some never fear the devil but on a dark night; and then a polled
sheep is a perilous beast, and many times is taken for our father's
soul, specially in a churchyard, where a right hardy man heretofore
durst not to have passed by night but his hair would stand upright.
Well, thanks be to God, this wretched and cowardly infidelity, since the
preaching of the Gospel, is in part forgotten, and doubtless the rest of
these illusions will in a short time, by God's grace, be detected and
vanish away."[44]

[Footnote 44: Reginald Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft," book vii. chap.
15.]

It would require a better demonologist than I am to explain the various
obsolete superstitions which Reginald Scot has introduced as articles of
the old English faith, into the preceding passage. I might indeed say
the Phuca is a Celtic superstition, from which the word Pook or Puckle
was doubtless derived; and I might conjecture that the man-in-the-oak
was the same with the Erl-Koenig of the Germans; and that the hellwain
were a kind of wandering spirits, the descendants of a champion named
Hellequin, who are introduced into the romance of Richard sans Peur. But
most antiquaries will be at fault concerning the spoorn,
Kitt-with-the-candlestick, Boneless, and some others. The catalogue,
however, serves to show what progress the English have made in two
centuries, in forgetting the very names of objects which had been the
sources of terror to their ancestors of the Elizabethan age.

Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in England we may
remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and
necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The
amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their
resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of
their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the
housewive