It is also established, and by this etymology itself, that the original fairy of Frankish poetry and fiction was simply a female initiated into the mysteries and marvels of magic. Such was the mighty Morgue la Fay, the mystic sister of King Arthur, and such, in unconscious accordance with the original tradition, were those fairies of later French romance who delighted our childhood in the graceful and beautiful stories of Perrault and the Countess d’Aulnoy. The immediate source of the conceptions which are at the base of English fairy poetry must be evidently sought in the romances and legends of early French chivalry, in such delightful, though comparatively unknown, stories as that of the Paladin Huon de Bordeaux, who was protected in direst extremity, and assisted in the successful prosecution of an almost impossible quest by the divine child Oberon, and then in a glade of dews and sunshine, fenced by the mystic darkness of a Syrian forest, was anointed with supernatural chrism, and instructed in the magical sentences which compel the obedience of elf and gnome and _lutin_, and “crowned King of all Faërie.” Oberon himself, it is true, has a Teutonic origin, and is known to the early Germanic folk-lore by the names of Alberich, Alberon, etc., but the original inspiration of English fairy poetry is derived, as I have said, through the fairy imaginings of the French metrical romancers. By these, the supreme monarch of Elfland, who, despite the supposititious succession of Huon and his own translation to Paradise, continued to spread wide his golden rule as in pre-Provençal days, is represented as a child of four to five years, indescribable in his beauty, sirenian in voice and manner, clothed in a robe which sparkled with all manner of precious stones, and aërially conveyed in a superb, swan-drawn chariot. His palace, with its golden roof and diamond spires, seems to have followed him in his travels, and thus the Land of Faërie was substantially and for the time being in that spot wheresoever which was the tarrying-place of the Grand Master of the Elfin World. Side by side with the fays of poetry and chivalrous history there persisted, in spite of the general diffusion of Christianity, the old spiritual traditions of the Gothic and Celtic nations, concerning the Elves, Trolls, Brownies, malignant or benevolent dwarfs, gnomes, and generally diminutive beings gifted with supernatural powers and of an other than mortal origin. These two hierarchies of supernal beings were confused in the popular imagination; the magical abilities which could only be painfully acquired by humanity were identified with the magical prerogatives which were inherent in the natures of Kelpie, Elf, and Ghoul, and the mystical combination produced that new, glorious, and beautiful hierarchy of semi-spiritual essences which was governed by the elfin Oberon.