The discrepancies in fairy traditions, as preserved in English poetry, may be partly accounted for by the fact of this confusion. We find the most eminent fairy authorities in distinct disagreement on several important points. Spenser, the poet of the elfin world _par excellence_, in his account of the “Rolls of Elfin Emperours,” deduces all Faërie from the man-monster created by Prometheus. Shakespeare, on the other hand, refers them to an Indian origin, and the dictionaries of Fairy Mythology, in accordance with this supposition, fix his abode in India, and represent him nightly crossing the intervening seas with inconceivable rapidity to dance in the western moonlight. The oriental origin of magic was generally recognised at a very early period of European gramary; the original fairies of romance received their wisdom from Persia and from India, and after the transfiguration of the elfin world by the confusion of the several spiritual conceptions already noticed, it is easy to see how an eastern source was attributed to the later fairy lineage. But on this point it must also be remembered that the Crusades were undoubtedly the means of acquainting western poets with the rich fountains of oriental romance, and that the general similarity between the Persian Peri and our own fairy, as well as the substantial identity of many supernatural fictions which are popular both in the West and in the East, are a sufficient warrant for attributing a part of this very transformation to the glamorous influence of Arabian imaginations. The classical alternative which is offered by the poet-chronicler of Fairydom has also a base in fact. The Elizabethan age commonly identified the fairies of Gothic superstition with the classic nymphs who attended Diana, while the elfin queen was Diana herself, and was called by one of the names of that goddess, that is, Titania, which is found in the metamorphoses of Ovid as a title of the uranian queen. The opinion originated with the romance writers. Chaucer identifies the fairies with the inhabitants of the Latin Infernus— Pluto that is King of fayrie ... Proserpine and all her fayrie, etc. The tradition spread wildly, and found during the early part of the fourteenth century a voice of poetic beauty in the lovely Scotch fairy-tale of “Orfeo and Heurodis,” which represents the Greek master of mystical song-craft as a “Kinge in Inglond, who abode in Traciens, or Winchester”— The King hadde a quen of priis That was y cleped dame Herodis, That finest leuedi for the nones That might gon on bodi and bones, Full of love and of godinesse Ac no man may tell hir fairnesse. On a certain morn of May, Heurodis, Eurodis, or Eurydice repaired with two of her maidens “to play bi an orchard side,” in the neighbourhood of the palace— To se the floures sprede and spring, And to hear the foules sing.