The entrance of several elements all foreign to each other into the later conception of Fairyland has assisted in the creation of other confusions besides the conflicting accounts of the elfin lineage. “Most spirits,” says a writer in _Chambers’s Journal_, “could contract and diminish their bulk at will, but the fairy alone seems to have been regarded as essentially small in size. The majority of other spirits, such as dwarfs, genii, etc., are represented as deformed creatures, whereas the fairy has almost uniformly been described as a beautiful miniature of the human being, perfect in face and form.” This statement, however, is not even generally correct; it is contradicted continually in legends and poetry alike. It is evident, for instance, that the “Queene of Faire Elfland,” with whom the immortal Rhymer of “bonny Ercildoune” performed his “mirk night” journey into Fairyland, was a spirit, at any rate, approaching the common stature of humanity. Such also were the elfin emperors of Spenser, and such the fay ladies whom Dryden celebrates in his magnificent modernised version of Chaucer’s “Flower and the Leaf,” and who were simply departed human beings in a certain state of bondage. The inhabitants of the Elfin World, and generally all classes of nature-spirits, are poetically depicted in all forms and sizes at the will of the bard or romancer, and are sometimes identical with the original human fairy of the Arthurian and Charlemagne cycles, sometimes with the diminutive good people of Gothic lore. These formal discrepancies originated in time a harmonising tradition which well enters into the spirit of fairy mythology. In the fine ballad of “The Young Tamlane,” that elfin knight, who had passed from mortality into fairyhood, informs his mistress that he can quit his body when he pleases, and inhabit either earth or air. Our shapes and size we can convert To either large or small; An old nut-shell’s the same to us As is the lofty hall. The religion professed in the elfin world is another debated point. According to Chaucer, the book, and bell, and holy water, the matins and other prayers of monks and limitours, had, even in his day, thoroughly exorcised the fairies, and improved them off the face of the earth, a statement which may be true enough in the case of the trolls and the brownies, and other survivals of heathen times.