In olde dayes of the King Artour, Of which that Bretons speken gret honour, All was this lond fulfilled of faerie; The elf-quene, with hire joly compagnie Danced ful oft in many a grene mede. This was the old opinion as I rede; I speke of many hundred yeres ago; But now can no man see non elves mo, For now the grete charitee and prayeres Of limitoures and other holy freres, That serchen every land and every streme, As thikke as motes in the sonne beme, Blissing halles, chambres, kichenes, and boures, Citees and burghes, castles high, and toures, Shropes and bernes, shepenes and dairies, This maketh that ther ben no faeries: For ther as wont to walken was an elf, Ther walketh now the limitour himself, In undermeles and in morweninges, And sayth his matines and his holy thinges, As he goth in his limitatioun. Women may now go safely up and doun, In every bush, and under every tree, Ther is non other incubus but he, And he ne will don hern no dishonour. But Bishop Corbet, writing in the days of the Restoration, testified that the fairies “were of the old religion,” and that since the advent of Protestantism and Elizabethan glories they had departed hence. Herrick, however, adopts a middle course. Now, this the fairies would have known, Theirs is a mixed religion: And some have heard the elves it call Part Pagan, part Papisticall. Intimately associated with the reigning Potentate of Fairyland, the monarch Oberon, and a person of, in some respects, more considerable importance, was the moonlight queen of elves, who is more or less identified by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the romance of “Orfeo and Heurodis” with the queen of the classical Avernus, Prosperine, but who is distinguished by Drayton from that goddess in his poetic romance of “Nymphidia,” and who, as a matter of actual fact, is a combination of several mythological elements. In the most ancient traditions we have glimpses of a time when this fair and glorious lady alone occupied the faëry throne, and, as in the case of Sire Thopas, was occasionally sought by human lovers. Shakespeare gives her the classical name of Titania, who is commonly identified with Mab, but their characters are sufficiently distinct. The latter, according to Keightley, has completely dethroned Titania, a statement which is scarcely borne out by the facts, for Mab was a person of general celebrity long before the appearance of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which contains the first mention of the rival sovereign. The herald and messenger of the royal pair was the tricksy sprite indifferently known as Puck, Hobgoblin, and Robin Goodfellow, and who must also perhaps be identified with “the illusory candle-holder,” Jack o’ Lantern, or Will o’ the Wisp, whose fatal phosphorescent light is, in “Paradise Lost,” described as