ERLE, SIR WILLIAM (1793-1880), English lawyer and judge, was born at Fifehead-Magdalen, Dorset, on the 1st of October 1793, and was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford. Having been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1819 he went the western circuit, became counsel to the Bank of England, sat in parliament from 1837 to 1841 for the city of Oxford, and, although of opposite politics to Lord Lyndhurst, was made by him a judge of the common pleas in 1845. He was transferred to the queen's bench in the following year, and in 1859 came back to the common pleas as chief justice upon the promotion of Sir Alexander Cockburn. He retired in 1866, receiving the highest eulogiums for the ability and impartiality with which he had discharged the judicial office. He died at his estate at Bramshott, Hampshire, on the 28th of January 1880, and a monument without his name but in his memory (sometimes erroneously supposed to mark the place where an old gibbet was) stands on the top of Hindhead. See E. Manson, _Builders of our Law_ (1904). ERLKONIG, or ERL-KING, a mythical character in modern German literature, represented as a gigantic bearded man with a golden crown and trailing garments, who carries children away to that undiscovered country where he himself abides. There is no such personage in ancient German mythology, and the name is linguistically nothing more than the perpetuation of a blunder. It first appeared in Herder's _Stimmen der Volker_ (1778), where it is used in the translation of the Danish song of the _Elf-King's Daughter_ as equivalent to the Danish _ellerkonge_, or _ellekonge_, that is, _elverkonge_, the king of the elves; and the true German word would have been _Elbkonig_ or _Elbenkonig_, afterwards used under the modified form of _Elfenkonig_ by Wieland in his _Oberon_ (1780). Herder was probably misled by the fact that the Danish word _elle_ signifies not only elf, but also alder tree (Ger. _Erle_). His mistake at any rate has been perpetuated by both English and French translators, who speak of a "king of the alders," "un roi des aunes," and find an explanation of the myth in the tree-worship of early times, or in the vapoury emanations that hang like weird phantoms round the alder trees at night. The legend was adopted by Goethe as the subject of one of his finest ballads, rendered familiar to English readers by the translations of Lewis and Sir Walter Scott; and since then it has been treated as a musical theme by Reichardt and Schubert.