“Good luck befriend thee, son; for, at thy birth The faiery ladies dannc’t upon the hearth; The drowsie nurse hath sworn she did them spie Come tripping to the room where thou didst lie, And, sweetly singing round about thy bed, Strew all their blessings on thy sleeping head.” L’Abbé Bourdelon, in his _Ridiculous Extravagances of M. Ouflé_, describes “The fairies of which,” he says, “grandmothers and nurses tell so many tales to children. These fairies,” adds he, “I mean, who are affirmed to be blind at home, and very clear–sighted abroad; who dance in the moonshine when they have nothing else to do; who steal shepherds and children, to carry them up to their caves,” etc.—(English translation, p. 190.) The fairies have already called themselves _spirits_, _ghosts_, or _shadows_, and consequently they never died, a position, at the same time, of which there is every kind of proof that a fact can require. The reviser of Johnson and Steevens’s edition of _Shakespeare_, in 1785, makes a ridiculous reference to the allegories of Spenser, and a palpably false one to Tickell’s _Kensington Gardens_, which he affirms “will show that the opinion of fairies dying prevailed in the last century,” whereas, in fact, it is found, on the slightest glance into the poem, to maintain the direct reverse:— “Meanwhile sad Kenna, loath to quit the grove, Hung o’er the body of her breathless love, Try’d every art (vain arts!) to change his doom, And vow’d (vain vows!) to join him in the tomb. What would she do? The Fates alike deny The dead to live, or fairy forms to die.” The fact is so positively proved, that no editor or commentator of Shakespeare, present or future, will ever have the folly or impudence to assert “that in Shakespeare’s time the notion of fairies dying was generally known.” Ariosto informs us (in Harington’s translation, Bk. x. s. 47) that “... (Either ancient folke believ’d a lie, Or this is true) a fayrie cannot die.” And again (Bk. xliii. s. 92), “I am a fayrie, and, to make you know, To be a fayrie what it doth import: We cannot dye, how old so ear we grow. Of paines and harmes of ev’rie other sort We tast, onelie no death we nature ow.” Beaumont and Fletcher, in _The Faithful Shepherdess_, describe— “A virtuous well, about whose flow’ry banks The nimble–footed fairies dance their rounds, By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes Their stolen children, so to make ’em free From dying flesh, and dull mortality.” Puck, _alias_ Robin Goodfellow, is the most active and extraordinary fellow of a fairy that we anywhere meet with, and it is believed we find him nowhere but in our own country, and, peradventure also, only in the South. Spenser, it would seem, is the first that alludes to his name of Puck:— “Ne let the _Pouke_, nor other evill spright, Ne let Hob–goblins, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not.”