* * * * * Such is the sum of what we have been able to collect respecting the popular fairy-lore of England, the largest and most complete collection that, to our knowledge, has ever been made. We might venture to add that little more is ever likely to be collected, for the sounds of the cotton-mill, the steam-engine, and, more than all, the whistle of the railway train, more powerful than any exorcists, have banished, or soon will banish, the fairy tribes from all their accustomed haunts, and their name and their exploits will in future be found in works like the present rather than in village tradition. * * * * * As the merry spirit, Puck, is so prominent an actor in the scenes forming our next division, this may be deemed no unfitting place for the consideration of his various appellations; such as Puck, Robin Good-fellow, Robin Hood, Hobgoblin. Puck is evidently the same with the old word _Pouke_,[361] the original meaning of which would seem to be devil, demon, or evil spirit. We first meet with it in the Vision of Piers Ploughman, where it undoubtedly signifies 'the grand adversary of God and man.' When, in this poem,[362] the Seer beholds Abraham, the personification of Faith, with his "wide clothes," within which lay a Lazar, Amonges patriarkes and prophetes, Pleying togideres, and asks him what was there, Loo! quod he, and leet me see. Lord mercy! I seide; This is a present of muche pris, What prynce shal it have? It is a precious present, quod he, Ac the _pouke_ it hath attached, And me theremyde, quod that man, May no wed us quyte, Ne no buyrn be oure borgh, Ne bringe us from his daunger; Out of the _poukes pondfold_ No maynprise may us fecche, Til he come that I carpe of, Crist is his name, That shall delivere us som day Out of the _develes_ power. Golding also must have understood Pooke in the sense of devil, when in the ninth book of his translation of Ovid, unauthorised however by the original, he applies it to the Chimæra, The country where Chymæra, that same _pooke_ Hath goatish body, lion's head and brist, and dragon's tayle. Spenser employs the word, and he clearly distinguishes it from hob-goblin: Ne let housefires nor lightnings helpless harms, Ne let the _pouke_[363] nor other evil sprites, Ne let mischievous witches with their charms, Ne let _hob-goblins_, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not.--_Epithalamion_, v. 340. These terms are also distinguished in the poem named The Scourge of Venus: And that they may perceive the heavens frown, The _poukes_ and _goblins_ pull the coverings down.