[406] This is perhaps the dancing on the hearth of the fairy-ladies to which Milton alludes: see above, p. 42. "Doth not the warm zeal of an English-man's devotion make them maintain and defend the social hearth as the sanctuary and chief place of residence of the tutelary lares and household gods, and the only court where the _lady-fairies convene to dance and revel_?"--Paradoxical Assertions, etc. 1664, quoted by Brand, ii. p. 504. [407] The reader will observe that the third sense of Fairy is the most usual one in Drayton. It occurs in its second sense two lines further on, twice in Nymphidia, and in the following passage of his third Eclogue, For learned Colin (Spenser) lays his pipes to gage, And is to _Fayrie_ gone a pilgrimage, The more our moan. [408] Mr. Chalmers does not seem to have known that the Crickets were family of note in Fairy. Shakspeare (_Merry Wives of Windsor_) mentions a Fairy named Cricket; and no hint of Shakspeare's was lost upon Drayton. [409] In the Musarum Deliciæ. [410] This is a palpable mistake of the poet's. The Friar (see above, p. 291) is the celebrated Friar Rush, who haunted houses, not fields, and was never the same with Jack-o'-the-Lanthorn. It was probably the name Rush, which suggested _rushlight_, that caused Milton's error. He is the Brüder Rausch of Germany, the Broder Ruus of Denmark. His name is either as Grimm thinks, _noise_, or as Wolf (Von Bruodor Rauschen, p. xxviii.) deems _drunkenness_, our old word, _rouse_. Sir Walter Scott in a note on Marmion, says also "Friar Rush, _alias_ Will-o'-the-Wisp. He was also a sort of Robin Goodfellow and Jack-o'-Lanthorn," which is making precious confusion. Reginald Scot more correctly describes him as being "for all the world such another fellow as this Hudgin," _i. e._ Hödeken: see above, p. 255. [411] Ben Jonson's Works, vol. ii. p. 499. We shall never cease to regret that the state to which literature has come in this country almost precludes even a hope of our ever being able to publish our meditated edition of Milton's poems for which we have been collecting materials these five and twenty years. It would have been very different from Todd's. [Published in 1859.] [412] Evidently drawn from Dryden's Flower and Leaf. [413] We meet here for the last time with Fairy in its collective sense, or rather, perhaps, as the country: All Fairy shouted with a general voice [414] In Mr Halliwell's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology, will be found a good deal of Fairy poetry, for which we have not had space in this work. SCOTTISH LOWLANDS. When from their hilly dens, at midnight hour, Forth rush the airy elves in mimic state, And o'er the moonlight heath with swiftness scour, In glittering arms the little horsemen shine. ERSKINE.