The genuine Brownie, however, is supposed to be, _ab origine_, an unembodied spirit; but the boy of Hilton has, with an admixture of English superstition, been identified with the apparition of an unfortunate domestic, whom one of the old chiefs of Hilton slew at some very distant period, in a moment of wrath or intemperance. The baron had, it seems, on an important occasion, ordered his horse, which was not brought out so soon as he expected. He went to the stable, found the boy loitering, and seizing a hay-fork, struck him, though not intentionally, a mortal blow. The story adds, that he covered his victim with straw till night, and then threw him into a pond, where the skeleton of a boy was (in confirmation of the tale) discovered in the last baron’s time. I am by no means clear that the story may not have its foundation in the fact recorded in the following inquest: “Coram Johannem King, coron., Wardæ de Chestræ, apud Hilton, 3 Jul. 7 Jac. 1609.” (And here follows a report in Latin.) Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that the unhousel’d spirit of Roger Skelton, whom in the hay-field the good Hilton ghosted, took the liberty of playing a few of those pranks which are said by writers of grave authority to be the peculiar privilege of those spirits only who are shouldered untimely by violence from their mortal tenements. “Ling’ring in anguish o’er his mangled clay, The melancholy shadow turn’d away, And follow’d through the twilight grey.” A free pardon for the above manslaughter appears on the rolls of Bishop James, dated 6th September, 1609. I will only add that, among the Harleian MSS., the same legend is told with some variations, in which this “cauld lad” is termed the “_Pale Boy_ of Hilton.” This confusion of _our_ mythology is as conclusive of the fiction of all the mysterious legends of the moderns, as the jumble which the classic poets have made of _their_ monsters. If we read Lempriere, the genealogy of the classic monster is involved in a maze of impious confusion; and the mythology of _Chimera_, and _Echidna_, and _Typhon_, _Geryon_, and _Cerberus_, and the _Hydra_ and _Bellerophon_, and _Ortha_ and the _Sphynx_, and the _Nemæan Lion_, and the _Minotaur_, and the demoniac records of their origin, it is almost profanation even to reflect on. But when Martianus Capella tells us that devils have aërial bodies, that they live and die, and yet, if cut asunder, soon re-unite; and when Bodine asserts, in his “Solution of Natural Theology,” that spirits and angels are _globular_, as being of the most perfect shape, I confess I feel more disposed to smile at their imposture than to frown, were it not for their utter worthlessness.