Gallic spirits alone, the above description corresponds with that of the Scottish Brownie.  But the latter, although, like Milton’s lubbar fiend, he loves to stretch himself by the fire[53], does not drudge from the hope of recompence.  On the contrary, so delicate is his attachment, that the offer of reward, but particularly of food, infallibly occasions his disappearance for ever[54].  We learn from Olaus Magnus, that spirits, somewhat similar in their operations to the Brownie, were supposed to haunt the Swedish mines.  The passage, in the translation of 1658, runs thus:  “This is collected in briefe, that in northerne kingdomes there are great armies of devils, that have their services, which they perform with the inhabitants of these countries:  but they are most frequent in rocks and mines, where they break, cleave, and make them hollow:  which also thrust in pitchers and buckets, and carefully fit wheels and screws, whereby they are drawn upwards; and they shew themselves to the labourers, when they list, like phantasms and ghosts.”  It seems no improbable conjecture, that the Brownie is a legitimate descendant of the Lar Familiaris of the ancients.

[Footnote 53: 

—­how the drudging goblin swet, To earn the cream-bowl, duly set; When, in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail had thresh’d the corn, That ten day-lab’rers could not end; Then lies him down the lubbar fiend, And, stretch’d out all the chimney’s length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And, crop-full, out of doors he flings, E’er the first cock his matin rings.

L’Allegro.

When the menials in a Scottish family protracted their vigils around the kitchen fire, Brownie, weary of being excluded from the midnight hearth, sometimes appeared at the door, seemed to watch their departure, and thus admonished them—­“Gang a’ to your beds, sirs, and dinna put out the wee grieshoch (embers).”]

[Footnote 54:  It is told of a Brownie, who haunted a border family, now extinct, that the lady having fallen unexpectedly in labour, and the servant, who was ordered to ride to Jedburgh for the sage femme, shewing no great alertness in setting out, the familiar spirit slipt on the great-coat of the lingering domestic, rode to the town on the laird’s best horse, and returned with the mid-wife en croupe.  Daring the short space of his absence, the Tweed, which they must necessarily ford, rose to a dangerous height.  Brownie, who transported his charge with all the rapidity of the ghostly lover of Lenore, was not to be stopped by this obstacle.  He plunged in with the terrified old lady, and landed her in safety where her services were wanted.  Having put the horse into the stable (where it was afterwards found in a woeful plight), he proceeded to the room of the servant, whose duty he had discharged; and, finding him just in the act of drawing on his boots, he administered to him a most merciless drubbing with