a golden rod, with which she directed her mule.  In the close of the procession, a tall majestic figure appeared in a chariot, adorned with emeralds and pearls, who fiercely asked the young man, ‘What he did there?’ He presented the letter in silence, which the daemon dared not refuse.  As soon as he had read, lifting up his hands to heaven, he exclaimed, ’Almighty God! how long wilt thou endure the iniquities of the sorcerer Palumbus!’ and immediately dispatched some of his attendants, who, with much difficulty, extorted the ring from Venus, and restored it to its owner, whose infernal banns were thus dissolved.”—­FORDUNI Scotichronicon, Vol.  I. p. 407, cura GOODALL.

But it is rather in the classical character of an infernal deity, that the elfin queen may be considered, than as Hecate, the patroness of magic; for not only in the romance writers, but even in Chaucer, are the Fairies identified with the ancient inhabitants of the classical hell.  Thus Chaucer, in his Marchand’s Tale, mentions

  Pluto that is king of fayrie—­and
  Proserpine and all her fayrie.

In the Golden Terge of Dunbar, the same phraseology is adopted:  Thus,

  Thair was Pluto that elricke incubus
  In cloke of grene, his court usit in sable.

Even so late as 1602, in Harsenet’s Declaration of Popish Imposture, p. 57, Mercury is called Prince of the Fairies.

But Chaucer, and those poets who have adopted his phraseology, have only followed the romance writers; for the same substitution occurs in the romance of Orfeo and Heurodis, in which the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is transformed into a beautiful romantic tale of faery, and the Gothic mythology engrafted on the fables of Greece. Heurodis is represented as wife of Orfeo, and queen of Winchester, the ancient name of which city the romancer, with unparalleled ingenuity, discovers to have been Traciens, or Thrace.  The monarch, her husband, had a singular genealogy: 

  His fader was comen of King Pluto,
  And his moder of King Juno;
  That sum time were as godes y-holde,
  For aventours that thai dede and tolde.

Reposing, unwarily, at noon, under the shade of an ymp tree,[A] Heurodis dreams that she is accosted by the King of Fairies,

  With an hundred knights and mo,
  And damisels an hundred also,
  Al on snowe white stedes;
  As white as milke were her wedes;
  Y no seigh never yete bifore,
  So fair creatours y-core: 
  The kinge hadde a croun on hed,
  It nas of silver, no of golde red,
  Ac it was of a precious ston: 
  As bright as the sonne it schon.

[Footnote A:  Ymp tree—­According to the general acceptation, this only signifies a grafted tree; whether it should he here understood to mean a tree consecrated to the imps, or fairies, is left with the reader.]