A rustic, also, whom Jackson taxed with magical practices, about 1620, obstinately denied that the good King of the Fairies had any connection with the devil; and some of the Highland seers, even in our day, have boasted of their intimacy with the elves, as an innocent and advantageous connection.  One Maccoan, in Appin, the last person eminently gifted with the second sight, professed to my learned and excellent friend, Mr Ramsay, of Ochtertyre, that he owed his prophetic visions to their intervention.

VI.  There remains yet another cause to be noticed, which seems to have induced a considerable alteration into the popular creed of England, respecting Fairies.  Many poets of the sixteenth century, and, above all, our immortal Shakespeare, deserting the hackneyed fictions of Greece and Rome, sought for machinery in the superstitions of their native country.  “The fays, which nightly dance upon the wold,” were an interesting subject; and the creative imagination of the bard, improving upon the vulgar belief, assigned to them many of those fanciful attributes and occupations, which posterity have since associated with the name of Fairy.  In such employments, as rearing the drooping flower, and arranging the disordered chamber, the Fairies of South Britain gradually lost the harsher character of the dwarfs, or elves.  Their choral dances were enlivened by the introduction of the merry goblin Puck,[A] for whose freakish pranks they exchanged their original mischievous propensities.  The Fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and Mennis, therefore, at first exquisite fancy portraits, may be considered as having finally operated a change in the original which gave them birth.[B]

[Footnote A:  Robin Goodfellow, or Hobgoblin, possesses the frolicksome qualities of the French Lutin.  For his full character, the reader is referred to the Reliques of Ancient Poetry.  The proper livery of this sylvan Momus is to be found in an old play.  “Enter Robin Goodfellow, in a suit of leather, close to his body, his hands and face coloured russet colour, with a flail.”—­Grim, the Collier of Croydon, Act 4, Scene 1. At other times, however, he is presented in the vernal livery of the elves, his associates: 

  Tim. “I have made
  “Some speeches, sir, ill verse, which have been spoke
  “By a green Robin Goodfellow, from Cheapside conduit,
  “To my father’s company.”
      The City Match, Act I, Scene 6.]

[Footnote B:  The Fairy land, and Fairies of Spenser, have no connection with popular superstition, being only words used to denote an Utopian scene of action, and imaginary or allegorical characters; and the title of the “Fairy Queen” being probably suggested by the elfin mistress of Chaucer’s Sir Thopas.  The stealing of the Red Cross Knight, while a child, is the only incident in the poem which approaches to the popular character of the Fairy: