[Footnote 1:  Hazlitt, Fairy Mythology, p. 182.]

114.  Such seems to have been the condition of England immediately before the period of the great Reformation.  But with the progress of that revolution of thought the condition changes.  The one true and eternal creed, as it had been deemed, is shattered for ever.  Men who have hitherto accepted their religious convictions in much the same way as they had succeeded to their patrimonies are compelled by this tide of opposition to think and study for themselves.  Each man finds himself left face to face with the great hereafter, and his relation to it.  Terrible doctrines are formulated, and press themselves with remorseless vigour upon his understanding—­original sin, justification by faith, eternal damnation for even honest error of belief,—­doctrines that throw an atmosphere of solemnity, if not gloom, about national thought, in which no fairy mythology can flourish.  It is no longer questions of material ease and gain that are of the chief concern; and consequently the fairies and their doings, from their own triviality, fall far into the background, and their place is occupied by a countless horde of remorseless schemers, who are never ceasing in their efforts to drag both body and soul to perdition.

115.  But it is in the towns, the centres of interchange of thought, of learning, and of controversy, that this revolution first gathers power; the sparsely populated country-sides are far more impervious to the new ideas, and the country people cling far longer and more tenaciously to the dying religion and its attendant beliefs.  The rural districts were but little affected by the Reformation for years after it had triumphed in the towns, and consequently the beliefs of the inhabitants were hardly touched by the struggle that was going on within so short a distance.  We find a Reginald Scot, indeed, complaining, half in joke, half in sarcasm, that Robin Goodfellow has long disappeared from the land;[1] but it is only from the towns that he has fled—­towns in which the spirit of the Cartwrights and the Latimers, the Barnhams and the Delabers, is abroad.  In the same Cambridge where Scot had been educated, a young student had hanged himself because the shadow of the doctrine of predestination was too terrible for him to live under;[2] and such a place was surely no home for Puck and his merry band.  But in the country places, remote from the growl and trembling of this mental earthquake, he still loved to lurk; and even at the very moment when Scot was penning the denial of his existence, he was nestling amongst the woods and flowers of Avonside, and, invisible, whispering in the ear of a certain fair-haired youth there thoughts of no inconsiderable moment.  And long time after that—­after the youth had become a man, and had coined those thoughts into words that glitter still; after his monument had been erected in the quiet Stratford churchyard—­Puck revelled, harmless and undisturbed, along many a country-side; nay, even to the present day, in some old-world nooks, a faint whispering rumour of him may still be heard.