Shakspeare must be regarded as a principal agent in this revolution; yet even he uses Fairy once in the proper sense of Fay; a sense it seems to have nearly lost, till it was again brought into use by the translators of the French Contes des Fées in the last century.
To this great Fairy I'll commend thy acts.
Antony and Cleopatra, act iv. sc. 8.
And Milton speaks
Of Faery damsels met in forests wide
By knights of Logres or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellinore.
Yet he elsewhere mentions the
Faery elves,
Whose midnight revels by a forest side
Or fountain some belated peasant sees.
Finally, Randolph, in his Amyntas, employs it, for perhaps the last time, in its second sense, Fairy-land:
I do think
There will be of Jocastus' brood in Fairy.
Act i. sc. 3.
We must not here omit to mention that the Germans, along with the French romances, early adopted the name of the Fées. They called them Feen and Feinen.[21] In the Tristram of Gottfried von Strazburg we are told that Duke Gylan had a syren-like little dog,
| Dez wart dem Herzoge gesandt | 'Twas sent unto the duke, pardé, |
| Uz Avalun, der Feinen land, | From Avalun, the Fays' countrie, |
| Von einer Gottinne.—V. 1673. | By a gentle goddess. |
In the old German romance of Isotte and Blanscheflur, the hunter who sees Isotte asleep says, I doubt
| Dez sie menschlich sei, | If she human be, |
| Sie ist schöner denn eine Feine, | She is fairer than a Fay. |
| Von Fleische noch von Beine | Of flesh or bone, I say, |
| Kunte nit gewerden | Never could have birth |
| So schönes auf der erden. | A thing so fair on earth. |
Our subject naturally divides itself into two principal branches, corresponding to the different classes of beings to which the name Fairy has been applied. The first, beings of the human race, but endowed with powers beyond those usually allotted to men, whom we shall term Fays, or Fairies of romance. The second, those little beings of the popular creeds, whose descent we propose to trace from the cunning and ingenious Duergar or dwarfs of northern mythology, and whom we shall denominate Elves or popular Fairies.
It cannot be expected that our classifications should vie in accuracy and determinateness with those of natural science. The human imagination, of which these beings are the offspring, works not, at least that we can discover, like nature, by fixed and invariable laws; and it would be hard indeed to exact from the Fairy historian the rigid distinction of classes and orders which we expect from the botanist or chemist. The various species so run into and are confounded with one another; the actions and attributes of one kind are so frequently ascribed to another, that scarcely have we begun to erect our system, when we find the foundation crumbling under our feet. Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings once formed parts of ancient and exploded systems of religion, and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved.
We will now proceed to consider the Fairies of romance; and as they are indebted, though not for their name, yet perhaps for some of their attributes, to the Peries of Persia, we will commence with that country. We will thence pursue our course through Arabia, till we arrive at the middle-age romance of Europe, and the gorgeous realms of Fairy-land; and thence, casting a glance at the Faerie Queene, advance to the mountains and forests of the North, there to trace the origin of the light-hearted, night-tripping elves.
ORIENTAL ROMANCE.[22]
Sadee.
All human beings must in beauty yield
To you; a Peri I have ne'er beheld.
PERSIAN ROMANCE.
The pure and simple religion of ancient Persia, originating, it is said, with a pastoral and hunting race among the lofty hills of Aderbijân, or, as others think, in the elevated plains of Bactria, in a region where light appears in all its splendour, took as its fundamental principle the opposition between light and darkness, and viewed that opposition as a conflict. Light was happiness; and the people of Irân, the land of light, were the favourites of Heaven; while those of Turân, the gloomy region beyond the mountains to the north, were its enemies. In the realms of supernal light sits enthroned Ormuzd, the first-born of beings; around him are the six Amshaspands, the twenty-eight Izeds, and the countless myriads of Ferohers.[23] In the opposite kingdom of darkness Aherman is supreme, and his throne is encompassed by the six Arch-Deevs, and the numerous hosts of inferior Deevs. Between these rival powers ceaseless warfare prevails; but at the end the prince of darkness will be subdued, and peace and happiness prevail beneath the righteous sway of Ormuzd.
From this sublime system of religion probably arose the Peri-[24] or Fairy-system of modern Persia; and thus what was once taught by sages, and believed by monarchs, has shared the fate of everything human, and has sunk from its pristine rank to become the material and the machinery of poets and romancers. The wars waged by the fanatical successors of the Prophet, in which literature was confounded with idolatry, have deprived us of the means of judging of this system in its perfect form; and in what has been written respecting the Peries and their country since Persia has received the law of Mohammed, the admixture of the tenets and ideas of Islam is evidently perceptible. If, however, Orientalists be right in their interpretation of the name of Artaxerxes' queen, Parisatis, as Pari-zadeh[25] (Peri-born), the Peri must be coeval with the religion of Zoroaster.
The Peries and Deevs of the modern Persians answer to the good and evil Jinn of the Arabs, of whose origin and nature we shall presently give an account. The same Suleymans ruled over them as over the Jinn, and both alike were punished for disobedience. It is difficult to say which is the original; but when we recollect in how much higher a state of culture the Persians were than the Arabs, and how well this view accords with their ancient system of religion, we shall feel inclined to believe that the Arabs were the borrowers, and that by mingling with the Persian system ideas derived from the Jews, that one was formed by them which is now the common property of all Moslems.
In like manner we regard the mountains of Kâf, the abode alike of Jinn and of Peries and Deevs, as having belonged originally to Persian geography. The fullest account of it appears in the Persian romance of Hatim Taï,[26] the hero of which often visited its regions. From this it would seem that this mountain-range was regarded as, like that of the ancient Greek cosmology,