Chapter II (2)

Both the good and the bad fairies used to recruit their numbers by carrying off children, or young men and women. The malignant race delighted in spiriting away the unbaptized offspring (for it was only over these that they had any power) of affectionate parents, particularly when heirs, that they might produce as much mischief and vexation as possible; while the benignant fairies never took any recruits but the orphans of pious parents, who had no protectors, or were oppressed by cruel and unjust guardians. Such protégés, or rather naturalised fairies, were permitted twice to resume their original state, and appear to their kindred and acquaintance. The first time was at the end of seven years, when, if they had been children when they were taken away, they appeared to their nearest relatives, and declared to them their state, whether they were pleased with their condition as fairies, or wished to be restored to that of men. If they had been boys or girls when they were removed from this upper earth, and had by this time grown to men or women, they always appeared to persons of a different sex to themselves, with whom they had fallen in love, to whom they declared their state and passion, and, according to circumstances, either wished their lover to accompany them to Fairyland, or suggested to them a method whereby to recover them out of the hands of their elfish lords.

The second appearance, at the end of fourteen years, was for the same purpose, and on this occasion they were either rescued from the power of the fairies or confirmed under their dominion for ever.

When the bad fairies carried off a child, they always left one of their own number in its place. This equivocal creature was always distinguished by being insatiable for food, and if kept, seldom failed to draw its supposed mother into a consumption.

Whenever a family suspected that a child had been changed for a fairy, they had recourse to the following strange, but, in the opinion of the country, infallible ordeal. A sufficient quantity of clay was produced from the eastern side of a hill, with which all the windows, doors, and every aperture through the house, excepting the chimney, were built up. A large fire was then made of peats, and the supposed fairy, wrapped in the sheets or blankets of the woman's bed, was laid on the fire when it was at the briskest, while one of the bystanders repeated--

"Come to me
Gin mine ye be;
But gin ye be a fairy wicht,
Fast and flee till endless nicht."

If the child actually was the woman's it instantly rolled off the fire upon the floor; but, if it was a fairy, it flew away up the chimney with a tremendous shriek, and was never more seen, while the real infant was found lying upon the threshold.

"Oh, that it could be proved
That some night tripping fairy had exchanged,
In cradle-clothes, our children as they lay;
And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine."[25]

[25] Shakespeare, 1. Henry IV.

Spenser also refers to this belief in the following lines:--

"And her base elfin breed there for thee left,
Such men do changelings call, so changed by fairie's theft."

In some parts of the country, it is, or perhaps we should more correctly say was, customary to protect a child against fairy influences by tying a red thread round its throat or by letting its head hang down for awhile in the early morning. One does not of course see why either of these remedies should be efficacious against fairies or against anything else; but any one who has had occasion to talk matters over with rustics will have found that all their remedies, whether for ills spiritual or material, are of the most inconsequent character, and that the gift of faith in them is one of the most necessary accompaniments. This belief in fairy changelings is of great antiquity, for we read in Holingshead's "Chronicles" that the common people, on the death of King Arthur, held that he was not really dead at all, "but carried away by fairies into some place, where he would remain for a time and then return again and reign in as great authority as ever." It was also an old belief that people who had once lived with the fairies never again looked quite like other people, an ingenious way of accounting for any peculiarity in any one. Sir Walter Scott, in speaking of elf-possession, says that even "full-grown persons, especially such as in an unlucky hour were doomed to the execration of parents or of masters, or those who were found asleep after sunset under a rock or on a green hill belonging to the fairies, or finally those who unwarily joined their orgies, were believed to be subject to their power. The accounts they gave of their situation differ in some particulars. Sometimes they were represented as living a life of constant restlessness and wandering by moonlight. According to others, they inhabited a pleasant region, where, however, their situation was rendered horrible by the sacrifice of one or more individuals to the devil every seventh year. This is the popular reason assigned for the desire of the fairies to abstract young children as substitutes for themselves in this dreadful tribute."

Persons, as we have seen, could occasionally be recovered from the fairies, and if changelings were taken before dark to a place where three rivers met, the stolen child would be brought back in the night and the fairy youngster would return whence it came. A poor woman who once had twins had them adroitly carried away soon after birth, and two of these elf-changelings substituted. For some months the change was not suspected, but as the mother began to perceive that the children never increased in size her suspicions were aroused, and she consulted one of the wise men of the district. This friend in need amply confirmed her suspicions, and in answer to her appeal for help and counsel, told her that she must get two eggshells, fill them with wort and hops, place them where these dubious infants could see them, and then secretly observe what came next. After a few minutes of watching the children began to stir, and these sweet little innocents, who were supposed to be unable to either walk or talk, crept up to the table, and after studying the matter awhile, one said to the other, "We were born before the acorn which produced the oak of which these cottage beams are made, but this is the first time we ever saw anybody brewing in an egg-shell!" The secret was now fairly out, and the woman was so exasperated at the trick played on her, that she fell on the changelings with the greatest fury, and only desisted when she got a solemn promise that her own dear children should at once be returned to her. One egg-shell story leads to another, and in an old book we came across the following:--

"My mother lived in the immediate neighbourhood of a farm-house that was positively infested by fairies. It was one of those old-fashioned houses among the hills of Cambria, constructed after the manner of ancient days, when farmers considered the safety and comfort of their cattle as much us that of their children and domestics, and the kitchen and cow-house were on the same floor adjoining each other, with a half-door over, so that the good man could see the animals from his chimney-corner without moving. My mother and the farmer's wife were intimate friends, and she used often to complain to her that the fairies annoyed her and her family to that degree that they had no peace;--that whenever the family dined, or supped, or ate any meal, or were together, these mischievous little beings would assemble in the next apartment. For instance, when they were sitting in the kitchen, they were at high gambols in the dairy, or when they were yoking the cows, they would see the fairies in the kitchen, dancing and laughing, and provokingly merry. One day, as there was a great number of reapers partaking of a harvest-dinner, which was prepared with great care and nicety by the housewife, they heard music and dancing and laughing above, and a great shower of dust fell down, and covered all the victuals which were upon the table. The pudding in particular was completely spoiled, and the keen appetites of the party were most grievously disappointed. Just at this moment of trouble and despair an old woman entered, who saw the confusion and heard the whole affair explained. 'Well,' said she in a whisper to the farmer's wife, 'I'll tell you how to get rid of the fairies. To-morrow morning ask six of the reapers to dinner, and be sure that you let the fairies hear you ask them. Then make no more pudding than will go into an egg-shell, and put it down to boil. It may be a scanty meal for six hungry reapers, but it will be quite sufficient to banish the fairies; and if you follow these directions you will not be troubled with them any more.' She did accordingly, and when the fairies heard that a pudding for six reapers was boiling in an egg-shell there was a great noise in the next apartment and an angry voice called out, 'We have lived long in this world. We were born just after the earth was made, and before an acorn was planted, and yet we never saw a harvest dinner prepared in an egg-shell. Something must be wrong in this house, and we will no longer stop under its roof.' From that time the disturbances ceased, and the fairies were never seen or heard there any more."

Some authorities on the subject--and there are no greater authorities on it than the most superstitious old crones one can lay hold of--have averred that if any persons find themselves unwillingly in the company of the fairies they can cause their instantaneous departure by drawing out their knives. This acts not as a threat, for these puny immortals have no need to fear the weapons of carnal warfare, but from some inherent property in the cold bright steel.

Many of the fairies are such kindly, genial little souls that one is rather grieved to find that they are entirely antagonistic to any religious influence. Many stories illustrate this unfortunate peculiarity, but to give one only will suffice. As a village fiddler was returning home one evening from some festivities that had doubtless owed much of their success to his enlivening strains, he was met in the darkness by a stranger. This stranger wished to make a somewhat curious arrangement with him, to the effect that on the following night at midnight he should bring his fiddle to a certain wild spot on the moorland, while he promised him ample reward for so doing. Though the fiddler presently agreed to do so, the more he thought it over the less he liked the bargain, and he would have gladly thrown it up had he dared. In his strait he bethought him of the minister of the parish, and determined to lay the whole matter before him and take his advice upon it. His clerical adviser liked the look of the affair no better than he did, but he advised him to keep to his bargain, while he strongly cautioned him to play nothing but psalm tunes. The fiddler kept his appointment, but no sooner had the sacred strains arisen than a great shriek rent the air and he was thrown violently down, and after receiving no slight castigation from invisible adversaries he returned home sore and stiff in the early morning. Unbelievers will no doubt say that the germ of truth in the story will be found in the fact, that if the jovial musician so far yielded to the charms of the revels as to be unable to steer a straight course home within reasonable hours, the early morning would probably find him stiff and sore with rheumatism.

The spirits of the mine were as firmly believed in amongst the miners as the woodland and meadow sprites were by the dwellers on the country side. They were generally called knockers, and any sound heard in the stillness of the earth, that was evidently not the work of a fellow-toiler, was at once attributed to supernatural agency. The miners assert that these fairies may be frequently heard assiduously at work in the remoter parts, and that by their knocking they draw the attention of the workmen to the richest veins of ore. In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for 1754 we found a curious letter from a mine-owner, and the extract we give shows that the belief in such beings was not by any means confined to the rude and uncultivated miners, men a great part of whose lives were spent in the bowels of the earth, far removed from the cheering light of day, and who were in an especial degree under the influence of superstition:--

"People who know very little of arts or sciences, or the powers of nature, will laugh at us Cardiganshire miners, who maintain the existence of knockers in mines, a kind of good-natured impalpable people, not to be seen but heard, and who seem to us to work in the mines; that is to say, they are types or forerunners of working in mines, as dreams are of some accidents which happen to us. Before the discovery of the _Esgair y Mwyn_ mine, these little people worked hard through day and night, and there are abundance of sober honest people who have heard them. But after the discovery of the great mine they were heard no more. When I began to work at Lwyn Lwyd, they worked so fresh there for a considerable time, that they frightened away some young workmen. This was when they were driving levels, and before we had got any ore, but when we came to the ore they then gave over, and I heard no more of them. These are odd assertions, but they are certainly facts, although we cannot and do not pretend to account for them. We have now (October 1754) very good ore at Lwyn Lwyd, where the knockers were heard to work. But they have now yielded up the place, and are heard no more. Let who will laugh; we have the greatest reason to rejoice and thank the knockers, or rather God, who sends these notices."

In the coal districts one meets with a similar belief in goblin miners. These spirits are ordinarily of a friendly disposition, and perform such kindly offices for their human fellow-workers as assisting to pump up superfluous water or loosening masses of coal. Of course one can readily see that when the men went to their work and found their toil diminished, owing to a heavy fall of coal in the working, superstition would at once have material to work on. Some of these spirits would appear to have been of less amiable disposition, and the sounds heard were at times the warnings and forerunners of coming disaster. As the fairies of the household or of the moonlighted forest glades were of uncertain and variable natures, though inclining on the whole to beneficence, so the spirits of the earth were divisible into those of gentle race and others of fierce and malevolent disposition. In Milton's "Comus" we find these earth spirits referred to in the following passage:--

"No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine,
Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity;"

and in Pope's prefatory letter to the "Rape of the Lock" we find a further allusion--"The four elements are inhabitated by spirits called sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders. The gnomes, or demons of the earth, delight in mischief; but the sylphs, whose habitation is in air, are the best-conditioned creatures imaginable."

A belief in kindly spirits of the household was widely spread, for besides our own Robin Goodfellow we find the Nis of Denmark and Norway, the Kobold of Germany, the Brownie of Scotland, and many others. Brownie, we may remark, is a tawny, good-natured spirit, and derives his name from his colour as distinctive from fair-ie. Robin Goodfellow was a merry domestic sprite, full of practical jokes, a terror to the lazy, but a diligent rewarder of industry:--

"When mortals are at rest,
And snoring in their nest,--
Un-heard or un-espied,
Through key-hole we do glide:
Over tables, stools, and shelves,
We trip it with our fairy elves.

And if the house be foule,
Of platter, dish or bowle,
Upstairs we nimbly creepe
And find the sluts asleepe:
Then we pinch their armes and thighes,
None escapes, nor none espies.

But if the house be swept,
And from uncleannesse kept,
We praise the house and maid,
And surely she is paid:
For we do use before we go
To drop a tester in her shoe."

The "shrewd and knavish sprite" and the good luck he brings to the deserving are referred to very happily again in the "Midsummer Night's Dream."

Prudent and considerate housewives who wished to gain the goodwill of these spirits of the night were careful to leave a bowl of milk on the table for their use. Milton, in his poem of "L'Allegro"--

"Tells how the drudging goblin swet,
To earn his cream-bowl duly set;"

the task he set himself in recompense for the attention shown him being the threshing during the night of as much corn as would have required the labour of ten men. What thrifty housewife would grudge a bowl of milk or cream for so great a reward!

Queen Mab shares with Robin his functions as critic of household management, for it will be remembered that in the "English Parnassus" we find her described as--

"She that pinches country wenches
If they rub not clean their benches;
And with sharper nail remembers,
When they rake not up their embers.
And if so they chance to feast her,
In their shoe she drops a tester."

Housewives would see their account in keeping such a belief vividly before the eyes of their serving-maids, and may even themselves have sometimes dropped a tester where their diligent hand-maidens would fancy it a fairy-reward for their zeal in her service, while the vague threats of fairy vengeance would come in most opportunely in support of their own chidings of the careless and indolent.

We turn, in conclusion, to the fourth class, the evil spirits of the water and the storm. Of such is the Cornish Bucca, a weird goblin of the winds, whose scream was heard amid the roar of the elements as some gallant vessel was hurled to destruction on the rocks. In Ireland the same creature was the dreaded Phoca or Pooka, in Wales the Pwcca, while in Scottish legends it is the Kelpie. The creature sometimes assumed the human form, and at others that of the eagle or the horse; thus in Graham's "Sketches of Perthshire" we read--"Every lake has its kelpie or water-horse, often seen by the shepherd sitting upon the brow of a rock, dashing along the surface of the deep, or browsing upon the pasture on its verge." The Nech is a similar creature in the folk-lore of Scandinavia. In Wales we meet with the belief in a creature called Cyoeraeth, so named, we are told, from its deadly chilling voice. We find it thus described in an old book:--"The Cyoeraeth is a being in the dress of a female, with tangled hair, a bloodless and ghastly countenance, long black teeth, and withered arms of great length;" in short, it is invested with a description which conveys to the mind the idea of a blasted tree as compared to the flourishing monarch of the forest, rather than as possessing the similitude of anything human. This being (fortunately for the people) seldom made itself visible, but its scream or shriek at night had a terrible and overpowering effect on all who heard it. It generally foreboded death or fearful disaster, and always occurred when the spirit approached a cross road or drew near to a river or _llyn_, when it would commence to splash and agitate the water with its long bloodless hands, wailing all the time so as to 'make night hideous.' Those who heard its dreary moaning (or thought they did, the case doubtless of the majority) fled in horror, fearing for their reason, while many were really affected in mind, and ever after had the shriek resounding in memory.

In Brecon a romantic gorge called the Cwm Pwcca bears record in its name of the old belief in the phoca. As a justification of its title we read the following story:--A countryman was wandering in the darkest of dreary winter nights in vain endeavour to find the path that would have guided him to his home, when he saw a light before him on the dreary waste, which he naturally took for the lantern of some wayfarer. He quickened his steps and made for it. As he rapidly neared it he was on the point of hailing its bearer when the roar of waters smote his ear in the silence of the night, and, barely arresting his steps in time, he found himself at the edge of a lofty chasm, the awful gulf at the base of which the torrent was sweeping with resistless fury. At this instant the bearer of the lantern took a flying leap to the opposite side of the gorge, burst into a scornful and unearthly peal of laughter, and vanished from the eyes of the affrighted rustic.

The _ignis fatuus_, will-of-the-wisp, or Jack o' lantern was doubtless at the bottom of such a story as this, and in Milton's "Paradise Lost" we find the following powerful illustrative passage, referring both to the natural phenomenon and the myth built upon it:--

"'Lead, then,' said Eve. He, leading, swiftly rolled
In tangles, and made intricate seem straight,
To mischief swift. Hope elevates, and Joy
Brightens his crest; as when a wandering fire,
Compact of unctuous vapour, which the night
Condenses, and the cold environs round,
Kindled through agitation to a flame,
Which oft, they say, some evil spirit tends,
Hovering and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads the amazed night wanderer from his way,
To bogs and mires, and oft through ponds or pool;
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far,
So glistered the dire snake."

In the same author's poem of "L'Allegro" we find the will-of-the-wisp again referred to, this time under the title of "Friar's lantern;" while Sir Walter Scott in his "Marmion" writes--

"Better we had through mire and bush
Been lantern-led by Friar Rush."

Shakespeare in 1 "Henry IV." calls it a "ball of wildfire," and also used the Latin name, _ignis fatuus_.

This bewilderment of the rustics by false fires does not always seem to have been the result of diabolical malice on the part of the fairies, but sometimes assumed the form of a practical joke. Like most practical jokes, it was probably much more amusing to the joker than the joked, and the benighted wanderer had little cause to thank him of whom it could be said--

"Whene'er such wanderers I meete
As from their night-sports they trudge home;
With counterfeiting voice I grete
And call them on, with me to roam
Thro' woods, thro' lakes,
Thro' bogs, thro' brakes;
Or else, unseene, with them I go
All in the nicke
To play some tricke,
And frolic it, with ho, ho, ho!"

An old legend tells us how on the advent of Christianity great Pan and all the woodland deities deserted their old haunts and were never seen of men again; and in the same way the march of science and the spread of education must ere now have killed off all the fairies, except in the most out-of-the-way districts. Once coaxed and propitiated, or shudderingly dreaded, they now but serve to make a pleasant fancy for a Christmas-card, or aid in the grand spectacular effects of the Christmas pantomime. Those, then, who would see these denizens of elf-land and all the grace and beauty that even the very name of fairy-land suggests, will seek them no longer in the ferny glades of some fair woodland or beneath the silvery beams of the moon, but reduce the matter to a prosaic visit to some great theatre, and endeavour to find in the great array of "supers" and the glowing of coloured fires the realisation of their fair ideal. The fairies are, in fact, as dead, as hopelessly defunct, as the proverbial door-nail, which seems to have been accepted by the wisdom of our ancestors as the most expressive symbol of mortality and the stern decrees of irreversible Fate.[26]

[26] Appendix P.

The Pigmies had not the same glamour of romance about them that was associated with the dwellers in elf-land. The consideration of them nevertheless comes well within the same chapter, as, like the fairies, they were a race of beings of human mould, but differing from the ordinary standard of humanity by reason of the exceeding smallness of their stature.

References to them will be found in the writings of Herodotus, Philostratus, Pliny, and many other authors, the first allusion to them being in the third book of the Iliad, where the Trojans are compared to cranes fighting against pigmies:--

"Thus by their leaders' care each martial band
Moves into ranks, and stretches o'er the land.
With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar,
Proclaim their motions, and provoke the war:
So when inclement winters vex the plain
With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain,
To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,
With noise, and order, through the mid-way sky:
To pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing."[27]

[27] "Marking the tracts of air, the clamorous cranes
Wheel their due flight in varied ranks descried;
And each with outstretched neck his rank maintains,
In marshalled order through th' ethereal void."

These combats between the pigmies and the cranes were also dwelt on by Oppian, Juvenal, and others; and what was, to quote an old writer, "only a pleasant figment in the fountain, became a solemn story in the stream." Strabo in his Geography considered the belief as fabulous, and so also did another old writer, Julius Scaliger; and even Aldrovandus, though ready to accept almost anything, found a difficulty in crediting it. Albertus Magnus, another of the old and over-credulous writers, found as much difficulty as Aldrovandus, but suggested that probably the belief arose from some big species of monkey having been taken for a diminutive man. Even the home of the pigmies was a point quite open to dispute. Some writers placed them in the extreme north, where the growth of all nature was feeble and stunted, while Aristotle placed them at the head of the Nile; Philostratus affirmed that they were to be found on the banks of the Ganges, and Pliny placed them in Scythia. Even their size was open to question, for some would have us believe that the mounted men in their armies rode on partridges, while others placed them on the backs of rams. If the warrior and his steed bore any due proportion to each other, this seems to point to a considerable divergence of ideas as to the size of a pigmy. They were said to have been found by Hercules in the great desert, and to have assailed him with their bows and arrows as the Lilliputians did Gulliver. Their valour, however, in this case seems to have outrun discretion, as the smiling demi-god carried a number of them off in his lion's skin. Ctesias says that they were negroes, and places a kingdom of them in the centre of India. Shakespeare mentions them, but gives no local habitation. "Will your Grace command me any service to the world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on: I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of Prester John's foot; fetch you a hair off the great Cham's beard; do you any embassage to the Pigmies!" Others of our poets have adopted the myth, though of course without committing themselves to an expression of their belief in it. In Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," for example, we find the lines--

"A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pygmy-body to decay,
And o'er informed the tenement of clay"--

and in Young's "Night Thoughts" we read--

"Pygmies are pygmies still, though perched on Alps;
And pyramids are pyramids in vales."

Another English writer whose book is before us does commit himself to an expression of belief, for his title runs as follows:--"Gerania, a New Discoverie of a Little Sort of People called Pygmies, with a Lively Description of their Stature, Habit, Manners and Customs." The author was one Joshua Barnes, and his book is dated 1675.

Though spelt indifferently as pigmy and pygmy, the latter is the more correct, though perhaps a little pedantic-looking; the word is derived from the Greek name for them, the Pygmaioi.

Tennant in his work on "Ceylon" makes the following very just remark:--"We ought not to be too hasty in casting ridicule upon the narratives of ancient travellers. In a geographical point of view they possess great value, and if sometimes they contain statements which appear marvellous, the mystery is often explained away by a more careful and minute inquiry." Against the statements of the geographers and historians of antiquity many modern critics have specially delighted to break a lance, condemning them as more or less fabulous and untrustworthy, though in some cases, as that of De Chaillu, the narratives of modern travellers have been almost as mercilessly analysed.

Probably the African race known at the present time as Bosjesmen or Bushmen are the modern representatives of the pigmies, for in their cave-dwelling, reptile-eating, and other peculiarities they agree entirely with those given by Pliny, Aristotle, and Herodotus. The tales of the battles fought with the cranes may have been but a satire on their diminutive size, or they may very possibly have been the records of actual facts. The Maori traditions tell of the contests with the moa and other gigantic birds which formerly inhabited the islands of New Zealand, while the Jesuit missionaries give accounts of enormous birds that were once found in Abyssinia, but are now, like the dodo, extinct. It is, therefore, quite possible that there is more truth in the story of these mannikins and their struggles with their feathered foes than we are at first prepared to admit, and that while many of the details of these old fables are evidently imaginative, there was in more cases than we at once realise a solid foundation of truth at the bottom of them.

Of giants, the opposite extreme in the scale, we need say but little. Probably in many cases the early peoples, who desired to honour their great champions, felt that the marvels they delighted to credit them with must have been the work of men of more than human power and parts. We see much the same feeling in the sculptures of antiquity, the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, where the monarch far outweighs even in mere physical bulk the subjects that surround him. Hence, like Goliath, the champions of old are generally giants; while at other times they themselves are of slender frame, striplings like David, and it is the foes they subdue that are gigantic in bulk. The struggles, for instance, of the gallant few against the crying and mighty wrong of human slavery would have in earlier times been handed down to posterity as a contest with an evil giant; and in the allegories of the Middle Ages we meet, in the same way, with Giant Pope, Giant Pagan, and Giant Despair.

Though in one's earlier years we read the exploits of Jack the Giant-Killer with great complacency, and give him full meed of praise for his valour, on fuller reflection we cannot help seeing that the giants he encountered had intellects that bore no proportion to their bodily bulk, and that it was the easiest thing possible to outwit them; that according to the doctrine which by men of science is called "the survival of the fittest," or in more popular parlance "the weakest going to the wall," their destruction was strictly according to the inexorable laws of nature. While dwarfs have been accredited with a spiteful vindictiveness that served them in some sort as a defence, giants have ordinarily been considered as great good-natured fellows, fully bearing out Bacon's remark about tall houses being often unfurnished in their upper story. Perhaps it is a merciful arrangement of nature that this should be so, for a combination of the maliciousness of the dwarf with the physical strength of the giant would be something altogether _de trop_.

We very early in the Bible narrative meet with references to giants, but it is by no means agreed by commentators that the word nephilim thus translated means men remarkable for their stature. The context in the case of the first reference to them, for instance, seems to render it more probable that these were men not of gigantic stature, but of gigantic wickedness--men who had departed from the true religion, and were sustaining their apostasy by acts of violence and oppression, and endeavouring by these means to gain to themselves power on the earth. At the same time in other passages the references to the size of the couch or the spear clearly implies their ownership by a man of much more than the ordinary stature. According to Jewish tradition Og lived three thousand years, and walked beside the Ark during the deluge, while after his death one of his bones was used as a bridge for crossing a river. According to Moses his bedstead was not quite sixteen feet long, so that it seems the brook that any single bone would span could scarcely have required bridging at all; while the depth at what we may be allowed to term "high water" during the Noachic deluge must have been very much less than all one's preconceived notions would suggest, if its volume was a thing of indifference to the owner of this sixteen-feet couch. The nearest approach to a giant in modern times was an Irishman named Murphy, who attained to a height of eight feet ten inches. Many of our readers will remember seeing the Chinese Chang, or at least hearing of him, as he was exhibited to the curious in London in 1866 and 1880. His height was eight feet two inches. Patrick Cotter, an Irishman, who died in 1802, exceeded this by six inches; and one fine youth named Magrath, an orphan adopted by Bishop Berkeley, died at the age of twenty, after reaching a height of seven feet eight inches. There is no absolutely authenticated instance of any one in modern times reaching nine feet, though, of course, when tradition and hearsay have taken the place of the measuring-tape, there is no difficulty in going considerably beyond that limit. Plutarch tells of a giant eighty-five feet high, and Pliny of another who only reached sixty-six. Many of the skeletons of giants that were then supposed to be found during the Middle Ages were really the remains of extinct animals. In the imperfect state of surgical and osteological knowledge, the leg or blade bone of some gigantic antediluvian monster was ascribed to some hero of the past, and a very pretty little giant story promptly built upon it.

Any curious natural phenomena were generally ascribed by our ancestors to diabolical influence, or else recognised as the labour of giants. The Giant's Causeway is a notable and very familiar illustration of this, and there are few mountains in Wales that are not invested with some fairy tradition or legend of the marvellous. Trichrug, in Cardiganshire, which derives its name from three united hills, is believed to have been a favourite resort of the giants, and, like Cader Idris, this lofty elevation was once the special seat or chair of a giant whose grave is still pointed out. In a match at quoits which took place here between the giants of Cambria, he of Trichrug is said to have thrown one across St. George's Channel to the opposite coast of Ireland, thus winning the contest triumphantly. His grave was fabled to possess such extraordinary capabilities that it not only adapted itself to the size of any one that lay down in it, but also gifted the individual with greatly renewed strength. All defensive weapons placed in this grave were either destroyed or swallowed up. The rocky fortification, or _carnedd_, on the summit of Cader Idris is in like manner invested by the surrounding peasantry with a mysterious tradition respecting the giant Idris.

The warring of the giants against the rule of Jehovah finds its parallel in the Greek myth of the sons of Tartaros and Ge attempting to storm the gate of heaven and the seat of Zeus, only to meet with signal discomfiture. The common expression for adding difficulty to difficulty and embarrassment to embarrassment, the piling of Pelion on Ossa, refers to this struggle, as the giants piled two mountains of these names on each other as a scaling ladder to reach the heights of high Olympus.

In "Measure for Measure" we find two well-known allusions to giants:--

"O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."

The second of these is equally familiar:--

"The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies."

In Matthew Green's play of "The Spleen," written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find an evident allusion to the struggle between David and Goliath in the line--

"Fling but a stone, the giant dies."

Coleridge, again, writes--"A dwarf sees further than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to rest on." This idea is not, however, his own, for in Herbert's "Jacula Prudentum" we find the line, "A dwarf on giant shoulders sees further of the two;" and in Fuller's "Holy State" he says--"Grant them but dwarfs, yet stand they on giants' shoulders and may see the further." Many other illustrations might, of course, readily be given of what may be termed the literary existence of giants, but enough has been quoted to show how valuable these personages have in poesy and general literature. In the West "Gulliver's Travels" and in the East the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" are two examples that at once occur to one's mind.

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