Page:Sir Orfeo, adapted from the Middle English (IA sirorfeoadaptedf00hunt).pdf/10

 throughout to accord with British notions of fairyland.

“From Hades, evidently, the scene of the old classical story has been transferred to fairy-land; the king of the Celtic Otherworld is substituted for Pluto. References in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale to ‘Pluto, that is king of fayerye,’ and in Dunbar’s ‘Golden Targe’ to ‘Pluto, the elrich incubus, in cloak of green,’ attest the familiarity of the mediæval English and Scotch with this new conception of the lord of the dead. Certain other classical stories (e.g. Pyramus and Thisbe, and Narcissus) were dealt with in old French poems sometimes called lays; but no one of them presents the peculiar situation in ‘Orfeo,’ where the Celtic spirit has quite dispossessed the ancient and permeated the whole account.

“The French lay of Orpheus, from which ‘Orfeo’ is translated, is now lost; but we have references enough to it in other works to es-