Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/149

Rh =woman a title formerly specially applied to monthly nurses! To think that Queen Mab should be suspected of being an etherealised variety of the Sairey Gamp and Betsy Prig order! But if Lucina could preside at the birth of mortals and yet be Juno, Queen of Olympus, there is nothing unprecedented in the Queen of the Teutonic Fairyland having as a function that of bringing forth the fancies born of sleep. The spouse of Oberon, described by Drayton, was guilty of one at least of the reprehensible habits recorded of Shakespeare's Mab, who

So says our present poet—

In Robin Goodfellow; His mad Prankes, &c. a black-letter tract published in London in 1628, it is a fairy named Gull who says, "Many times I get on men and women, and so lye on their stomackes that I cause them great pains, for which they call me by the name of Hagge, or Nightmare." She was probably merely a myrmidom of Mab's: quid facit per aliam facit per se. Mr. Thoms has so admirably discoursed of the presumed external origin of nightmare in his Notelets on Shakespeare that I will content myself and my readers by referring them to pages 94-100 of a multum in parvo of curious lore. Professor Skeat quotes the definition, "Nightemare, or mare, or wytche, Epialtes vel effialtes," from the Promptorium Parvulorum: he discredits Tyrwhitt's reading of "nightes mare" in the charm episode of Chaucer's Miller's Tale, and is of opinion that the sense of mare is crusher, from the fertile root, the ramifications of which Max Müller so fully pointed out in his Lectures on the Science of Language.

It is observable that many of the acts that Shakespeare, Jonson,