Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/150

142 Milton, and others attribute to Mab herself, are by Drayton spoken of as being those of minor elves; but remembering the principle just advanced with regard to Gull, this is a point that need not detain us.

Why "frisking elves and apes"? This strikes me as being a compatriotism not elsewhere countenanced in literature, and one suspects that the union may have been brought about by mere exigence of rhyme, though the stress would hardly seem to have been unavoidable. Mr. Grant Allen has tried to persuade readers of the Cornhill Magazine that fairies sprang from dim traditions and fancies concerning pre-historic peoples. May we believe that Drayton's imagination carried him back to a time which Darwin would have rejoiced to see, to an age when the races aforesaid had not yet evolved humanity? Milton, who tells us on hearsay evidence that on a particular occasion