the sides of the boat sit the court, dressed in the costume of the period of William of Orange, which is the probable date of the painting. On the hood sits a little elf, with a red toadstool as an umbrella over the head of king and queen. In the bow sits Jack-o’-lanthorn, with a cresset in his hands, dressed in a red jacket. Beside him is an elf playing on a jew’s-harp, which is as large as himself; and another mischievous red-coated sprite is touching the vibrating tongue of the harp, with a large extinguisher, so as to stop the music.
“The water all round the royal barge is full of little old women and red-jacketed hobgoblins, in egg-shells and crab-shells; whilst some of the imps who have been making a ladder of an iron boat-chain have missed their footing, and are splashing about in the water. In another part of the picture the sprites appear to be illuminating the window of a crumbling tower.”
The word fairy, so little in use now in the North of England, is however retained at Caldbeck, in Cumberland, where a curious excavation in a rock is called the Fairy’s Kettle, a neighbouring cavern twenty yards in length the Fairy Kirk, and other spots around bear similar appellations. The historian of Cumberland tells us that this place is “the scene of sundry superstitious notions and stories,”[1] but unfortunately he did not think it worth while to preserve them. In a Shropshire village, near Coalbrookdale, it is still said that fairies dance in a ring in an adjoining field, and that any unlucky wight who stepped within the ring would be kept there and never allowed to leave the spot.
Respecting the Evil Spirit, the veritable Satan, I have collected but a few notices, though it must have struck my readers that Redcap and Wag-at-the-wa’ were suspiciously like him. Border tradition maintains that he has been known to assume the form of a black ram with fiery eyes and long horns, or of a sow, a bull, a goat or horse, a very large dog, or a brindled cat. It is impossible for him to take that of the lamb. Of birds he can only simulate the crow and the drake. The farmyard cock and hen, and the pigeon, are too pure for him to have anything to do with the former from their watchfulness, the latter because
- ↑ Hutchinson’s History of Cumberland, vol. ii. pp. 388-9.
