was formerly, is now the friar, steadfastly paying his visits at morning and noontide meals, not forgetting his matins and benedictions as he makes his rounds of alms-begging. Now the women can safely walk abroad, through brake and copse, and sit under every green tree; the friar is your only incubus,[1] and he will offer us no dishonour.
It happened that in the Court of this King Arthur dwelt a handsome and vigorous young bachelor Knight, who, on his return one day from a hawking party of water-fowl, saw before him a young maiden, whom in a transport of wilfulness and brutality he ill-treated. The unmanliness and violence of the deed raised such a clamour, and so keen a pursuit of the offender, that he was seized, tried, and condemned to lose his head. The Queen, however, and her ladies, so earnestly entreated his pardon of the King, that he granted him his life, and at the same time yielded him to his
- ↑ The Incubus was a fairy of less innocent character than his brethren. He succeeded the Fauni of the heathen mythology, and, like them, was supposed to inflict that oppression which goes under the name of ephialtes, or night-mare.
