he drew the subtle old rogue counting up
the Jacobite clans on his picking and stealing
fingers.

THE POETRY OF FACT.

PERHAPS there is nothing that more astonishes
the student of modern literature than to find,
on the one hand, many of those things which
he had esteemed mere fictions of the fancy, to
have had their origin in historical fact; and, on
the other, that many others, which were and
are really the products of the poetic imagination,
have been in the present, and will be in the
future, actualised by the ingenuity of science,
or the progress of society. Even the fairies
have been traced to a specific birthplace, and
an actual race of dwarfish beings having a
local habitation and a name. A shrewd observer
has traced all the distinguishing marks by
which they are described to the settlements
of the Lapps. These, like what we are told of
fairies, live in green mounds, pop up their
heads when disturbed by people treading on
their houses, steal children, are on familiar terms
with the people about them when they treat
them well, and punish them in return for ill-
treatment. A Lapp is a little flesh-eating
mortal, having control over animals, sometimes
living in a tent, and sleeping out of doors,
wrapped in his deer-skin shirt, but generally in
a green mound, exactly answering to a fairy
retreat. One sagacious traveller visited such a
home on the most northern peninsula in Europe,
to the east of the North Cape, close to the sea,
in a sandy hollow near a burn. It was round,
about twelve feet in diameter, sunk three feet
in the sand, the roof being made of sticks and
covered with turf, and the whole structure, at
a short distance, looking exactly like a conical
green mound about four feet high. There was
a famous crop of grass on it, and children
and dogs ran out at the door, and up to the
top when the visitants approached, as ants run
on an ant-hill when disturbed. Their fire was
in the middle of the floor, and the pot hung
over it from the roof.

A house in South Uist, in the sand-hills close
to the sea, built of loose boulders, circular, and
with recesses in the sides, bears corroborative
testimony. It was covered when found, and
full of sand, which, being removed, stone querns
and combs of bone were detected mingled with
ashes. Near the level of the top there was a
stratum of bones and teeth of large grass-eating
animals, the bones being splintered and broken,
blended with ashes and shells, oysters, cockles,
and periwinkles, showing clearly the original
level of the ground, and proving that this was
a dwelling almost the same as a Lapp " Gam"
at Hopseidet.

These descriptions tally exactly with our
fairy tales; and indeed our traveller's
adventures read nearly as elvishly. The scene is
laid at Quickjok, and on Vallespik, Swedish
Lapland, and the Lapps and the deer are the
actors in it. A small man of five-and-twenty
is seen from the opposite side of a river. He
wears a high blue cap, yet he is so short that both
he and his cap could stand upright under the arm
of the observer. A party having been formed to
make better acquaintance with the deer, the Lapp
took from its hiding-place in a fir-tree a long
birch pole, which aided him in his pursuit, and
enabled him to outstrip his companions. One
of these looked after him through a glass, and
saw, like a brown speck on the shoulder of
Vallespik, a small mortal with two dogs driving
home the deer. They also visited a "cota,"
which was a permanent dwelling made in the
shape of a sugar-loaf, with birch sticks, and long
flat stones and turf; it had a door, a mere
narrow slit, opening to the west, and a hole in
the roof to let out the smoke. Inside was a girl
of about fifteen, with very pretty eyes, sitting
crouched up in a corner, and looking as scared
as one of her own fawns. A priest who
attended the party remarked, that if they had
not been accompanied by the Lapp she would
have fainted, or run away to the hills. The
narrator of the adventure began to sketch her,
as she sat modestly in her dark corner, and was
rejoicing in the extreme stillness of his sitter,
when, on looking up from some careful touch,
he found that she had vanished through the
doorway.

These diminutive people may have sat for the
fairies of the nursery-tales, even for the Puck
of the Midsummer Night's Dream. Our
classical fairies—such as people Spenser's great
poetic allegory—are not of this class. They
are of full size, and have spiritual powers
corresponding. Nor has Shakespeare painted his
Oberon and Titania as minute beings; rather
they have the stature and intelligence of demigods.
Spenser and our dramatist contemplated
them through a telescope, which perhaps more
humble believers had inverted; and thus the
giants and fairies were, after all, but one and
the same set of beings viewed in a different
manner. It is curious, that whatever magic
arts giants may have mastered, they were always,
like Old Nick himself in the Icelandic legends,
beaten in the end by men, though they also are
painted as man-eaters and owners of slaves.
Some lived in caves, some had houses and cattle.
Like Hercules, they fought with clubs. Are
these imagined beings men or myths? In either
case, they are represented as strange lubberly
beings, whose dealings with men always end in
their own discomfiture. Little real resemblance
have the weird sisters in the tragedy of
Macbeth to the three strange hags we meet
with in the annals of Holinshed. They may
have been intended by the legend-writer for
the fates or valkyries of the northern mythology,
but the historian does not say so. With
our great dramatist, they are simply the
exponents of Macbeth's state of mind, who had
meditated the murder of Duncan before he had
seen the witches. The poet uses such materials,
always crude under the best of circumstances,
in accordance with his theme, and, by means of