[Footnote 1:  Harsnet, p. 101.]

[Footnote 2:  Scot, p. 481.]

50.  It is not surprising that of human forms, that of a negro or Moor should be considered a favourite one with evil spirits.[1] Iago makes allusion to this when inciting Brabantio to search for his daughter.[2] The power of coming in the likeness of humanity generally is referred to somewhat cynically in “Timon of Athens,"[3] thus—­

“Varro’s Servant. What is a whoremaster, fool?

“Fool. A fool in good clothes, and something like thee.  ’Tis a spirit:  sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher with two stones more than ’s artificial one:  he is very often like a knight; and, generally, in all shapes that man goes up and down in, from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks in.”

[Footnote 1:  Scot, p. 89.]

[Footnote 2:  Othello, I. i. 91.]

[Footnote 3:  II. ii. 113.]

“All shapes that man goes up and down in” seem indeed to have been at the devils’ control.  So entirely was this the case, that to Constance even the fair Blanche was none other than the devil tempting Louis “in likeness of a new uptrimmed bride;"[1] and perhaps not without a certain prophetic feeling of the fitness of things, as it may possibly seem to some of our more warlike politicians, evil spirits have been known to appear as Russians.[2]

[Footnote 1:  King John, III. i. 209.]

[Footnote 2:  Harsnet, p. 139.]

51.  But all the “shapes that man goes up and down in” did not suffice.  The forms of the whole of the animal kingdom seem to have been at the devils’ disposal; and, not content with these, they seem to have sought further for unlikely shapes to assume.[1] Poor Caliban complains that Prospero’s spirits

     “Lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark,"[2]

just as Ariel[3] and Puck[4] (Will-o’-th’-wisp) mislead their victims; and that

    “For every trifle are they set upon me: 
    Sometimes like apes, that mow and chatter at me,
    And after bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
    Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
    Their pricks at my footfall.  Sometime am I
    All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
    Do hiss me into madness.”

And doubtless the scene which follows this soliloquy, in which Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano mistake one another in turn for evil spirits, fully flavoured with fun as it still remains, had far more point for the audiences at the Globe—­to whom a stray devil or two was quite in the natural order of things under such circumstances—­than it can possibly possess for us.  In this play, Ariel, Prospero’s familiar, besides appearing in his natural shape, and dividing into flames, and behaving in such a manner as to cause young Ferdinand to leap into the sea, crying, “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!” assumes the forms of a water-nymph,[5] a harpy,[6] and also the goddess Ceres;[7] while the strange shapes, masquers, and even the hounds that hunt and worry the would-be king and viceroys of the island, are Ariel’s “meaner fellows.”