[Footnote 1:  For instance, an eye without a head.—­Ibid.]

[Footnote 2:  The Tempest, II. ii. 10.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid.  I. ii. 198.]

[Footnote 4:  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. i. 39; III. i. 111.]

[Footnote 5:  I. ii. 301-318.]

[Footnote 6:  III. iii. 53.]

[Footnote 7:  IV. i. 166.]

52.  Puck’s favourite forms seem to have been more outlandish than Ariel’s, as might have been expected of that malicious little spirit.  He beguiles “the fat and bean-fed horse” by

    “Neighing in likeness of a filly foal: 
    And sometimes lurk I in a gossip’s bowl,
    In very likeness of a roasted crab;
    And when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
    And on her withered dewlap pour the ale. 
    The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
    Sometime for three-foot stool[1] mistaketh me;
    Then slip I from her, and down topples she.”

And again: 

    “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
    A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
    And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
    Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn."[2]

With regard to this last passage, it is worthy of note that in the year 1584, strange news came out of Somersetshire, entitled “A Dreadful Discourse of the Dispossessing of one Margaret Cowper, at Ditchet, from a Devil in the Likeness of a Headless Bear."[3]

[Footnote 1:  A Scotch witch, when leaving her bed to go to a sabbath, used to put a three-foot stool in the vacant place; which, after charms duly mumbled, assumed the appearance of a woman until her return.—­Pitcairn, iii. 617.]

[Footnote 2:  III. i. 111.]

[Footnote 3:  Hutchinson, p. 40.]

53.  In Heywood and Brome’s “Witch of Edmonton,” the devil appears in the likeness of a black dog, and takes his part in the dialogue, as if his presence were a matter of quite ordinary occurrence, not in any way calling for special remark.  However gross and absurd this may appear, it must be remembered that this play is, in its minutest details, merely a dramatization of the events duly proved in a court of law, to the satisfaction of twelve Englishmen, in the year 1612.[1] The shape of a fly, too, was a favourite one with the evil spirits; so much so that the term “fly” became a common synonym for a familiar.[2] The word “Beelzebub” was supposed to mean “the king of flies.”  At the execution of Urban Grandier, the famous magician of London, in 1634, a large fly was seen buzzing about the stake, and a priest promptly seizing the opportunity of improving the occasion for the benefit of the onlookers, declared that Beelzebub had come in his own proper person to carry off Grandier’s soul to hell.  In 1664 occurred the celebrated witch-trials which took place before Sir Matthew Hale.  The accused were charged with bewitching two children; and part of the evidence against them was that flies and bees were seen to carry into the victims’ mouths the nails and pins which they afterwards vomited.[3] There is an allusion to this belief in the fly-killing scene in “Titus Andronicus."[4]