The employment, the benefits, the amusements of the Fairy court, resembled the aerial people themselves.  Their government was always represented as monarchical.  A King, more frequently a Queen of Fairies, was acknowledged; and sometimes both held their court together.  Their pageants and court entertainments comprehended all that the imagination could conceive of what was, by that age, accounted gallant and splendid.  At their processions they paraded more beautiful steeds than those of mere earthly parentage—­the hawks and hounds which they employed in their chase were of the first race.  At their daily banquets, the board was set forth with a splendour which the proudest kings of the earth dared not aspire to; and the hall of their dancers echoed to the most exquisite music.  But when viewed by the eye of a seer the illusion vanished.  The young knights and beautiful ladies showed themselves as wrinkled carles and odious hags—­their wealth turned into slate-stones—­their splendid plate into pieces of clay fantastically twisted—­and their victuals, unsavoured by salt (prohibited to them, we are told, because an emblem of eternity), became tasteless and insipid—­the stately halls were turned into miserable damp caverns—­all the delights of the Elfin Elysium vanished at once.  In a word, their pleasures were showy, but totally unsubstantial—­their activity unceasing, but fruitless and unavailing—­and their condemnation appears to have consisted in the necessity of maintaining the appearance of constant industry or enjoyment, though their toil was fruitless and their pleasures shadowy and unsubstantial.  Hence poets have designed them as “the crew that never rest.”  Besides the unceasing and useless bustle in which these spirits seemed to live, they had propensities unfavourable and distressing to mortals.

One injury of a very serious nature was supposed to be constantly practised by the fairies against “the human mortals,” that of carrying off their children, and breeding them as beings of their race.  Unchristened infants were chiefly exposed to this calamity; but adults were also liable to be abstracted from earthly commerce, notwithstanding it was their natural sphere.  With respect to the first, it may be easily conceived that the want of the sacred ceremony of introduction into the Christian church rendered them the more obnoxious to the power of those creatures, who, if not to be in all respects considered as fiends, had nevertheless, considering their constant round of idle occupation, little right to rank themselves among good spirits, and were accounted by most divines as belonging to a very different class.  An adult, on the other hand, must have been engaged in some action which exposed him to the power of the spirits, and so, as the legal phrase went, “taken in the manner.”  Sleeping on a fairy mount, within which the Fairy court happened to be held for the time, was a very ready mode of obtaining a pass for Elfland.  It was