(continued this garrulous old Magician), to
show you that in Egypt, at least, my empire
is of a date superlatively more ancient
than that of your vaunted Queen Mab. If
you doubt me, go ask, go search the works of
those conscientious ghoules among the graves
of Egyptian antiquities—Rosellini, Grævius,
Lane, Denon, Champollion, Belzoni, Wilkinson
—go to the fountain-head, the father of
history—Herodotus. Go ask that famous
student of the black art in your own times
—Caviglia—he who, from the three corner
stones of astrology, magnetism, and magic,
raised a pyramid of the most extraordinary
mysticism, on whose airy faces he could see
inscribed in letters of light invisible to all
but himself elucidatory texts: he who was
the last recipient of that rich but awful
legacy of mystical learning which has been
handed down from age to age—from the
Essenes to Philo the Jew, from Pythagoras
to Psamnadius; he who, from the constant
and engrossing study of the mysteries of the
pyramids, became (like those Cingalese
insects that take the shape and colour of the
leaf they feed on) himself in dress, feature,
manner, thought and language, absolutely
pyramidal.

But I have not done with you yet, Novice,
nor have I vindicated the claims of Magic
sufficiently. You shall leap with me o'er
centuries. I willingly resign to Queen Mab
and her fairies the era of Sultan Haroun
Al'Raschid, the silly, sparkling, spangled
enchantments of Bagdad, and Damascus, and
China, nay, even the fairy doings in my own
Egypt—my own Grand Cairo—during the
sway of the caliphs. I look upon her trivial
pranks with calenders, and caravans, and fair
Persians; her peris, genii, and dwarfs, just as
so many conjuring tricks and mountebanks
at a fair. She may have the whole of the
dark and middle ages (in the East) for me,
and plague or reward as she list the enervated
occupants of Moslemin harems or the effete
princes of the Lower Empire. Europe was
my field of sovereignty then; and the realm
of Magic held its own against the realm of
Fairyland there for ages.

I will take Puck. You have been bold
enough, sir, to claim that essential vassal of
the king of Magic as a fairy. You will quote,
of course, the authority of William
Shakespeare (a fellow so ignorant of geography that
he talks about the sea-coast of Illyria), who
makes Puck a sort of fairy tiger or "gyp"
to Oberon, putting a girth round about the
earth in forty minutes, and bragging with
disgusting egotism of his flying "straight as
an arrow from a Tartar's bow." You will
have seen, doubtless, also, the Midsummer
Night's Dream at Covent Garden Theatre
under the management of Madame Vestris,
and probably because you saw therein Miss
Marshall as Puck looking very fairy-like in a
short tunic and fleshings; or perchance saw
pasted on the green-room pier-glass a prompters's
"call" for "Puck and all the fairies at
twelve," you jumped at the conclusion that
Puck was a fairy. He is nothing at all of the
sort. The fellow is a hobgoblin, and belongs
to me. Let Mab rule her own roast of
sylphides, coryphées, fays and sprites, and not
meddle with me. I will quote chapter and
verse for it.

        "In John Milesius any man may read
         Of divels in Sarmatia honoured,
         Called Kotri or Kobaldi such as we
         Pugs and hobgoblins call——"

Thus writes old Heywood in his Lucifugi.
Pug or Puck is a hobgoblin, a divel, and, as
such, I do not think the sportive Queen of
Elf-land will be inclined to claim him in
future. Indeed, many learned theologians—
both Catholic and Protestant—have gone far
to prove, by texts and arguments, both from
Scripture and the Fathers, that Puck is no
other than Satan himself in various disguises.
Such was Puck who had a domicile in the
monastery of the Greyfriars at Mecklenburg-Schwerin,
which he haunted in the form of a
pug or monkey, and tormented the monks
and lay brethren sorely. He had his fits of
good humour sometimes certainly, and turned
the spit, baked the bread, drew the wine, and
cleaned the kitchen, while the inmates of the
monastery lay a-snoring, receiving as wages
two brass pots and a parti-coloured jacket to
which a bell was appended; but these
benevolent humours were transitory and capricious;
and he is truly described, by the monk
to whom we owe the Veredica Relatio de
Demonio Puck, as an impure spirit. In fact (and
you will excuse the freedom of my language,
for, though I am a Magician, I am a gentleman,
and would not wish to wound your ears
unnecessarily) Puck was a very devil. Do not
misconstrue me. I don't mean the devil who
was always requiring payment, and for whom
there was no pitch hot; the devil who taught
Jack of Kent bridge-building, on condition
that a certain post obit should be paid if Jack
was buried on land or in water, and was
cheated out of his bond by Jack causing
himself to be buried in the keystone of his last
bridge; the devil who patronised old Nostradamus,
and was, in a somewhat similar manner
to the Jack ruse, cheated—he having a
contingent reversion in Nostradamus, which
was to fall in if that worthy was buried within
a church or without a church, whereupon
Nostradamus left directions in his will "to
be put into a hole in a wall," which was
accordingly done, to the devil's discomfiture.
Puck is not the devil whom Banagher beat;
the devil who assisted (for a consideration)
the architect of the cathedral of Cologne;
the devil who raised the Lust-Berg at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and had a finger in most of the
castles on the banks of the Rhine; the devil
of Evreux, who migrated from thence to
Caen, and appeared there in eighteen
hundred and eighteen clad in white armour, and