WHO WERE THE FAIRIES ? 263 



them and had made the world his confidant by 

 publishing the work whose name appears first in 

 the list at the head of this chapter. The Secret 

 Commonwealth was an exceedingly rare book, and 

 indeed may still so be described since the late Mr. 

 Nutt's reprint of it in his Bibliotheque de Carabas 

 with a learned introduction by the late Andrew 

 Lang was very strictly limited in numbers. 



It is a book well worth reading, and is distin- 

 guished from every other book on the subject by 

 the fact that its author treated his subject in 

 exactly the same manner as he might have done 

 had he been writing an account of the manners 

 and customs of the inhabitants of the village of 

 Aberfoyle over which he was minister. Gait's 

 Annals of a Parish is the kind of book of which I 

 am thinking, but that was admittedly a work of 

 imagination. Not so Mr. Kirk's essay : that was 

 in his hands as much a sober account of actual 

 things as was his countryman Mungo Parke's 

 description of his journeyings in Africa, and of 

 the tribes and peoples with whom he met. The 

 Secret Commonwealth, then, is of great value, be- 

 cause it sets down once for all exactly what things 

 were believed about the Fairies, in Scotland at any 

 rate, at a time when such beings were as much 

 believed in as were witches and warlocks and other 

 like uncanny and, usually, unseen, existences. For 

 the full account the curious must be referred to 

 the pages of Mr. Lang's edition, and those who 

 betake themselves to it will find a rich reward, 

 but a few of the more general passages must be 

 quoted in order that Kirk's position with regard 



