pages 186-187

186                Illustrations of Lancashire

nation is the débris of the grand old spirit-worship - vague, but exquisitely picturesque, and figuratively significant, which, in the popular religion of the pre-Christian world, filled every sweet and romantic scene with invisible beings - Dryads, who loved the woodland; Naiads, that sported in the stream and waterfall; Oreads, who sat and sang where now we gather their own fragrant Oreopteris,1 and which assigned maidens even to the sea - the Nereids, never yet lost. "Nothing," it has been well said, "that has at any time had a meaning for mankind ever absolutely dies." How much of the primeval faith shall survive with any particular race or people - to what extent it shall be transformed - depencls upon their own culture, spiritual insight, and ideas of the omnipresence of the Almighty, of which the fancies as to the nymphs, etc., declared a dim recognition: it is affected also very materially by the physical character and complexion of their country. This has been illustrated in the completest manner as regards the eastern borders of Lancashire by the accomplished author of Scarsdale 2 already named: the influence of the daily spectacle of the wild moor, the evening walk homewards through

1 Lastrea Oreopteris, "sweet mountain-fern," abundant in South-East Lancashire.
2 The late Sir James Philips Kay-Shuttleworth, Bart.

Peculiarities                187

the shadowy and silent ravine, the sweet mysteries of the green and ferny clough, with its rushing stream, all telling powerfully, he shows us with perennial grace, upon the imagination of a simple-hearted race, constitutionally predisposed towards the marvellous, and to whom it was nourishment. Nobody is really happy without illusions of some kind, and none can be more harmless than belief in the mildly supernatural. The local fairy tales having now been pretty well collected and
classified,1 it remains only to recognise their immense ethnograpical value, since there is probably not a single legend or superstition afloat in Lancashire that, like an ancient coin, does not refer the curious student to distant lands and long past ages. Lancashire, we must remember, has been successively inhabited, or occupied, more or less, by a Celtic people, - by Romans, Danes, and Anglo-Saxons, - all of whom have left their footprints. No one can reside a year. in Lancashire without hearing of its "boggarts" - familiar in another form in the Devonshire pixies, and in the "merry wanderer of the night," Titania's "sweet Puck.' Absurd to the logician, the tales and the terrors connected with the boggarts carry

1. Lancashire folk-Lore. By John Harland and T.T. Wilkinson. 1867