It is no longer questions of
material ease and gain that are of the chief concern; and consequently
the fairies and their doings, from their own triviality, fall far into
the background, and their place is occupied by a countless horde of
remorseless schemers, who are never ceasing in their efforts to drag
both body and soul to perdition.
115. But it is in the towns, the centres of interchange of thought, of
learning, and of controversy, that this revolution first gathers power;
the sparsely populated country-sides are far more impervious to the new
ideas, and the country people cling far longer and more tenaciously to
the dying religion and its attendant beliefs. The rural districts were
but little affected by the Reformation for years after it had triumphed
in the towns, and consequently the beliefs of the inhabitants were
hardly touched by the struggle that was going on within so short a
distance. We find a Reginald Scot, indeed, complaining, half in joke,
half in sarcasm, that Robin Goodfellow has long disappeared from the
land;[1] but it is only from the towns that he has fled--towns in which
the spirit of the Cartwrights and the Latimers, the Barnhams and the
Delabers, is abroad. In the same Cambridge where Scot had been educated,
a young student had hanged himself because the shadow of the doctrine of
predestination was too terrible for him to live under;[2] and such a
place was surely no home for Puck and his merry band.
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