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Thomas Herron: Their argument gains some support from Sp's late use of the word in "Epith" among Munster things that "sing" with "drery accents" (351): Ne let hob goblins, names whose sense we see not, Fray us with things that be not. (343-4) It would be interesting to think of these lines as a rejoinder to Harvey's earlier criticism of Sp's own poetry... for as Sp makes clear, his is the type that, like Apollo and Orpheus, can shine light on his love and make the woods ring in Co. Cork. Me: I'm not too sure about the Irish nature of the hob-goblin - it seems a fairly unequivocally English word. Harvey's distinction between Hobgoblin and Apollo has always appeared to me to be one between learned classical and oral English culture, primarily. Spenser's reply was, in effect, to make one of his projects in FQ the reclamation of 'soiled' or *infra dig* English symbols for the causes he held dear. Thus St George ceases to be a dubious May-game figure (of the kind condemned by Piers in the May Eclogue) and comes into his full inheritance as England's Christian saint. All those Belle Dame Sans Merci-type ballads about the Queen of Fairies seducing hapless young men are reworked to become Prince Arthur's vision of a wholly admirable Glory(ana). And so on. The lines from Epith. quoted above are amusing though when considered in the light of the philosophical principles of Thomas Hobbes, a man who made much play of not being frayd by 'things that be not', but whose name nevertheless became the occasion of a hobgoblin pun in Seth Ward and John Wilkins's *Vindiciae Academiarum* (1654), where they comment on his arguments against the establshed university curriculum: "The Hobbe-goblins spightfull and mischeivous in their Friskings". Charlie Butler