In the _Golden Terge_ of Dunbar, the same phraseology is adopted: Thus,

Thair was Pluto that elricke incubus
In cloke of grene, his court usit in sable.

Even so late as 1602, in Harsenet's _Declaration of Popish Imposture,_
p. 57, Mercury is called _Prince of the Fairies._

But Chaucer, and those poets who have adopted his phraseology, have only
followed the romance writers; for the same substitution occurs in the
romance of _Orfeo and Heurodis_, in which the story of Orpheus and
Eurydice is transformed into a beautiful romantic tale of faëry, and
the Gothic mythology engrafted on the fables of Greece. _Heurodis_ is
represented as wife of _Orfeo_, and queen of Winchester, the ancient
name of which city the romancer, with unparalleled ingenuity, discovers
to have been Traciens, or Thrace. The monarch, her husband, had a
singular genealogy:

His fader was comen of King Pluto,
And his moder of King Juno;
That sum time were as godes y-holde,
For aventours that thai dede and tolde.

Reposing, unwarily, at noon, under the shade of an ymp tree,[A]
_Heurodis_ dreams that she is accosted by the King of Fairies,

With an hundred knights and mo,
And damisels an hundred also,
Al on snowe white stedes;
As white as milke were her wedes;