Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/137



Mr. Clodd has kindly forwarded for publication the following letter from Mr. Grant Allen:

The Croft, Hind Head, Haslemere, December 2, 1898.

I do not quite know why I should have ever been dragged at all into this controversy. Canon Pullen told me a certain fact, or alleged fact; it was a fact bearing upon studies which interest both of us, and I told it to you. There my part in the matter ended. I cannot imagine why it should be considered quite right of the Canon (because he is a canon, perhaps) to tell me the story, and quite wrong of me to repeat it to you.

More than that. The real burden of having told the alleged fact rests with Canon Pullen, and not with either of us. I was told it by him as fact. I repeated it as fact. It is now said that the Canon told the story "after dinner." That is quite true; but I am not myself in the habit of making my statements less trustworthy after dinner than before it. The supposed fact was related to me, not as an anecdote, but as a piece of evidence bearing on a subject under serious discussion in the drawing-room of Madame Brufani's hotel at Perugia. We had been talking for some time, in a group of three or four persons, about Frazer's Golden Bough, and other kindred topics. The Canon then brought up this illustrative case, which he mentioned with some reserve, because (he said) of its "blasphemous" character. He mentioned it very seriously, as a serious contribution to a serious discussion, and one wrung out of him, as it were, with some reluctance, because of its strange mixture of heathenism and Christianity. I should never have said myself that it was "an after-dinner conversation;"