Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/509

 Reviews, 477

Faiths and Folklore. By W. Carew Hazlitt. 2 vols. Reeves and Turner. 1905.

This work is described on the title page as " a Dictionary of National Beliefs, Superstitions, and Popular Customs, Past and Current, with their Classical and Foreign Analogues, described and illustrated. Forming a new edition of ' The Popular Antiquities of Great Britain,' by Brand and Ellis, largely extended, corrected, brought down to the present time, and Now first alphabetically arranged." One rubs one's eyes on reading this, wondering whether there is any use in the continued existence of the Folk-Lore Society, if so vast a design has already been carried out, and carried out too by the colossal efforts of one man, achieving more in his own single person than a whole society has been able to accomplish in a quarter of a century. But further examination enables us to reassure our members. There is still work to be done, there is still room for us to justify our existence ; there is indeed still room ioil\\dX%xQ.z.l Dictionary of British Folklore of which Mrs. Gomme's Traditional Games remains as yet the only instalment. The present work consists of a sort of mincemeat, composed of chopped ^ra^z^, enriched with some items of pure Hazlitt^ ranged under headings of which the first page will be a sufficient sample. It treats of Abbot of Bon Accord, Abbot of Unreason, Abingdon (Berks), Abraham-Men, Advertisements and Bills, Adventurer, Admiral of the Blue [a sobriquet for a tapster], Adoption, ^piornis. Aerolites. There is much folklore and something of trivial popular fallacies, but nothing of " faiths " in the sense of serious or religious beliefs, unless the articles on Indulgences and Mary of Nazareth count for such. We find, moreover, many purely glossarial entries correct and otherwise ; as for example, " Avenor, from Fr. avoine, the person who, in great towns, formerly had the superintendence of the horse-meat. See Halliwell in v." . . . . " Lich-gate, or gate of the dead. The gate at or near the entrance to a church, where the funeral service was in former times often conducted." The " classical and foreign analogues " cited consist chiefly of the parallels already adduced by Sir Henry Ellis and by Aubrey, but no references to Ellis's Brand are given, so we are left to conjecture, or to research in Sir Henry's three volumes, to inform us whether he or Mr. Hazlitt is to be cited as the authority for such statements as, " Luck-money, a payment still