Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/386

 350 Reviews.

native insight relieve the sordidness of the collection, but there is little in the book that can rank with the exquisite love-poetry which Dr. Hyde has collected from this very district and nothing at all which can be named in the same breath with the delicately beautiful poetry of nature which comes down from an earlier time.

Eleanor Hull.

Folk-lore of Women, as Illustrated by Legendary and Tra- ditionary Tales, Folk-rhymes, Proverbial Sayings, Supersti- tions, etc. By T. F. Thiselton-Dver, M.A.

It is clear that the author of this work, who has published many books of the same kind, must command a public. But it is not to the advantage of folk-lore, as this Society understands it, that this should be so. He does not concern himself with any of the questions which, in our belief, deserve scientific inquiry, and though he has read widely his method is very different from that which we have consistently advocated. His object is merely to collect from a variety of sources, among which he ventures to name the publications of this Society, a number of miscellaneous proverbs and beliefs which he supposes will amuse the public for whom he caters. These he roughly classifies under headings, such as " Woman's Eyes," " Woman's Tongue," " Red-haired Girls," " Woman's Curiosity," " Young and Old Maids," and so on. His method of supplying references is one of the curiosities of the book. For instance, on page 2, he gives chapter and verse for a passage in Don Juan., and on page 47 a reference to Lady E. C. Gurdon's Suffolk Folk-lore, while elsewhere half a dozen pages at a time, swarming with assertions which a reader would wish to verify, are left without a footnote. Nor does he refer to the standard literature of the subject. He begins Chapter XX., which deals with "Woman's Curiosity," with a mention of Peeping Tom of Coventry, which is hardly apposite, and he goes on to talk of Forbidden Chambers and the like, as if Mr. Sidney Hartland had never dealt with such things.