Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/120

112 on the other hand, is one of the most valuable books issued by the Folk-Lore Society. It forms an admirable companion-volume to the Contes Moralisés of Nicholas Bozon, put forth a few months earlier by the Société des Anciens Textes Français, under the editorship of Miss Toulmin Smith and M. Paul Meyer. The introduction to the latter work, written by M. Paul Meyer, is learned and judicial; and it would have been still more complete had he been able to refer to Mr. Jacobs' edition of The Fables of Æsop, reported on last year. The notes to both the Exempla and the Contes Moralisés greatly enhance their usefulness. Those of Prof Crane display wider research in the literary history of the fable, and his whole book is a model of editing. I may note, incidentally, that the thirteenth example, that of the mouse in the dish, has survived in England as a traditional apologue until the present day. I remember my own nurse, a Cambridgeshire woman, often repeating it to me as a child. Prof Crane notices its survival in Italy, but he refers to no case in England, nor to any English writer who has mentioned it beside Swift.

Miss Hodgetts leaves us to find out which of the items included in her Tales and Legends from the Land of the Tsar are translations from existing collections. Some of them are easily recognised from Mr. Ralston's versions, and it was hardly necessary to present them afresh to English readers. Much more real service would have been done had she taken the trouble to give us chapter and verse for all that she has obtained from Afanasief and other writers, and stated concerning the rest when, where, and from whom she heard them. Thus much said, however, let me hasten to add that thirty of the eight-and-thirty stories here brought together are new, in their Russian form, to English readers; and there are few English men or women who have the opportunity of obtaining Russian folk-tales at first hand. To those who have the opportunity and use it, we may well be grateful.

In Tales of the Sun, Mrs Howard Kingscote has