Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/125

Rh of this report. The chief point of the former is the illustrations by the late Richard Doyle, repeatedly recalling the same artist's design for the cover of Punch. The latter book causes me to regret that with Mrs. Russell's abilities, opportunities, and enthusiasm, she has not given us a collection of the genuine and unadorned folk-lore, all duly ticketed and pigeon-holed, of the island she loves so well. It is not too late to hope that she may be induced to make so desirable a contribution to science. Waldron's is the only book on the subject, for the chapters given by Train are somewhat grudgingly devoted to it in a larger work; and Waldron labours under the difficulty of having written in a pre-scientific age. From The Deemster we learned what wealth lay buried in the mountain recesses of the Isle of Man; and Mrs. Russell's little book confirms the knowledge. But in neither case is the store, by its form, available for students, save in Mrs. Russell's last chapter, however, where she gives an account of a few superstitions, and relates some stories not hitherto recorded; but they, alas! only whet the appetite.

I have left but little space to deal with Mr. Clouston's treatise (for this it is) on Chaucer's "Squire's Tale", and Herr Marx's work on Greek Folk-tales of Grateful Beasts. The importance of the former will be understood when I say that Mr. Clouston has filled more than two hundred pages with abstracts of analogues of the tale and of the various magical instruments—horses, chariots, mirrors, images, rings, gems, swords, and spears—with which it is concerned. He has ransacked literature and tradition, with a result that every one who knows his writings would have anticipated. The reader is presented with a cyclopaedia of information; and the pity is that it is intended only for the members of the Chaucer Society, for it is worthy of a wider audience. Incidentally Mr. Clouston administers a rebuke to the late Sir R. F. Burton for his " explanation" of the ebony horse in the Arabian tale as simply Pegasus, "which". Sir Richard lucidly declares, "is a Greek