Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/146

118 Birds, and Waterfowl; Wind and Weather; Stones and Caverns Secret Hoards and Treasures; the Devil and his Doings in Wales; Dragons, Serpents, and Snakes; Corpse-candles and Phantom Funerals; Weird Ladies and their Work; Witches, their Rendezvous and Revels; Charms, Pentacles, and Spells; Days and Months; Births, Weddings, and Funerals; Death, its Omens and Personifications; Transformations and Transmigrations; Colour-lore and Old-time Remedies; the Leasing—i.e, the Gleaning of such miscellanea as found no fit place elsewhere.

This, it will be seen, is a very comprehensive and well-planned survey of the field of folklore. It begins where it ought to begin, with the world of Nature, it proceeds to the visionary world of mythic beings and phantoms, thence to magic in its twofold manifestation as witchcraft and charming, and, lastly, deals with the life and death of man and the folk-philosophy of the After-Life. It is an admirably designed programme, but the manner in which it is carried out is open to criticism in some respects. Fire-festivals at the beginning of the volume are oddly divorced from Days and Months near the end. Hallowmas appears in the latter, and Christmas in the former. (A burning cart-wheel was still rolled from the top of many Glamorganshire hills on Midsummer night as late as 1820-30, p. 27.) Birds, (among which bats are classed), are curiously divided between Animals and Trees, water-fowl being placed with the latter!, and Trees are separated from Plants and Herbs to accommodate them. The matter noted under the head of Wind and Weather might well have been distributed among the animals, birds, and plants which give the weather-omens, or else might with advantage have been placed in closer relation to Heavens, Earth, and Sea; while the Water-horses, Spirits of the Mist, and Hounds of the Under-World are awkwardly separated from the other spectres. Possibly Mrs. Trevelyan was actuated by a wish for uniformity in the length of the chapters: hardly a sufficient reason, to our mind.

Mrs. Trevelyan's collection deals primarily but not wholly with South Wales. The nucleus of her material consisted, she tells us, of the large MS. collection of her late father, which she has supplemented partly from printed sources, partly from personal enquiry among old inhabitants. She has aimed at distinguishing