Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/570

 528 Reviews.

names still applied to them of heilig in Protestant Friesland and of aleluyas in Spain. Some of the most interesting examples are still of the religious type, such as the pennons (drapelets) printed with the legends etc. of trade patron saints, or places of pilgrimage, carried in funeral and wedding processions, and hung up in the peasants' homes beside the statuette of the Virgin. The capricious colouring of the prints is thought by our authors to have been adopted to suit a popular taste formed by the weird rose-coloured dogs, red trees, and blue horses of the twelfth and thirteenth century painted glass in the cathedrals of Antwerp, Laon, etc. The authors supply a mass of laboriously collected material for the study of the long life and transmutations of wood blocks, — some of which they trace back to seventeenth-century Dutch and French originals and others to eighteenth-century chapbooks, while the bulk were specially cut for the broadsides. One of the most curious examples of change of ascription is the use about 1820 of a very recognizable portrait of Napoleon as the portrait of the hereditary prince of the Netherlands, 'the conqueror of Waterloo.' In another print, obviously of St Brigit of Ireland, the legend is that of Brigit the Swedish princess. As might be expected, many of the subjects occur in the prints of almost every nation, and, as in chapbook and ballad literature, there is the strangest mixture of old folk-tales, — Cinderella, Habetrot, Red Riding Hood, Tyll Owlglass, the Land of Cockayne, the Wandering Jew, — with tales perhaps on their way to become folk-tales, — e.g. Gulliver's Travels, in which two episodes differ from Swift, Gulliver's death-scene appearing to be copied from that of Tom Thumb ! — proverbs, street cries, fashions, games old and new, monsters surviving from mediaeval bestiaries, old customs such as leaping over candles on January 6, universal jests such as La Dispute de la Cuiotte, battle pictures of Jena etc., the burning of Moscow, and prints (of about 1850) of General Tom Thumb. One interesting adaptation to modern conditions is the belief that if the prayer on a certain common print be read daily for eight days before the drawing of the con- scription, and the print bound to the arm with which the ticket is drawn, a 'good number' will result (p. 74).

The greater part of the book is concerned with the prints