Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/28

 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

last year I had the honour of addressing you from this Chair, I ventured to prophesy that in a year's time the Council would be able to come before you with proposals for some definite work which should employ and concentrate the energies of the Society at large. I am now so fortunate as to find my prophecy fulfilled. You will have seen from the Annual Report, now before you, that the Council feel with me that the time has come for an endeavour to present the world with some authoritative corpus of British Folklore. A full and complete record can hardly be obtained until the series of County Folklore is completed; but that can hardly be in the lifetime of many of us here present, and meanwhile, in the picturesque language of the folk, "while the grass grows, the horse starves." We have, therefore, resolved, at the suggestion of Mr. Crooke, to undertake the very serious and important task of bringing out a new edition of the Calendar Customs portion of the work well known to us all as Brand's Antiquities. The history of the book, however, is not so well known. The nucleus of it is a little treatise on the local popular beliefs and customs, compiled by the Rev. Henry Bourne, Curate of All Saints, Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1725. Fifty-two years later (in 1777), this was enlarged and added to by the Rev. John Brand, subsequently Secretary to the