Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/29

Rh Brand's book was last edited, in an adequate way, by Sir H. Ellis in 1813. When this important work is complete we trust that we shall have, to a large extent, discharged our obligations in connection with British folklore, and shall have laid the foundations of further systematic research.

We are sometimes warned that the time for collection has passed away, and that the pseudo-culture of the present generation has destroyed the few remains of genuine folk-belief in these islands. Much undoubtedly has been lost, and is now past recovery. But I venture to think that much more of the ancient tradition than is generally believed will reward the patient enquirer. The remarkable fact about the lore of the folk is its extreme vitality. It may not be openly expressed, because an ignorant minority brands it as vulgar or unscientific. But this amorphous group of beliefs, deep rooted in the hearts of our people, never entirely disappears, and fragments of it crop up in the most unexpected places.

Only last year, in a Worcestershire village, a woman foolish enough to marry a man much her senior was branded a witch, and was obliged to insert an advertisement in the local newspapers threatening legal proceedings against her traducers. I heard lately of another woman in Gloucestershire who has acquired a like uncanny reputation because she is in the habit of keeping two pigs,—one white, the other black. A young singer who recently made her debut on the stage informs the public through the halfpenny press that she owes her success to her manager's gift of a lucky shilling just before her first performance. Mr. Lovett, out of his great store of specimens, has on more than one occasion demonstrated at our meetings that countless varieties of charms and mascots are used by all classes of society; and we lately heard of a Jew applying to a London coroner for a piece of the rope used by a suicide for a charm because, as Mr. Hartland recently