Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/125

Rh mind is that his materials have been for the most part btainedobtained [sic] at second-hand. This impression may be erroneous; though it is certainly confirmed, not only by the style of many of the sagas, but also by such opening phrases as: "Vers la fin du dix-septième siècle vivait à,"—"Vers l'an 1608 le bon roi Henri IV eut une heureuse idée,"—"Un beau matin de l'an 1777 tout Rethel fut révéille par un régiment,"—and so forth. The Contes divers—drolls, beast-tales, and märchen—are generally better given. Some of them are stated to have been obtained, directly or indirectly, from school-children; and one is transcribed in dialect from the dictation of a storyteller who repeated it at a veillée in the commune of Rimogne. In his notes M. Meyrac draws attention to variants, sometimes in works little known to the English student.

M. Pineau's Contes populaires du Poitou belongs to the Collection de Contes et Chansons populaires published at irregular intervals by Ernest Leroux. It is a small but good collection of forty-eight stories of various kinds gathered, as we are told in the Preface, at a little place in the valley of the Vienne called Lussac-les-Chateaux, from villagers, some of whom he characterises in a sentence or two of light but true touches. They ought, however, to have been credited separately and by name with the stories they furnished, and the details of their ages, occupations, etc., should have been mentioned. When will collectors learn to do this?

Dr. Ulrich Jahn has followed up his Volkssagen aus Pontmern und Rügen, and his other services to the study of the folk-life of Pomerania, by the first instalment of a collection of Volksmärchen aus Pommern und Rügen. Having in view the attack made upon him by Dr. Veckenstedt, it is natural first to turn to his Introduction in order to ascertain what he has to say about the persons from whom he gets his tales, and his mode of collection. And it is impossible to read many of his interesting pages