Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/85

 Rh to generalise as to the entire nation. This is an inexact way of dealing witii the subject. It is just as if a Southron writer were to jumble English and Welsh tales all together in a volume, and to treat them in his Introduction as the productions of a single people, while illustrating his conclusions as to the characteristics of their common imagination either from the English or the Welsh tales only. Perhaps we could not easily find better evidence of the necessity for the work of the Ethnological Survey Committee, which appears to be so long beginning its labours.

If we admit that Highland and Lowland stories may be mixed in this manner, the collection is not without merit, though more space might have been given to the former. It contains many stories not easily accessible elsewhere, and some that have never been seen in print before. We feel, from the specimens given, that we should like to know more about the manuscript collections of Mr. Dennison, Mr. Kennedy, and Mr. Ollason. Assipattle is, as we might expect, a purely Norse tale, and there ought to be " more where that came from". The examples of the different kinds of stories seem well selected. Those from the Rev. John Frazer's "Discourse concerning Second-sight" were quite worth reprinting. The volume is prettily got up, but it would have been more useful to the student had the editor indicated his sources in a more precise and businesslike way.

E. S. Hartland.