Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/78

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" in Germany!" Edited in Germany, printed in Germany. We look at books like this, designed to promote the study of Early English language and literature, with a mixture of gratitude to the German scholars who undertake the editorship and shame that the neglect of our own countrymen has thrown the work into the hands of foreigners, though foreigners so near akin to us. Dr. Horstman is already well known to students, as well of folklore as of philology, by his editions of some of our early sacred legends. In this volume his introduction, marked by his usual learning, sketches the development of English medieval mysticism and expounds the position of Richard Rolle as a mystic. The texts comprised in the volume are religious writings of various kinds. For folklore students the most valuable contents are some charms for the toothache, a revelation respecting purgatory, and some scattered moral tales. The latter are, perhaps, not so much traditional as deliberately invented by the monkish writers: at least this seems the case with certain of them.

of the Australian natives will be so much the more welcome that hitherto very few have been reported. We have plentiful accounts of the manners and customs of the Blackfellows, their tables of kindred and affinity, even their most secret rites; but of their tales we have only had a few cosmological myths. Yet all students have felt sure that tales were to be had, if only somebody could be found with the tact and the opportunity to get them. Mrs. Parker, endowed with both, has made an excellent beginning in the present volume.

Savage tales are, of course, conditioned by savage life. In a primitive democracy you cannot expect to find the princes and