Page:Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (Volume 1).djvu/14

Rh form. Few tales are more pleasing than the Spectre Barber, one of the happiest illustrations of this class of writing, where a playful fancy sports with a fiction, that was at no distant time the delight and terror of the peasant’s fireside. La Motte Fouqué, on the contrary, is altogether a magician of darkness, who loves to treat the wild and impossible as serious matters, but who always endeavours to draw from them some moral conclusions. Veit Weber, another great name of romance, builds his tales on the dark times of chivalry, when the kinghtsknights [sic] plundered the people with the sword and the monks plundered the knights with the bible. Ottmar and Büsching are the antiquarians of romance, who have collected the scattered traditions of the peasantry, and retailed them to the world with little deviation