Page:Researches respecting the Book of Sindibad and Portuguese Folk-Tales.djvu/13



thirty stories which Prof. Consiglieri Pedroso has selected from his collection of five hundred inedited Portuguese Folk-Tales have this great merit—they are evidently genuine. Just as it is easy to decide in the case of certain tales which their collectors profess to have gathered from rustic lips that they have been submitted to literary manipulation, so is there no difficulty in recognising the justice of the claim made by these Portuguese stories to be considered as "popular" in the technical sense of the word. Their occasional clumsiness and obscurity, their frequent forgetfulness of their original meaning, and some of their other peculiarities, may be objected to by lovers of neat and trim fairy-tales, but those characteristics will be accepted by more serious students of folk-lore as trustworthy evidence in favour of Prof. Consiglieri Pedroso's conscientiousness as a collector and a reporter.

As he has postponed for a time his comments on the stories he has published, it may be useful to say a few words here as regards their principal themes. The group of folk-tales, which is most largely