Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/21

Rh while pointing out as many others have also done, that the great bulk of our household tales have come to us from the East, and have been spread over Europe in various ways, points out that this was done for the South in great measure through the agency of the Turks; but for the North it was by the Mongolians during their two centuries of ascendancy in Eastern Europe; the Slaves received them from them, and communicated them to the German peoples.

If therefore you find some tales in one collection bearing a close resemblance with those you have read in another, you should make it a matter of interest to observe what is individual in the character of each, and to trace the points both of diversity and analogy in the mode of expression in which they are clothed, and which will be found just as marked as the difference in costume of the respective peoples who have told them each after their own fashion.

All of them have at least the merit of being, in the main, pictures of life, however overwrought with the fantastic or supernatural element, not ideal embodiments of the perfect motives by which people ought to be actuated, but genre pictures of the modes in which they commonly do act. As such they cannot fail to contain the means of edification, though we are left to look for and discover and apply it for ourselves. To take one instance. The Christian hagiographer could never have written of a hero he was celebrating, as we