Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 5 1887.djvu/276

268 NOTICES AND NEWS.

The version of this world-wide tale here reprinted is taken from the Golden Asse of Apuleius, as translated by William Adlington and printed in 1566. The story is quaintly told in its sixteenth century fashion, and it is delightful to possess a copy of this handsome and dainty reprint accompanied by introductory verses from five different writers, and by capital drawings of Psyche and Proserpina by Mr. W. B. Richmond and of Venus and the Seagull by Mr. Vereker Hamilton.

But it is Mr. Lang's "discourse on the fable" that creates the real interest of this book to folk-lorists. Plunging at once into his subject, Mr. Lang points out that nothing but the names of the hero and heroine and of the gods connect the legend with the higher mythology of the Olympian consistory, and that Cupid is in this story only the invisible bridegroom of so many household tales. He then proceeds to analyse the story, in order to get at the incidents essential to the plot. Grouping these incidents according to the ideas which they express, Mr. Lang then points out that three of them are moral observations of the facts of life which may occur anywhere, and anywhere may offer motifs for fiction; a fourth, the getting rid of a foe by putting him to perilous tasks, occurs in a state of society where opportunity serves; a fifth, that Hell may be visited by those who refuse to taste the dead man's meat, is found in savage and Greek myth; the sixth and seventh are found in widely scattered peoples in various degrees of primitive culture: that animals can assist their friends, and that the husband is not to be seen by the bride. Having established by