BOOK-TALK.
IN the present passion for the study of comparative folk-lore there is nothing which the public have so badly needed as a book by some person not clever enough to be a crank, who would simply collect and systematize the results of the latest researches without distracting the reader's attention by any obtrusive theory of his own. We have become weary and a little suspicious of Sir George W. Cox and his solar myth hobby, of Max Müller and his disease of language hobby, and we are even a little distrustful of Andrew Lang lest in his zeal to demolish other people's theories he should be too anxious for the acceptance of his own. Such a book as the public needed has at last been given them in W. A. Clouston's two handsome volumes, "Popular Tales and Fictions, their Migrations and Transformations" (Scribner & Welford). The author truthfully says that "there is no work precisely similar to this in our country, in which variants of the same general stories are detailed,—not merely indicated by their titles,—thus enabling the reader to judge for himself of their common origin, and the transformations they have undergone in passing from one country to another, without the labor of consulting a great many different books, some of which are not readily accessible." Something of the kind was indeed attempted by Dunlop in his "History of Fiction" and Keightley in his "Fairy Mythology;" but Dunlop lived a century before the birth of comparative mythology, so that his book has all the assumption and positiveness of ignorance, while Keightley was one of the pioneers of the new science, and knew just enough to be hampered by the consciousness of ignorance. Clouston's book is not in any sense exhaustive. It simply takes up a handful of popular stories and gives the variants that are to be found in the literatures and folk-lore of different nations, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions as to their genesis. But he has no special system of selection : there is no reason why "Whittington" should be included and "Cinderella" excluded, or why the "Pot of Basil" should be excluded and the "Matron of Ephesus" included; and the work could be indefinitely continued by the addition of a new volume every year. So far as it goes, however, it can be recommended as thoroughly reliable and sensible.
When Charles Perrault's collection of fairy-tales made their first appearance they were read with avidity by the general public, which is known to be frivolous and light-minded. Occasionally a man of intellect devoted his leisure moments to their perusal, but it was with a certain air of condescension, of unbending. "I borrowed one or two idle books of Contes det Fées," Swift confesses rather shamefacedly in his Journal to Stella, "and have been reading then these two days, although I have much business upon my hands." If Swift's ghost ever revisits the earth in these days it must be greatly surprised to see idle books of a similar character in the hands of the wisest thinkers and most profound scholars of the day, and still more to learn that these men devote a Lifetime of study to the elucidation of the tales they contain, and to speculations upon their origin and diffusion,—speculations which are expected to establish the most important sociological
