Notes on Books.
Ulster Folk-Lore. By Elizabeth Andrews. (Elliot Stock.)
This useful little book has something to say of human beings who practise shape-shifting, and of giants; but it is chiefly devoted to a description of fairies as they are known in the North of Ireland. These diminutive people are certainly not nature-spirits. They have no kinship with the light-elves of the heathen Norsemen. They house in caverns, or in artificial underground "coves" built of rough stones without mortar, and roofed with large flat slabs. For many reasons it is to be concluded that, "in traditions of fairies, Danes [far more ancient than the mediæval sea-rovers], and Pechts, the memory is preserved of an early race or races of short stature, but of considerable strength, who built underground dwellings, and had some skill in music and in other arts." They appear to have been spread over the greater part of Europe, and to have finally been "driven southward to the mountains of Switzerland, westward towards the Atlantic, and northward to Lapland, where their descendants may still be found." It is to be noted that throughout Europe the customs attributed to undersized beings who live beneath the ground in caves, raths, or hollowed mounds are much the same. The elf-queen of Denmark wooing a handsome young knight on her grassy hillock closely resembles her Irish cousins. The little earth-folk of Germany, like the fairies near Somersby, in Lincolnshire, and their kindred in Ireland, bake cakes, and bestow some of them on kindly and helpful human beings. The legend of the woman who was induced to attend on the wife of a fairy-man at the birth of her child is very widely known (a variant has been gleaned in Palestine), but one Ulster version has details which make it of special importance. Several stories of the household, or farm, goblin are also widely current. The domestic sprite of the North who cried "Ay, we're flittin'," is to be heard of in Southern Italy and Spain. At the present date well-made dwarfs are not uncommon in Spain. In Württemberg such reversions to an ancient type are said to be sharp of wit and mirthful, but vain, and given to spiteful tricks if offended, a character they share with Congo pygmies and with the fairy-folk of tradition. An amusing point about the Donegal fairies of to-day is the readiness with which they adapt themselves to modern conditions. "At Finntown they did not interfere with the railway, as they sometimes enjoyed a ride on the train." Probably, in a few years we shall learn that they make use of aeroplanes.
The most important thing in this month's Cornhill Magazine is the unfinished draft of a poem by Browning, here published for the first time. The MS. is now in the British Museum. It was catalogued for the sale of the Browning MSS. last May as an " Auto. Draft of a Poem . . . . apparently intended for ' Aristophanes 'Apology,'" but it is as a matter of fact a soliloquy spoken by Æschylus just before his death. It is impossible to read a poem of Browning's without deep interest, and impossible but that out of so many lines some should be memorable, even strikingly beautiful; yet, if the matter rather than the form is considered, it is not difficult to understand why this poem came to be abandoned. It is of the nature of an exercise. 'A Saxon Diplomatist of the 'Thirties,' by Mr. A. F. Schuster, and 'Schools and Schoolmasters,' by Mr. C. L. Graves, are the two papers we should put first. The former is drawn from the private papers of Baron de Gersdorff, the Saxon Minister in London during the reign of William IV., and for a few years of that of Queen Victoria. It is full of vivid, curious pictures of the persons and life of the time—of which we may mention the contrast between the magnificence displayed and the entertainments given by the foreign embassies at the Queen's Coronation, and the parsimonious conduct of affairs by the English Court. Not even a banquet was given to the envoys after the Coronation; an equerry on horseback in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace called out to the foreign carriages as they drove up returning from the Abbey, "Now you may all go home!" We do not quite perceive why Mr. Schuster should find it "refreshing" to read of William IV.'s "old-fashioned hatred of the French"; but "refreshing" is just now rather a hard-worked word. The public school whose ways some thirty years ago Mr. Graves recalls is Marlborough. Dr. Stephen Paget's paper on 'Lister,' if slight, is pleasantly and sympathetically written; and two other papers worth reading are General Wilson's 'The Son of Waterloo' and Mr. Shetland Bradley's 'Concerning Tigers.' E. Hallam Moorhouse's 'New Letters from Admiral Collingwood' gives extracts from letters addressed by Collingwood to Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. and his wife, which have been deposited in the Public Library of Newcastle. These add little to what is already known of the great admiral, but they confirm that memory of capacity, devotion to his country, fortitude, and tenderness towards his family, which Collingwood has left in history.
The Fortnightly Review for November is rather remarkable for vigorous political articles on the burning topics of the hour than for literary studies. 'The Archduke Franz Ferdinand's Diary,' by Miss Edith Sellers, is a welcome study of a personality whom it certainly behoves all who have the least interest in international affairs to get to understand as truly as they may. Mr. Edwin Emerson's paper on 'Victoriano Huerta' is another account of a prominent personality, the true significance of whose appearance needs for the English public some detailed explanation. Huerta, be it remembered, boasts that he is a pure-blooded Aztec. One of the most interesting papers here, despite its disjointedness, is Mr. Victor du Bled's 'The Diplomatic Spirit in France and Elsewhere.' Mr. T. H. S. Escott has a paper on John Forster—'A Literary Cham and his Court'—a rambling performance, in which nothing stands out clearly. M. Luigi Villari's 'Italy a Year after the Libyan War' goes to show how happily Italy has disappointed those prophets who thought the war an enterprise beyond her resources, whether in wealth or in national discipline. She has met the charges of the campaign without external aid, and is proceeding with a prudent slowness to the development of her newly acquired territory. Mr. H. M. Walbrook's 'Irish Dramatists and their Countrymen'
