M. Sébillot has been so able and successful a collector of the folklore of Upper Brittany, that his name has become a household word to English students. The former of the two books mentioned above is, as he says, the natural, almost logical, sequel of his previous volume entitled Petite Légende Dorée. It does not add much to our knowledge of the subject; but it gathers together local legends scattered through the Revue des Traditions Populaires and through various books relating more exclusively to the district, and many of them difficult or impossible of access to English, if not to French, readers.
The collection is not complete in the present volume, which extends only to the physical world—earth and water, with the supernatural beings assigned to them in tradition, including in a final chapter serpents and monsters. Ample bibliographical details of the sources of the various sections are given, so that the statements and legends can be verified, and the subject in many cases can be followed up beyond the point at which it is left here. Such a compilation cannot but be useful.
In La Veillée de Noël M. Sébillot brings his peasant-friends on the scene to tell in their own way their Christmas superstitions and to sing their Christmas songs. The author must be congratulated on having aroused sufficient interest to justify the production of this little sketch, which hardly attempts to be more than formally dramatic, on the boards of the Odéon. It must have been a novelty for Parisians last Christmas Eve to see reproduced before their eyes the kind of experience which to many of them who were country-born was familiar; and the pleasure with which these regarded it must have been based upon a sense of familiarity and
