for if any wife should point with indignation at such a tale as "Not a Pin to choose between them," p. 173, where wives suffer; she will be amply avenged when she reads "The Husband who was to mind the House," p. 269, where the husband has decidedly the worst of the bargain, and is punished as he deserves.
Of particular characters, one occurs repeatedly. This is that which we have ventured, for want of a better word, to call "Boots," from that widely-spread tradition in English families, that the youngest brother is bound to do all the hard work his brothers set him, and which has also dignified him with the term here used. In Norse he is called "Askefis," or "Espen Askefjis." By M. Moe he
Swedish collection of George Stephens and Hylten Cavallius, Svenska Folk-Sagor og Æfventyr, 2 vols., Stockholm 1844, and following years; and also this beautiful Norse one, to which Jacob Grimm awards the palm over all collections, except perhaps the Scottish, of MM. Asbjornsen and Moe. To it also we owe many most excellent collections in Germany, over nearly the whole of which an active band of the Grimms' pupils have gone gathering up as gleaners the ears which their great masters had let fall or let lie. In Denmark the collection of M. Winther, Danske Folkeeventyr, Copenhagen 1823, is a praiseworthy attempt in the same direction; nor does it at all detract from the merit of H. C. Andersen as an original writer, to observe how often his creative mind has fastened on one of these national stories, and worked out of that piece of native rock a finished work of art. Though last, not least, are to be reckoned the Scottish stories collected by Mr. Robert Chambers, of the merit of which we have already expressed our opinion in the text.
