fairy-stories peculiar to Belgian territory, whether Flemish, Walloon, or French. The customary legends of the northwest and centre of Europe are circulated in Belgium, but they adopt no special national character there. They repeat, to excess, the feature which must so often baffle the collector, namely, the extraordinary resemblance to other stories from every portion of the globe. My eminent friend, M. Verhaeren, has indicated to me the tale called “Sire Halewyn,” but this is simply “Bluebeard,” with the addition of sinister and brutal features which make it unsuitable for popular reading. The so-called “Legendes Flamandes” and “Contes Brabanconnes” turn out not to be legends at all, but Rabelaisian “pastiches” of a recent and purely literary kind. But about forty years ago their author, Charles de Coster (1827-1879),who was almost the only Franco-Belgian writer of merit in that dark time, published a volume called “Thyl Ulenspiegel.”
Thyl Ulenspiegel (or Eulenspiegel) was the name of a legendary Teutonic character said to have been born in Brunswick in the thirteenth century. The word is supposed to mean The Owl’s Looking-Glass, but this remains a matter of conjecture. Ulenspiegel’s adventures were told in chap-books, and he became the type of the crafty peasant, the humorous rogue of Central European romance. In Elizabethan times he seems to have been popular even in England, under the name of Owlglass or Howleglas. This story was always popular in the Low Countries, and there are very early Dutch versions of it. Coster lifts this rather vulgar hero, whose name is the source of the French word “espiegle,” to an imaginative sphere, and makes a national Belgian figure of him. His book is full of violent animation and preposterous action, but it is inspired by a patriotism which was never so appropriate as it is to-day. Coster places his adaptation of the story at the period of Spanish oppression which so
