On the whole we believe that the old nurse's fable is more in vogue than it has been at any other age of the world. Strong-minded men seem as a rule to have always despised mere portents and auguries, and only to have accepted the fables that accounted for natural phenomena because no other solution had been discovered. And the religion of truth always waged war against them. A true Israelite under the old dispensation was taught to be as free from all superstition as a Christian of the present day; and from Moses on to the later books of the Old Testament, there is a continual denunciation of the various magic practices that were caught from the heathens. The early Christian teachers in like manner forbade all varieties of divination, and modes of securing good luck, on the same principle, i.e., that the Second Commandment is infringed by trust in whatever is not of God; and in the interesting work at the head of our paper, Mr. Henderson has brought together many quotations showing the constant testimony of the Fathers and earlier ecclesiastics against such practices. He collects many such denunciations throughout the Middle Ages, and adds that apparently the Reformation, by diminishing popular reliance on Saints and Angels, absolutely caused the balance to swing back towards the old remnants of heathenism; so that instead of the fairies and elves being, as merry Bishop Corbett says, all of the old profession,' they would rather have lifted their heads when relieved from the censure of the Church. This is possible, but it may also be that our greater evidence of popular credulity may be caused by the more prominent relief into which a lower grade of persons were raised by the greater fullness of history, and by their own increasing importance. However, there has been, and very rightly, a universal endeavour for at least two centuries, to argue away, laugh down and eradicate all such superstitions, until they have almost perished from the surface, and only remain niched in a few credulous and ignorant minds in remote places, now and then coming into full light, chiefly in some case of obtaining money on false pretences, or of savage revenge on some supposed witch. And when practical and mischievous faith in these superstitions has passed away, it has become the part of scholars to collect them and compare them as valuable and instructive remnants of ancient beliefs. Such researches in able hands have led to very important conclusions, and it is highly desirable that every indication of popular belief should at once be noticed down, just as a specimen in natural history in a new place is recorded not so much for its own sake as for its connexion with its congeners. Folk Lore is a very vague term. It includes all that traditional mass of tales, sayings, beliefs, customs, observances, and auguries that are, or recently were, afloat among the people, accepted and acted upon by the lower orders, and more or less even by the upper classes. In these there is a certain amount of simple truth. Some are remnants of Church customs now disused, and some are relics of old Teuton heathenism. Often, we believe that superstition is the vulgarising of Reverence. Awe, devoid of actual fear, is incomprehensible to the rude and coarse, and when the vulgar see certain things, places, or persons treated with distant respect, they immediately conclude that some dire material effect is apprehended from a contrary course. Thus the poor women keep their children quiet in church by appalling threats of what the parson will do to them; and the legend of Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour who died of the prick of a needle on Sunday, has no doubt done much to produce the Englishwoman's horror of touching that implement; though the tales of the Evangelical Lutheran, Madame Nathusius, represent the pattern German girl as regarding fancy work as part of her Sunday recreation. The real range of Folk Lore is world-wide; Kaffir, Negro, Maori, continually amaze us with the resemblance of their traditions to our own; but within this mighty circuit there are divisions; and those superstitions which belong to the IndoEuropean nations are the most easily compared, as well as the most interesting to ourselves; while again we shall find that the most accessible traditions, and those most easy to compare and classify, are those of the countries where the population consists of Teutons or Kelts, in various proportions, with civilization derived from Rome. Much has been done towards such collections, ever since the brothers Grimm set the example in Germany. Mr. Edgar Taylor introduced their Mährchen' in England in an elegant selected translation, which, however, coming in the full swing of Edgeworthism, was, we fear, generally regarded as almost too unintellectual for a nursery book. Yet its notes gives it a value even above that of the beautiful recent edition de luxe, containing all the Mährchen. Sir Walter Scott meanwhile was, from taste and instinct, collecting all that Border tradition could afford him, viewing it, however, chiefly as poetic material. Croker's Irish tales were a most valuable contribution in themselves, and were told so charmingly as to awaken the popular taste and curiosity. Mr. Keightley began to collect and harmonize the old tales and fairy legends of different countries; and though no collector has equalled the pair who deserve to be mythologically celebrated as the Giants Grimm, yet the dwarfs standing on their shoulders begin to see further than even the giants themselves, and collectors and interpreters alike have multiplied within the last few years. Among the interpreters we would mention Professor Müller, Mr. Cox, Mr. S. B. Gould, and Mr. Kelly; among the collectors Mr. Dasent for Norway and Iceland, Mr. Campbell for the Highlands, Mr. Hunt for Cornwall, Mr. Hadland and Mr. Wilkinson for Lancashire, Mr. Henderson for the counties of Durham and Northumberland, as well as for the Border districts. Here he has been fortunate enough to become possessed of a MS. collection, made by a young man named Wilson, at the request of Sir Walter Scott, but which had failed to reach his hands. Add to these the Rev. J. C. Atkinson's contributions to the Monthly Packet, of the Folk Lore still fresh among the Danish sprung population of Cleveland-a work which we hope to see complete and published in a full and separate form. We believe that almost any curiosity of Folk Lore, which can be gathered direct from the peasantry, ought to be at once sent with sufficient evidence to some collector of these matters, since there is much yet to be established respecting the geographical distribution (if it may so be called) of certain myths and customs, and much light is thrown on differences of national character by the forms that the same story or belief will assume. No time is to be lost, for even in Cornwall Mr. Hunt tells us that stories he heard and happily recorded thirty-five years ago, have now become extinct. It must be confessed, however, that researches after English Folk Lore are apt to be disappointing. Our people in the true-blooded Anglian and Saxon counties, are too busy, too practical, too shy of being laughed at, too sophisticated to dwell much on any tradition that does not connect itself with immediate results. They are not narrators of stories, and care little for battle-fields. Mr. Henderson, indeed, relates how a Sunday scholar at Durham preferred a lesson from the Book of Joshua to one from Samuel, because of the fighting in it, and then told his teacher that there had been a great battle fought close to Durham once "And where was it fought ?" asked the teacher; "At Neville's Cross," answered the lad promptly. "I go there very often of an evening, to see the place, and if you walk nine times round the Cross, and then stoop down and lay your head to the turf, you'll hear the noise of the battle and the clash of the armour.' "" These were the young fellow's exact words.'Henderson, p. 266. But Durham was peopled partly by Kelts, and partly by Northmen, and against this young poet may be set the old woman of Berkshire, who with the White Horse and the Dragon's Hill before her eyes, was far from clear whether the battles they commemorated had not been a review, the firing of which she herself had heard. Naseby Field is said to be believed to be haunted with battle noises, but in general we fear that where the spot is remembered at all, it is only as a local lion, attracting strangers and bringing profit. There is no perspective in the popular mind. Even in the Keltic, and therefore naturally imaginative Cornwall, the terrible Tregeagle figures as an unjust attorney of not many generations ago, but falls in with ancient British hermits, and saints; and the saints have the characters and powers of their predecessors the giants, hurl rocks about, and even pelt each other, as did SS. Just and Sennan, whose two rocks met midway in the air, united, and formed one enormous granite mass. All that is before the memory of the grandmother of the oldest 'inhabitant,' is in one plane of far antiquity, including King Arthur, Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution. Christmas mummers in the south of England always call St. George 'King Geaarge,' a village girl who was taken to see Windsor Castle, wrote to her mother that she had seen the "old King killing the dragon," and in Cornwall there is scarcely a tradition about King Arthur himself. Without cultivation there seems to be an essential vulgarity in the English mind. Witness the deterioration of ballads that have been current among the people in England compared with those that have had the same lot in Scotland. For instance, we will take the mournful ditty where the jealous elder sister drowns the younger. In the Scottish ballad the miller is thus summoned :— 'O father, father, draw your dam, There's either a mermaid or milk-white swan, After drawing out the unfortunate lady 'He made a harp of her breast-bone, Whose sounds would melt a heart of stone, The strings he framed of her yellow hair, Whose notes made sad the listening ear, He brought it to her father's hall, And there was the Court assembled all, By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie. He laid his harp upon a stone, And straight it began to play alone, By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie. And yonder sits my mother, the queen, By the bonnie mill-dams o' Binnorie. And by him my William, sweet and true, Was "Woe to my sister, false Helen," We quote from Mr. Chambers' version, but the wild weird, ghastly beauty is the same in every Scotch variety, but contrast the poetic grandeur of this poem, every word of which is homely, with the two English versions given in Mr. Hughes' 'Scouring of the White Horse.' The Berkshire runs thus, as to the discovery of the body: : 'O father, O father; here swims a swan, Very like a drowned gentlewoman, If my love be true to me. The miller, he fot his pole and hook, Hey down, bow down, And he fished the fair maid out of the brook, And I'll be true to my true love, If my love be true to me. O miller! I'll give thee guineas ten, If thou'lt fetch me back to my father again. The miller, he took her guineas ten, And he pushed the fair maid in again. But the coroner has come, and the justice, too, The sister, she went beyond the seas, The other version, from the Welsh border, describes minutely how a fiddle was constructed from the poor lady's interior, and reproached all the family-but oh! how unlike the Scottish harp-and ending with the true legal consolation ; |