All our authors have some terrible recent persecutions, and witchcraft is only too certainly still believed in almost everywhere among the ignorant. How far it was once a real power, and whether there be any connexion between it and magnetism, it is not for us to say. It is a subject to need deeper examination than would chime in here. But of this at least we are sure, that those who deal with a power they cannot understand, submit themselves to the peril of the strong delusion that they should believe a lie,' and it is more than probable that it is to the same power that inspired the wizards that peep and mutter,' or the oracles that Christian truth silenced. Every now and then some trial brings to light a whole tissue of strange dealings with cunning men or women for the discovery of stolen goods, or for the recovery of health. Nay, only last year, we knew of a poor woman who had fallen into a state of morbid melancholy from the reproaches of her own conscience, she having been persuaded to ill-wish a neighbour who had illwished her. The neighbour remained undamaged, but the remorse for the evil-wish took effect on the poor woman's mind, and threw her into an illness,

The ordeal of the Bible and key is not entirely forgotten, as the following paragraph, from a newspaper of January 1867, testifies:

SUPERSTITION.-At Southampton, on Monday, a boy working on board a collier, was charged with theft, the only evidence against him being such as was afforded by the ancient ordeal of Bible and key. The mate and some others swung a Bible attached to a key with a piece of yarn, the key being placed on the first chapter of Ruth. While the Bible was turning, several suspected names were repeated, and on the mention of the prisoner's name, the book fell to the floor. The bench of course discharged the prisoner.'

Here comes again the question-is it faith, is it conscience, is it magnetism, that has even made these ordeals effective? Never, never to be answered questions, only growing deeper and more mysterious as we learn more of the effects of spirit upon matter, and of the influence of the unseen world upon spirit-an inquiry deeply connected with the credibility of those constantly wrought, or expected, cures by the shrines of saints or by healing wells.

Cornwall has a peculiar species of Folk Lore in its Giantswho bear the credit of many of the wonders of a granitic country-and are plainly related to the Irish Giants, springing from the same Keltic fancy exercised on the huge boulders and mighty fissures of their rugged western coast. Spenser and Milton have brought two at least of these giants into literary fame, and with great correctness; and strangely enough these giants have more Irish than Breton, affinities.

While names of places and persons are almost identical in Brittany and Cornwall, the legends given by MM. Souvestre and Villemarqué, do not so decidedly resemble the Cornish ones as might have been expected, since the similar ones are more universal than Keltic. We would cite as instances, the expulsion of the changeling elf, which is indeed Breton, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, but also so German that Martin Luther himself wished to put an unfortunate child in the Moldau, and this not being possible, recommended constant prayers-Paternosters-to which he ascribed its death; also the repining maiden punished by being carried off by the ghost of the dead lover. The Cornish form is the story of Nancy Pen warne, who was saved at the last moment before daybreak by a smith, who burnt her clothes out of the ghostly grasp, and brought her home to die in peace. The Breton version has lately been made known by Mr. Tom Taylor's paraphrases of M. Villemarqué's translations. Everybody knows Bürger's Lenore, and the magnificent Scottish ballad of the Demon Lover, where the victim's guilt is enhanced by her having become a wife, and she is carried off by sea till the deadly discovery :

"O whaten a mountain is yon, she said,

All so dreary with frost and snow?"
"O yon is the mountain of hell," he said,
"Where you and I shall go."

Sea tales of submerged cities are found in the Kelt maritime countries, such as Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland, in all of which there are charming legends of bells ringing beneath the waters, and lands drowned for some great sin. The Morfa, or Mermaid, is another fair Cornish and Irish vision, and there is a very sad story in Cornwall, where Selina Penna Morfa comes exactly like Undine to her parents as a changling for their own drowned babe. Her lover betrays her, and she dies and is buried; then he endures the fate of Huldbrand, but not from her, but the bereaved Mermaid Mother, by whom, in revenge, he is kissed to death, while closed in the watery embrace.

We pass to the region where early childhood disports itself, in myth, fairy tale or nursery story, the pleasantest and best worked field that Folk Lore has to offer, dear to us for old love's sake, of well thumbed book, or of kind narrator, and valuable for the connexion of kindred thought and origin thus traced from land to land.

The tendency of the last two or three centuries to dress up everything in the conventional costume of literary dignity, is one of the chief obstacles to all researches. The same was always

the case. If Telemaque' is the Frenchman in a helmet and cuirass, Æneas is an Augustan Roman. No one but Shakspeare knew how to make his characters of all ages, like those in Lear and Macbeth, or of their own and no other, like the wonderful pictures in Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra. If the age of the writer be remote, we are thankful to him for his revelations about his own times, and are well pleased that Palæmon and Arcite should become doughty knights, worthy to figure in Froissart; and Alexander, in the Talbot book in the British Museum, is as welcome in his fifteenth century armour as he could be in his own robe, wrought by his mother and sisters. Even the prodigal son hawking before a Dutch country house is endurable. But when the whole of ancient times were melted into one happy medium, neither present nor past, but like nothing that ever existed on earth-when English gentlemen were sculptured in togas and full-bottomed wigs-when

Old Tonson, in his wondrous mood,

Amazing all beholders,

Had placed old Nassau's hook-nosed head
On poor Æneas' shoulders.'

When Blenheim's ceilings were painted with Marlborough, Queen Anne, and all the gods and goddesses among chariots, olive branches and cotton-wool clouds, when Arcadia became a neutral ground, and Cyrus and Mandane were fashioned to resemble Louis XIV. and his satellites-when Smollett anglicised Sancho's blunders and proverbs, and Mason altered Gray's letters to suit the public taste-then what could a genuine tradition expect? If Prior took up the Nut Brown Maid, it must be to turn the Shepherd Lord and his love into a conventional Henry and Eirma; Gray's Fatal Sisters gain in smoothness, but lose the weird awfulness of the Valkyrier, who weave the web of the slaughter of Clontarf; Parnell's Fairy tale, lacks the quaint reality of the Irish Lusmore or the Breton tailor. And though the Countess d'Aulnoy, M. Perrault, and others, revived the fairy tales of old, it was in a dressed up form from which they have never perfectly recovered. Respect to old individualities of tradition had been lost. The heroes and heroines who had descended with their narrators into the humblest grades of peasant life, thoroughly national, emerged as princes and princesses of realms of peacocks and of roses, and were draped à la Louis XIV. Love stories were saddled on them, importations made from eastern romance, and the stories composed which have to us become our childhood's tradition, but which utterly confuse our understanding of the original conception of these curious tales. The matter is further complicated by the

good folk who wished to render fairies moral and instructive, and turned them into rewarders of good children, punishers of naughty ones, and far worse, guides in natural science. Fairyland became a world which any one might play tricks with, and the burlesque or pantomime, with its foolish over-wrought puns and allusions to the subjects of the day, has vulgarized the fairy tale in a way unworthy of its essential poetry, and high descent; furnishing another proof of that strange element in the English mind which loves to violate and make game of everything poetical.

It is to the cottage hearth that we must go for the genuine fairy tale, and not to those of the sophisticated kingdom of Wessex; but to Cornwall, to Cleveland, to Wales, to the Highlands, to Ireland, to Brittany, Scandinavia and Germany. As we have already said, the quest was first begun by the brothers Grimm. Mr. Edgar Taylor and Mr. Keightley discerned its interest; but the study paused until its real meaning was revealed by the proofs of the common stock of the Aryan nations, when it became manifest that as surely as the names of numbers and terms for the nearest relationships and common objects of life, manifest the identity of origin of two nations, so surely do popular tales, existing in different versions, manifest that they have been derived from a universal root. The changes they undergo, in unison with the nation's alterations of circumstance, are as characteristic as those undergone by words, according to Grimm's famous law. That the Greek god will be a German peasant, or tailor, is nearly as certain as that the Greek & will be a Latin L. If we find Venus by her own name as on the Venus berg and in Sintram, we are as sure it is a modern transplantation as we are that an omnibus or a Eureka shirt is among ourselves-while a day, a tear, or a door, bear as evident the marks of old descent as do Jack the Giant Killer or Habetrot and the Whippety Stouries, Mr. S. B. Gould, besides his Curious myths of the middle ages,' has given us an appendix to Mr. Henderson's Northern Folk Lore, with a list of what he calls the universal story radicals, which he considers the Aryan race to have started with before they dispersed, and to have modified according to the influences of the localities the different nations adopted.

For instance, the Cyclops, or Round Eye, was originally the Sun. He is, as Mr. Kelly shows us, a complete Astronomical Indo-European idea; and the Cyclopes become numerous by the continual addition of departed days. In like manner, Odin in the Edda has but one eye, the Sun, having sacrificed the other for a draught from the Well of Wisdom; but as the notion of personified day was forgotten, the Cyclops became in

the popular mind a mere monster giant, ready for his natural fate of becoming victim to a hero. This hero is in every case caught in his den, and in danger of serving as his meal, which danger is escaped by blinding him, and riding out on the leader of the flock; but in each case there is a touch of national character and national respect to probability. Sindbad the Sailor (who may be considered as more properly representing Persia than Arabia) thrusts out the monster's eye with a cluster of the spits employed for roasting his comrades-the astute Ulysses glories in the device of professing to be Nobody,' and uses the giant's pine tree staff, hardened in the fire-the Gael, Conal na Buidhe recommends a poisonous eye-salve to his maneating foe on the Irish coast, and creeps out under the belly of the largest goat, while the poor giant pathetically says, 'There thou art, thou shaggy haired white goat, thou seest me, but I cannot see thee'-the German giant is blinded by the like treacherous recommendations. It is further curious to observe the different heroes, the Eastern merchant, the Greek king, the cunning Highland robber, and the honest German peasant, as also that the Eastern and the Greek accept the single eyed giant unhesitatingly; but the northern credulity is not so strong, and the Irishman was naturally two-eyed, and has only lost one by disease, while the German is allowed both.

Again, the beautiful fable of the Love and the Soul, which we know best in its late classical form in the graceful story of Cupid and Psyche, as given by Apuleius, and again in its court dress of La Belle et la Bête; appears likewise in a homely German version, where the Cupid of the part is a lion, and the curiosity of Psyche causes him to become a dove. We believe that it is the same legend, stripped of its allegorical meaning, that has come forth in another shape in Blue Beard. The ordinary semi-oriental dress of this story is, we believe, owing to French taste, and for some time there was a theory that it was a parody on the horrible doings of that half-madman, half-wizard, Ġilles de Retz, in Brittany; but Mr. Dasent in Norway, and Mr. Campbell, found the story current in forms much older than any tradition of De Retz.

The Gaelic version given by Mr. Campbell is the connecting link, but, as in all the modern versions, the part of Hamlet is left out. There is no haunting with

'Ach! Sein Bart war blau,'

for beard he either had none, or it was not blue. But though he keeps the secret chamber full of murdered wives which is evidently a Keltic idea, since one was discovered by Jack the Giant Killer, and another by Tom in the establishment of the Cornish