out of the reading of her stories alone,
however much they may help, taken with
others, to produce them. Madame d'Aulnoy
frolicked with much liveliness and grace
within a very narrow circle. Let the child,
familiar not with that alone, find liveliness
and grace in other circles, and in
energy and massive strength. With the
whole playground of fancy open to him. let
him exercise all faculties, and so acquire
perfect agility of mind.

There are certain qualities common to all
fairy tales—by which term we would be supposed
to express all short, brisk narratives,
of an extremely fanciful description—some
respects in which the teachings of them all
concur. They all, for example, nearly or
quite without exception, suggest thoughts of
familiarity and kindness towards animals.
Of course, it is difficult for any person gifted
with a prompt and active fancy to be cruel.
They are the dull of wit who can inflict torture
or see torture inflicted without wincing
at their own conception of the suffering a
helpless creature feels. The spirit of kindness,
therefore, animates all fairy lore, and
must, as well as the activity of thought attached
to it, become communicated in some
measure to the faithful student.

It is curious, too, to observe how completely
the traces of their Oriental origin is
to be seen underlying national peculiarity in
almost all tales of enchantment. From one
of the oldest civilisations in the world, and
from the remotest times, from the early
mythology of India, the attendants which
adorned the court of the god Indra as with
flowers, found their way in a new form to
Persia. The Persian deevs and peris date
almost from the time of Zoroaster, and perhaps
the wife of Artaxerxes, in Green Parisatis
was in Persian, Pari-zadeh, Peri-born.
The Persian story-tellers found their way to
the hearts of the Arabians, and by the
crusaders the magic lore of the Mussulmen
was brought to the west, especially to
England and to France. One idea of the
origin of the word fairy, is that it is derive
from the Persian peri, and that our
fairyland is thus nothing else but the charmed
country of Ginnistan seen from a western
border.

Be that as it may, eastern ideas of magnificence
accepted and amplified by the delight
which the old knights of the middle
ages took in pomps and shows, fairly belong
to the genius of most fairy tales. It does not
appear in the tales of Ireland, and in some
others, for reasons which we need not stop to
specify. It does appear in the tales of the
Countess D'Aulnoy, and that in a grotesque
form which is very charming. She belonged
to a court that had abundant relish for external
glitter; though, when she wrote, Louis
the Fourteenth was following the footsteps of
Madame Maintenon to heaven, princes of the
blood were being educated by Bossuet and
Fenelon, and furnished by the prudish and
the wise with special editions of the classics,
and small libraries of learned and moral
works. Harmless amusement was sought
for the young, and found also by the old, in
little stories. Following, but in no case we
think sharing the lead of Perrault, the author
of Cinderella, several ladies of the court,
among whom the most justly popular was
the Countess D'Aulnoy, produced tales of
which not a few will go down from one
generation of children to another, until
childhood shall be no more. This lady died
a century and a half ago, at the age of
fifty-six. She wrote several books, but nothing
of hers has lived except the fairy tales;
not even one of the novels in which these
tales were embedded when they first appeared.

One of the main charms of them, apart
from higher qualities already named, is the
completeness with which the writer shakes
off all common regard for possibilities, and
gives up her entire mind without reserve to
the extravagance of fairyland. If a very
little dwarf appears, he probably comes
mounted on an elephant. If a lady weeps,
her eyes are like two fountains playing in
the sun, or there is a brook upon the floor
created by her tears. When King Charmant
was entrapped by the fairy Soussio, and
the hideous Truitonne, and the two ladies
hoped to talk him into marrying the fright,
"twenty days," we are told, "and twenty
nights passed without their ceasing to talk;
without eating, sleeping, or sitting down."
As you would commend a novelist for never
swerving from the possible, so you commend
and love a teller of fairy tales who never
swerves from the impossible. Let the real
world be mixed up with the unreal and a
discord is produced, comparisons are bred,
and readers are flattered with the notion that
they have a right to cry, "How so?" at what
is told them. There is no, how so? in fairy
history; it is all so, and so because it is so.
When King Charmant's friend the enchanter
set out to look for him, he went a little more
than eight times round the world upon his
search. When Leander, the invisible prince,
or prince sprite, was attacked by the followers
of Faribon, he made nothing of killing every
man, though he had scarcely recovered his
wind after a combat with a furious lion,
which, of course, was "of an enormous size."
When the same prince committed ravages
among the apricots and cherries (all fruits
are ripe at all seasons, of course), in the
queen's parterre, his was a remarkably bold
act; they were fruits that "it was death to
touch." It is a genuine fact, too, as relating
to this prince, that he "had always nice"—no,
we misquote that—"the nicest sweetmeats in
the world in his pocket," and even a more
genuine fact is narrated of another person in
the story, who being teased by excess of his
wife's affection, "went off one fine morning