GIFT-BOOKS.
MR. ANDREW LANG'S NEW FAIRY-BOOK.* WHEN Mr. Andrew Lang published, some four years ago, if we remember right, his Blue Fairy Book, he probably did not think of giving to the world a whole rainbow of colours. As it is—answering, doubtless, an imperious command—he added " Red " to the "Blue," followed up the " Blue " with a "Green," and has now crowned the edifice—capable, however, of receiving another story or so—with "Yellow." Perhaps this hap-hazard way of going on has been for the beet. We might have bad a scientific arrangement, if all had been planned from the beginning, for Mr. Lang is an expert in the science of these things. As a matter of fact, we get what is much better,—a collection of things new and old, which are supplied from an apparently inexhaustible treasury. Here, for instance, is a very old friend indeed : "How to tell a True Princess." Put a pea under twenty mat- tresses ; if she is of the true sort, her high-bred bones will feel it, as Hippocrates of Sybaris felt the crumpled rose-leaf. "The Story of the Emperor's New Clothes," which, as our readers will probably remember, were no clothes at all, is another old favourite; so is "The Story of Big Klaus and Little Klaus," which we remember in some popular edition of Grimm, almost as long as we can remember any- thing. Mr. Lang has been taken to task, it seems, by Mr. G. Lawrence Gomme, President of the Folk-lore Society, for mixing together old and new, meaning genuine folk-tales, of which the Klaus story may be taken as a type, and the modern invention, such as is "The Emperor's New Clothes," the satirical spirit of which is of latter-day birth. Folk-tales are true, it is said ; and fairy-tales, such as Madame D'Aulnoy and Hans Christian Andersen wrote, are not. Mr. Lang answers pertinently enough that "all the stories which are pleasant to read are true enough for us." Children will probably take things as they come, and not trouble them- selves with this somewhat subtle question of true or not true. Older readers, who indeed will be making a great mistake if they disdain this collection and its diverse-coloured fellows, will find a special interest in marking characteristic diver- sities and curious unexpected resemblances. " The Dead Wife," for instance, is translated, we are told, from the Iroquois—Mr. Lang might, we think, have been more liberal in imparting information about the sources of his tales—and it has the sombre colour which we should expect from its origin. An Indian hunter loses his wife and mourns bitterly 0 The Yellow Fairy Book. Ndited by Andrew Lang. London : Lonymans and Co, 1894, for her. After a while he makes a wooden doll and dresses it in the dead woman's clothes. At the end of a year, coming back one day from hunting, he finds his fire lit ; the following day there is a piece of meat in the kettle, nearly ready for eating. The next time he goes out hunting he returns early, and finds his wife sitting by the fire. She tells him that the Great Spirit has let her return, but he must not stretch out his hand to touch her till they had seen the rest of their people,—they lived in the woods, far from the tribe. At the end of another year they start to return to the camp, a six days' journey. When but one day's journey remains, he is seized with an uncontrollable longing, clasps her in his arms, and finds —the wooden doll. How we are reminded of the old Eurydice story,—" Luce sub ipso, Immemor heu 1 victusque animi re. spexit." The next story, "In the Land of Souls," is somewhat vaguely said to be "from the Red Indian." It touches an altogether higher plane of thought, and we should like to know something more about it. In the "Flower Queen's Daughter" we have again something that reminds us of Greek myth. "My daughter," says the Queen to the Prince, "can only stay with you in the summer. In winter, when every- thing is dead, and the ground is covered with snow, she must come and live with me in my palace underground." But this conclusion might well not be an original part of the tale, which is somewhat grotesque in character. "The Swineherd" and "The Nightingale" belong, we should guess, to the class of modern stories ; they are, in fact, bits of social satire. The latter, where the sham bird, with its gorgeous outside, playing by mechanism tunes which every one can learn, is preferred to the true, with its distracting variety of notes, is particularly good of its kind. The illustrations, by Mr. H. T. Ford, who contributed to the first and second volumes and has entirely furnished the third and fourth, are as spirited as usual, and vary between the beautiful and the grotesque with appro- priate versatility. But why, we may ask, in "The Dead Wife," referred to above, is the wife apparently a white woman, and the man an Indian?
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