my difficulty was one of collection. This time, in offering them
specimens of the rich folk-fancy of the Celts of these islands, my
trouble has rather been one of selection. Ireland began to collect
her folk-tales almost as early as any country in Europe, and Croker
has found a whole school of successors in Carleton, Griffin,
Kennedy, Curtin, and Douglas Hyde. Scotland had the great name of
Campbell, and has still efficient followers in MacDougall, MacInnes,
Carmichael, Macleod, and Campbell of Tiree. Gallant little Wales has
no name to rank alongside these; in this department the Cymru have
shown less vigour than the Gaedhel. Perhaps the Eisteddfod, by
offering prizes for the collection of Welsh folk-tales, may remove
this inferiority. Meanwhile Wales must be content to be somewhat
scantily represented among the Fairy Tales of the Celts, while the
extinct Cornish tongue has only contributed one tale.

In making my selection I have chiefly tried to make the stories
characteristic. It would have been easy, especially from Kennedy, to
have made up a volume entirely filled with "Grimm's Goblins" _a la
Celtique_. But one can have too much even of that very good
thing, and I have therefore avoided as far as possible the more
familiar "formulae" of folk-tale literature. To do this I had to
withdraw from the English-speaking Pale both in Scotland and
Ireland, and I laid down the rule to include only tales that have
been taken down from Celtic peasants ignorant of English.

Having laid down the rule, I immediately proceeded to break it. The
success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due
admixture of the comic and the romantic: Grimm and Asbjornsen knew
this secret, and they alone. But the Celtic peasant who speaks
Gaelic takes the pleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly: so far as