INTRODUCTION


ORIGIN

The most careless reader can hardly fail to see that many of the
Tales in this volume have the same groundwork as those with which he
has been familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in
fact, of the days when there were tales in nurseries--old wives'
fables, which have faded away before the light of gas and the power
of steam. It is long, indeed, since English nurses told these tales
to English children by force of memory and word of mouth. In a
written shape, we have long had some of them, at least, in English
versions of the _Contes de ma Mere l' Oye_ of Perrault, and the
_Contes de Fees_ of Madame D'Aulnoy; those tight-laced, high-
heeled tales of the 'teacup times' of Louis XIV and his successors,
in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an
artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre.
From these foreign sources, after the voice of the English reciter
was hushed--and it was hushed in England more than a century ago--our
great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and Beauty and the
Beast, of Little Red Riding-hood and Blue Beard, mingled together in
the _Cabinet des Fees_ with Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin's
wondrous lamp; for that was an uncritical age, and its spirit
breathed hot and cold, east and west, from all quarters of the globe
at once, confusing the traditions and tales of all times and
countries into one incongruous mass of fable, as much tangled and
knotted as that famous pound of flax which the lassie in one of these
Tales is expected to spin into an even wool within four-and-twenty