prian syllabaries, or alphabets were invented. They are older than
reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers before men had any
education to quarrel over. The grannies told them to the grandchildren,
and when the grandchildren became grannies they repeated the same old
tales to the new generation. Homer knew the stories and made up the
'Odyssey' out of half a dozen of them. All the history of Greece till
about 800 B.C. is a string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and
Heracles and Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a _Cabinet des Fees_, a
collection of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them
into 'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up
himself, great as he was. Let ladies and gentlemen think of this when
they sit down to write fairy tales, and have them nicely typed, and send
them to Messrs. Longman & Co. to be published. They think that to write
a new fairy tale is easy work. They are mistaken: the thing is
impossible. Nobody can write a _new_ fairy tale; you can only mix up and
dress up the old, old stories, and put the characters into new dresses,
as Miss Thackeray did so well in 'Five Old Friends.' If any big girl of
fourteen reads this preface, let her insist on being presented with
'Five Old Friends.'

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy
tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who
goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple
blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies
try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. Real
fairies never preach or talk slang. At the end, the little boy or girl
wakes up and finds that he has been dreaming.

Such are the new fairy stories. May we be preserved from all the sort of
them!

Our stories are almost all old, some from Ireland, before that island
was as celebrated for her wrongs as for her verdure; some from Asia,
made, I dare say, before the Aryan invasion; some from Moydart,
Knoydart, Morar and Ardnamurchan, where the sea streams run like great
clear rivers and the saw-edged hills are blue, and men remember Prince
Charlie. Some are from Portugal, where the golden fruits grow in the
Garden of the Hesperides; and some are from wild Wales, and were told at
Arthur's Court; and others come from the firesides of the kinsmen of the
Welsh, the Bretons. There are also modern tales by a learned
Scandinavian