exceptions to it,--tales
which are based upon healthy instincts, and which appeal to sympathies
that are never entirely undeveloped in the breasts of human beings above
the grade of Bushmen, or in which the fun does not depend upon the
exhibition of unexpected modes of inflicting death, pain, or discomfort.
It is not, however, in these that we are to look for the chief
attraction and compensating value of the collection. Those are to be
found, as we have already hinted, in the relative aspects of the tales,
which the general reader might consider for a long time fruitlessly,
save for the help of Mr. Dasent's Introductory Essay. This is at once an
acute and learned commentary upon the tales themselves, and a thoroughly
elaborated monograph upon mythology in its ethnological relations. We
know no other essay upon this subject that is so comprehensive, so
compact, so clear, and so well adapted to interest intelligent readers
who have little previous knowledge on the subject, as Mr. Dasent's,
although, of necessity, it presents us with results, not processes. A
perusal of this Essay will give the intelligent and attentive reader so
just a general notion of the last results of philological and
ethnological investigation into the history of the origin and progress
of the Indo-European races, that he can listen with understanding to the
conversation of men who have made that subject their special study, and
appreciate, in a measure at least, the value of the many references to
it which he meets in the course of his miscellaneous reading. And should
he be led by the contagion of Mr. Dasent's intelligent enthusiasm to
desire a more intimate acquaintance with a topic which rarely fails to
fascinate those whose tastes lead them to enter at all upon it, he may
start from this Essay with hints as to the plan and purpose of his
reading which will save him much otherwise blind and fruitless labor.

This, however, is not all. It is but right also to say that the readers
whose religion is one of extreme orthodoxy, that is, who deem it their
bounden duty to believe exactly and literally as somebody else believed
before them,--such readers will find their orthodoxy often shocked by
the tales which Mr. Dasent has translated, and yet oftener and more
violently by conclusions which Mr. Dasent draws from a comparison of
these stories with others that bear the same relation to other races
which these do to the Norsemen. The man who believes tha