ies: but a confused, careless, or discrediting tenure of
the fiction will lead to as confused and careless reading of fact. Let
the circumstances of both be strictly perceived and long dwelt upon, and
let the child's own mind develop fruit of thought from both. It is of
the greatest importance early to secure this habit of contemplation, and
therefore it is a grave error, either to multiply unnecessarily, or to
illustrate with extravagant richness, the incidents presented to the
imagination. It should multiply and illustrate them for itself; and, if
the intellect is of any real value, there will be a mystery and
wonderfulness in its own dreams which would only be thwarted by external
illustration. Yet I do not bring forward the text or the etchings in
this volume as examples of what either ought to be in works of the kind:
they are in many respects common, imperfect, vulgar; but their vulgarity
is of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful
English, to say that a thought "popped into Catherine's head"; but it
nevertheless is far better, as an initiation into literary style, that a
child should be told this than that "a subject attracted Catherine's
attention." And in genuine forms of minor tradition, a rude and more or
less illiterate tone will always be discernible; for all the best fairy
tales have owed their birth, and the greater part of their power, to
narrowness of social circumstances; they belonged properly to districts
in which walled cities are surrounded by bright and unblemished country,
and in which a healthy and bustling town life, not highly refined, is
relieved by, and contrasted with, the calm enchantment of pastoral and
woodland scenery, either under humble cultivation by peasant masters, or
left in its natural solitude. Under conditions of this kind the
imagination is enough excited to invent instinctively (and rejoice in
the invention of) spiritual forms of wildness and beauty, while yet it
is restrained and made cheerful by the familiar accidents and relations
of town life, mingling always in its fancy humorous and vulgar
circumstances with pathetic ones, and never so much impressed with its
supernatural fantasies as to be in danger of retaining them as any part
of its religious faith. The good spirit descends gradually from an
angel into a fairy, and the demon shrinks into a playful grotesque of
diminutive malevolence, while yet both keep an accredited and vital
influence upon