d queens, and princesses and knights,
about ogres and witches, about men that have been changed into
animals, and about animals that talk and behave like human beings,
exercise on the imagination of young children. While we listened, a
new world seemed to open before us, and anything like doubt as to the
reality of these beings never existed. What was reality or unreality
to young children of four and five? How few people know what real
reality is, even after they have reached the age of fifty or sixty.
For children, such names as reality and unreality do not exist, nor
the ideas which they express. They listen to what their father tells
them, and they cannot see any difference between what he tells them of
Frederick Barbarossa, of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf, or of
the dwarfs that guarded the coffin of Schneewittchen.

Some people, however, have thought that from an educational point of
view, a belief in this imaginary world must be mischievous. I doubt
it, and it would be easy to show that originally these stories and
fables were really meant to inculcate right and good principles.
Luther declared that he would not lose these wonderful stories of his
tender childhood for any sum of money, and Camerarius (_Fabulae
Aesopeae_, p. 406, Lipsiae, 1570) speaks of these German fables as
filling the minds of the people, and particularly of children, with
terror, hope, and religion. The oldest collections in which some of
these Aesopean fables occur, the Pantschatantra and Hitopadesa in
Sanskrit, were distinctly intended for the education of princes, and
though they may make the young listeners inclined to be superstitious,
such superstitiousness is not likely to last long. Children delight in
_Maerchen_ as in a kind of pantomime, and when the curtain has fallen
on that fairy world they often think of it as of a beautiful dream
that has passed away. The stories are certainly more impressive than
the proverbs and wise saws which many of them were meant to
illustrate, without always saying, _haec fabula docet_. Even if some
of these stories touch sometimes on what may not seem to us quite
correct, it is done to make children laugh rather at the silliness
than cry at the downright wickedness of some of the heroes. It is by
no means uncommon, for instance, that a good-for-nothing fellow
succeeds, while his virtuous companions fail. But there is either a
reason for it, or the injustice provokes the indignation of children,