says Clough, better inspired than Perrault's _Bucheron_.

[Footnote 34: _Selected Essays_, i. 504.]

[Footnote 35: Benfey, ii. 341.]

[Footnote 36: See _Poesies de Marie de France, Poete Anglo-Normande du
xiiie Siecle_, vol. ii. p. 140. Paris, 1820.]

[Footnote 37: Benfey, _Pantschatantra_, ii. 341.]

[Footnote 38: Comparetti, _Book of Sindibad_, p. 3. Benfey,
_Pantschatantra_, i. 38.]

[Footnote 39: _Poesies de Marie de France_, vol. ii. p. 53.]

LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT.

_The Sleeping Beauty._

The idea of a life which passes ages in a secular sleep is as old as the
myth of Endymion. But it would be difficult to name any classical legend
which closely corresponds with the story of the Sleeping Beauty. The
first incident of importance is connected with the very widely spread
belief in the Fates, or Moirai, or Hathors (in Ancient Egypt), or
fairies, who come to the bedside of Althaea, or of the Egyptian Queen, or
to the christening of the child in _La Belle au Bois Dormant_, and
predict the fortunes of the newly born. In an Egyptian papyrus of the
Twentieth Dynasty there is a tale, beginning, just like Perrault's, with
the grief of a king and queen, who have no child, or at least no son.
Instead of going _a toutes les Eaux du monde_, they appeal to the gods,
who hear their prayers, and the queen gives birth to a little boy.
Beside his cradle the Hathors announce that he shall perish by a
crocodile, a serpent, or a dog. The story, in Egyptian, now turns into
one of the common myths as to the impossibility of evading Destiny[40].
In Perrault's _Conte_, of course, fairies take the place of the Fates
from whom perhaps _Fee_ is derived. When the fairies have met comes in
another old incident--one of them, like Discord at the wedding of
Peleus, has not been invited, and she prophesies the death of the
Princess. This is commuted, by a friendly fay, into a sleep of a hundred
years: the sleep to be caused, as the death was to have been, by a prick
from a spindle. The efforts of the royal family to evade the doom by
proscribing spindles are as futile as usual in these cases. The Princess
and all her people fall asleep, and the story enters the cycle of which
Brynhild's wooing, in the _Volsung's Saga_, is the heroic type. Brynhild
is thus described by the singing wood-peckers,--

'Soft on the fell
A shield-may sleepeth,
The lime-trees' red plague
Playing about her.
The sleep-thorn set Odin
Into