n Glasgow, and in Belfast. In one publisher's
announcement, at least, it was advertised as "Greeley's Account of the
Great Slave-Sale."

* * * * *

_Popular Tales from the Norse_. By GEORGE WEBBE DASENT, D.C.L. With an
Introductory Essay on the Origin and Diffusion of Popular Tales. New
York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. lxix., 379.

The tales of which this volume presents the first English
translation--though, as regards some of them, hardly the first English
version--appear to have been collected about twenty or twenty-five years
ago. Two gentlemen, Messrs. Asbjoernsen and Moe, (the name of the first
of whom begets much confidence in his ability for the task,) went out
among the most unlettered and rudest of the common folk of Norway and
Sweden, and there, from the lips of old women and little children,
gathered these stories of the antique time. Of what age the stories are,
nobody knows,--those who listened to them in their childhood, to relate
them in turn in their declining years, least perhaps of all. For they
are a part of the inheritance common to all the races that have sprung
from the Asiatic ancestor, who, at periods the nearest of which is far
beyond the ken of history, and at intervals of centuries, sent off
descendants to find a resting-place in Europe; and it is one great
object, if not the principal object, of the original collectors and the
translator of these tales to exhibit in them a bond of union among all
European peoples.

Indeed, the tales in their present form may be regarded as examples in
point appended to the translator's Essay which opens the volume. For
they will add little to our stock of available stories, for either
youthful or adult reading. The best of them already are a part of our
nursery lore, and are known to the English race under forms better
adapted to English taste and sympathies than those under which they are
here presented; and nearly all of those that are exceptions to this
remark are unfitted for "home consumption," either by the objectionable
nature of their subjects, by the still more objectionable tendency of
their teaching, or by a yet more fatal demerit,--their lack of interest.
They are in some respects notably tame and puerile,--with a puerility
which is not childish simplicity, but a lack of inventive fancy, and
which exhibits itself in bald repetition. The giant, for instance,
always complains of a smell of Christian blood, and is