f about animals and the world was touched with
imagination and was full of suggestions, illustrations, and pictorial
figures which the poets were quick to use. When the king says to Cranmer
in "Henry VIII:" "Come, come, my lord, you'd spare your spoons," he was
thinking of the old custom of giving children at christenings silver or
gilt spoons with handles shaped to represent the figures of the
Apostles. Rich people gave twelve of the "apostles' spoons;" people of
more moderate means gave three or four, or only one with the figure of
the saint after whom the child was named. On Lord Mayor's Day in London,
which came in November and is still celebrated, though shorn of much of
its ancient splendour, the Lord Mayor's fool, as part of the
festivities, jumped into a great bowl of custard, and this is what Ben
Jonson had in mind when he wrote:

"He may, perchance, in tail of a sheriff's dinner,
Skip with a rime o' the table, from near nothing,
And take his almain leap into a custard,
Shall make my lady Maydress and her sisters,
Laugh all their hoods over their shoulders."

It was once widely believed that a stone of magical, medicinal qualities
was set in the toad's head, and so Shakespeare wrote:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in its head."

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" is the most wonderful fairy story in the
world, but Shakespeare did not create it out of hand; he found the fairy
part of it in the traditions of the country people. One of his most
intelligent students says: "He founded his elfin world on the prettiest
of the people's traditions, and has clothed it in the ever-living flower
of his own exuberant fancy."

This immense mass of belief, superstition, fancy, is called folk-lore
and is to be found in all parts of the world. These fancies or faiths or
superstitions were often distorted with stories, and side by side with
folk-lore grew up the folk-tales, of which there are so many that a man
might spend his whole life writing them down. They were not made as
modern stories are often made, by men who think out carefully what they
are to say, arrange the different parts so that they go together like
the parts of a house or of a machine, and write them with careful
selection of words so as to make the story vivid and interesting.

The folk-tales were not written out; many of them grew out of single
inci