shermen
unbound its eyes, and said to the lady, 'We cannot think how this
thing came to be over its eyes.' The lady said she wished she had
not bound up its eyes, and she gave the shillings in her purse to
the fishermen who had saved her donkey.

Now every child knows that a donkey may change into a Fairy
Prince: that is a truth of imagination. But to be polite and say
nothing of the lady, every child knows that so donkey would be
ass enough to behave as in this narrative. And the good parents
who, throughout the later 18th century and the 19th, inflicted
this stuff upon children, were sinning against the light.
Perrault's Fairy Tales, and Madame D'Aulnoy's were to their hand
in translations; "Le Cabinet des Fees", which includes these and
M. Galland's "Arabian Nights" and many another collection of
delectable stories, extends on my shelves to 41 volumes (the last
volume appeared during the fury of the French Revolution!). The
brothers Grimm published the first volume of their immortal tales
in 1812, the second in 1814. A capital selection from them,
charmingly rendered, was edited by our Edgar Taylor in 1823; and
drew from Sir Walter Scott a letter of which some sentences are
worth our pondering.

He writes:

There is also a sort of wild fairy interest in [these tales]
which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken
the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the
good-boy stories which have been in later years composed
for them. In the latter case their minds are, as it were, put
into the stocks ... and the moral always consists in good
moral conduct being crowned with temporal success. Truth
is, I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Riding
Hood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred
histories of Jemmy Goodchild.

Few nowadays, I doubt, remember Gammer Grethel. She has been
ousted by completer, maybe far better, translations of the
Grimms' "Household Tales". But turning back, the other day, to
the old volume for the old sake's sake (as we say in the West) I
came on the Preface--no child troubles with a Preface--and on
these wise words:

Much might be urged against that too rigid and philosophic (we
might rather say, unphilosophic) exclusion of works of fancy
and fiction from the libraries of children which is advocated
by some. Our imagination is surely as susceptible of
improvement by exercise as our judgment or our memory.

And that admi