nded to acquire from these fairy tales, which are certainly
more amusing than the _Telemaque_ of Messire Francois de Salignac de
la Motte-Fenelon, tutor of the children of France, Archbishop Duke of
Cambrai, and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

The success of Perrault was based on the pleasure which the court of
Louis XIV. took in fairy tales; we know that they were told among
Court ladies, from a letter of Madame de Sevigne. Naturally, Perrault
had imitators, such as Madame d'Aulnoy, a wandering lady of more wit
than reputation. To her we owe _Beauty and the Beast_ and _The Yellow
Dwarf_. Anthony Hamilton tried his hand with _The Ram_, a story too
prolix and confused, best remembered for the remark, 'Ram, my friend,
begin at the beginning!' Indeed, the narrative style of the Ram is
lacking in lucidity! Then came _The Arabian Nights_, translated by
Monsieur Galland. Nobody has translated _The Arabian Nights_ so well
as Galland. His is the reverse of a scientific rendering, but it is as
pleasantly readable as the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ would be if Alexandre
Dumas had kept his promise to translate Homer. Galland omitted the
verses and a great number of passages which nobody would miss, though
the anthropologist is supposed to find them valuable and instructive
in later scientific translations which do not amuse. Later, Persian
Tales, Tales of the Sea, and original inventions, more or less on the
fairy model, were composed by industrious men and women. They are far
too long--are novels, indeed, and would please no child or mature
person of taste. All these were collected in the vast Fairy Cabinet,
published in 1786, just before the Revolution. Probably their attempt
to be simple charmed a society which was extremely artificial, talked
about 'the simple life' and the 'state of nature,' and was on the eve
of a revolution in which human nature revealed her most primitive
traits in orgies of blood.

That was the end of the Court and of the Court Fairy Tales, and just
when they were demolished, learned men like the Grimms and Sir Walter
Scott began to take an interest in the popular tales of peasants and
savages all the world over. All the world over the tales were found to
be essentially the same things. _Cinderella_ is everywhere; a whole
book has been written on _Cinderella_ by Miss Cox, and a very good
book it is, but not interesting to children. For them the best of the
collections of foreign fairy tales are the German st