v of 
 
 &M.1FORN1A 
 
 &N DIEGO 
 
 presented to the 
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIKGO 
 
 by 
 
 FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY 
 
 MR. JOHN C. ROSE 
 
 donor
 
 c-
 
 HOMEK. 
 (After fainting by Frati(ois Gerard.)
 
 DEAR OLD STORY-TELLERS 
 
 BY 
 
 OSCAR FAY ADAMS 
 
 Author of " POST-LAUREATE IDYLS," and Editor of "THROUGH THF 
 YEAR WITH THE POETS," " CHAPTERS FROM JANE AUSTEN," etc. 
 
 TWELVE PORTRAITS 
 
 BOSTON 
 D LOTHROP COMPANY 
 
 WASHINGTON STREET OPPOSITE BROMFIELD
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1889, 
 
 BY 
 D. LOTHROP COMPANY. 
 
 JDrrsss of 
 
 Btrtntcfc A Smttfj, 
 Boston.
 
 To 
 
 EDWIN 
 
 Brother beloved, on that grave of thine 
 
 I lay this -wreath of blossoms, blown too late. 
 
 Forgive their scanty fragrance and divine 
 His loi-e who brings them is not bound by date.
 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES .... 9 
 
 CHAPTER Ii. 
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS 26 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 X 50 * 39 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MOTHER GOOSE rr 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT 74 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE BROTHERS GKIMM 89
 
 CONTENTS. 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LA FONTAINE, THE GOOD IO8 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE . . 12$ 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN .... 143 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 DAVID DEFOB l &4 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE, THE VALIANT . . . I?8 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE ABTHOR OF "PAUL AND VIRGINIA." . . IQ3
 
 DEAR OLD 
 STORY-TELLERS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HOMER : TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 HISTORY and fiction have always been 
 unequal rivals for favor, and where ten 
 men will read history with sincere interest, a 
 hundred will turn from history to fiction with 
 relief. 
 
 The more closely history adheres to facts, the 
 less the general reader cares for it. The histor- 
 ical narratives that have been most widely pop- 
 ular have been those of a legendary character. 
 The more unreal, the more romantic the history, 
 the greater its hold upon the average reader. 
 9
 
 10 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 An inability to separate the false from the true, 
 the romance from the fact, is characteristic of 
 the early chronicles of all nations. The lively 
 imagination of ruder peoples in early times has 
 always invested nearly everything with which 
 they had to do with a veil of romance. Their 
 religious rites, their daily tasks, their pleasures 
 and their pains became mixed with this element 
 of the unreal. Beside the gods and goddesses 
 in whom they believed and whose bodily appear- 
 ance on earth might be expected at any moment, 
 all nature was by their imagination peopled with 
 myriad forms, more or less human in their attri- 
 butes, and more or less but usually less 
 kindly disposed towards mankind. A firm belief 
 in these existences made a love for the mar- 
 velous an universal thing. No hero arose but 
 that half-miraculous powers were ascribed to him. 
 It was not enough that he must be victorious 
 over his fellowmen, he must have slain giants, 
 have vanquished dragons or conquered his ene- 
 mies by summoning to his aid the mysterious
 
 HOMER. 
 in British Museum, London )
 
 HOMER : TALES AND ROMANCES. 13 
 
 powers of earth and air. Homer, the greatest of 
 the ancient story-tellers, when relating the his- 
 tory of the siege of Troy or recounting the 
 wanderings of Ulysses, heightened the interest 
 of his narrations by interweaving into his ac- 
 counts of the prowess of his heroes tales of the 
 interposition of the gods in their behalf and of 
 their continual and intimate relations with su- 
 pernal powers. And all the romancers from 
 Homer down have depended more or less upon 
 the supernatural or unreal to deepen the fasci- 
 nation of their tales. In such ways the ac- 
 count of the life of any early hero has become 
 so mixed with the marvelous and the impossible 
 that the very fact of his existence is often ren- 
 dered a matter of doubt. 
 
 
 
 With the coming of Christianity many pagan 
 myths became merged into half-comprehended 
 Christian ceremonies and beliefs, and pagan 
 tales and legends of the saints were sometimes 
 strangely blended. In all, however, the element 
 of romance, of the fantastic, of the unreal, is
 
 14 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 stronger than anything else; because the liking 
 for the romantic is one of the strongest of human 
 emotions. The highest civilization refines this 
 liking, it reduces its power somewhat, but it does 
 not extinguish it. 
 
 The Norseman delighted in stories of Thor 
 and Odin and their exploits in the days of his 
 paganism ; and when a dim and doubtful Chris- 
 tianity came with Olaf, he transferred to Christian 
 heroes many of the attributes of his pagan gods. 
 The history of the Norsemen is a confused jum- 
 ble of Thor and Odin, the marvelous deeds of 
 yellow-haired sea-kings and their stormy loves 
 and hates, and when the land grew quieter in 
 the lapse of centuries the tales of these rest-; 
 less days, so full of the romantic and marvelous, 
 never lost, nor have they yet, their power to 
 charm. Mr. William Morris writes in our day 
 such poems of Norse loves and hatreds as " The 
 Lovers of Gudrun " and " Sigurd, the Volsung," 
 and the world reads them with delight. 
 
 The Welshman was as romantic as his Norse 
 K
 
 HOMER. 
 (Bust in National jl/i/seitnt, Naples)
 
 ,
 
 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. If 
 
 kinsman ; and in the Mabinogion and other col- 
 lections of tales he has left us a fantastic mixture 
 of Pagan and Christian romance. Of some of 
 these Welsh heroes we read in Tennyson's Idyls 
 of the King. 
 
 Many of the Irish and Highland legends have 
 a common source and are quite as wildly romantic 
 as the Norse or Welsh stories. One of the most 
 beautiful of the Irish legends is told in verse in 
 Dr. Joyce's Deirdre ; and in Miss Katharine Ty- 
 nan's Shamrocks the story of Diarmuid is finely 
 given. Diarmuid, whose story is related by both 
 Irish and Highland bards, seems to have been 
 a sort of Adonis and Paris combined, and like 
 Adonis was killed by a boar. This legend, com- 
 mon to both nations, could no doubt be traced to 
 the same source as the classical story of Adonis. 
 
 A general likeness exists between the roman- 
 ces of European nations, and archaeologists have 
 traced a great number of them back to Asiatic 
 or Egyptian sources. Some of our most familiar 
 nursery tales appear in various forms in the ro-
 
 i8 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 mantic literature of many nations, varied in each 
 case to accord with national peculiarities. The 
 story of Cinderella, for example, is given in 
 French, Italian, Arabian and Egyptian versions 
 and is known even among some tribes of North 
 American Indians. The Egyptian as being the 
 earliest, may probably claim to be the original. 
 It is as follows: In the year 670 B. c. the beauti- 
 ful Princess Rhodope was bathing in the river 
 and had left her garments on the river's brink. 
 The glitter of her jeweled shoes attracted an 
 eagle hovering in the air above her who, swoop- 
 ing down, caught up one of the shoes in his beak 
 and bore it away. Passing over Memphis in his 
 flight the shoe dropped from his beak into the 
 lap of King Psammetichus who was then hold- 
 ing a court of justice. The king, much at- 
 tracted by the dainty .beauty of the shoe, sent 
 forth a royal edict requesting the owner to apply 
 for it in person. As days went by and no appli- 
 cant appeared messengers were at length sent 
 out who in process of time found the Princess
 
 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 19 
 
 Rhodope still mourning for her lost shoe. She 
 was soon after brought before the king who 
 married her. In the Italian version, still occa- 
 sionally acted at carnivals, the outline of the story 
 as just narrated is presented, Italian personages 
 being substituted for Egyptian. The French 
 version places the scene in quite humble life, 
 as we shall see if we read the fairy tales of 
 Charles Perrault of whom we shall hear further 
 on. Ih " The Story of Rhodope," one of the 
 tales in Mr. William Morris's Earthly Paradise, 
 the adventure is again told, though one not 
 familiar with the Egyptian version might not 
 perhaps recognize the well-known tale of Cin- 
 derella. The theft of the shoe is thus related 
 by Mr. Morris : 
 
 " There, as she played, she heard a bird's harsh cry, 
 And looking to the steep hillside could see 
 A broad-winged eagle hovering anigh, 
 And stood to watch his sweeping flight and free, 
 Dark 'gainst the sky, then turned round leisurely 
 Unto the bank, and saw a bright red ray 
 Shoot from a great gem on the sea-thieves' prey.
 
 20 HOMER : TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 " Then slowly through the water did she move, 
 Down on the changing ripple gazing still, 
 As loath to leave it, and once more above 
 Her golden head rang out the erne's note shrill, 
 Grown nigher now ; she turned unto the hill, 
 And saw him not, and once again her eyes 
 Fell on the strange shoes' jeweled 'broideries. 
 
 " And even therewithal a noise of wings 
 Flapping, and close at hand again the cry, 
 And then the glitter of those dainty things 
 Was gone, as a great mass fell suddenly, 
 And rose again, ere Rhodope could try 
 To raise her voice, for now she might behold 
 Within his claws the gleam of gems and gold. . 
 
 " Awhile she gazed at him as, circling wide, 
 He soared aloft, and for a space could see 
 The gold shoe glitter, till the rock-crowned side 
 Of the great mountain hid him presently, 
 And she 'gan laugh that such a thing should be 
 So wrought of fate, for little did she fear 
 The lack of their poor wealth, or pinching cheer." 
 
 If we look at the stories of later date than 
 these which had their origin in the remoter past 
 we shall find the more unreal the story is, the 
 more romantic, as we say, the greater number 
 of people it interests and the stronger its hold
 
 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 21 
 
 upon popular favor. People like to get away 
 for a time from the every-day atmosphere that 
 surrounds their lives. The easiest way to do 
 this is by reading or listening to some romance 
 which is not closely hemmed in by the facts of 
 familiar existence. As for children the fairy 
 tale or book of adventure is the passport to 
 happiness, so for their elders the romance serves 
 more or less effectually the same purpose. 
 When we read Burns's Tarn O ' Shanter we have 
 left the land of the actual for that of the ideal ; 
 a rather grim ideal to be sure, but still an ideal. 
 Rip Van Winkle takes us to the same ideal 
 country, so does Hiawatha, so do The Idyls of 
 the King. 
 
 At the close of the last century when the ro- 
 mantic novel had become so absurdly romantic 
 as to create a sort of rebound from its influence 
 in the public taste, well-meaning writers like 
 Miss Edgeworth and Thomas Day, undertook 
 to provide a literature for young people which 
 should deal with facts and have nothing to do
 
 22 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 with romance. So Mr. Day wrote Sandford and 
 Merton, a book which no healthy child ever reads 
 without yawning over it, and Miss Edgeworth 
 and others wrote stories which showed quite as 
 little recognition of the craving for romance so 
 strong in childish hearts. Certain American 
 authors have made the same mistake and have 
 produced books which have ignored this, within 
 certain limits, healthy craving in young minds. 
 It is guidance, not repression, that the romantic 
 instinct needs. Sometimes the ideal assumes 
 the guise of the practical, as in Robinson Crusoe 
 and Swiss Family Robinson, but in spite of the 
 matter-of-fact style of these tales they are in 
 conception essentially romantic, and it is this 
 that has given them their world-wide fame. 
 
 Every age and every nation has its favorite 
 romances, some of which retain their hold on 
 readers but a little while, comparatively speak- 
 ing, while others are enjoyed by generation after 
 generation. In the Middle Ages the story of 
 Reynard the Fox was more popular in Europe
 
 HOMER : TALES AND ROMANCES. 23 
 
 than that of King Arthur and the Round Table. 
 The origin of the tale seems to have been Flem- 
 ish and the date about 1150. It soon became 
 the common property of the Teutonic nations, 
 and an English version of it was printed by Cax- 
 ton in 149.1. 
 
 The stories of the Arabian Nights' Entertain- 
 ments, as we shall have occasion to notice later, 
 did not long remain the property of one people, 
 and the Fables of sEsop, which are romances 
 in condensed form, have been the heritage of 
 many centuries and of almost all nations. 
 
 Within the present century the greater facili- 
 ties for travel and for the distribution of litera- 
 ture have made what was once the operation of 
 centuries an affair of but a few months or years 
 the world-wide dissemination of a popular 
 romance. It has brought to Western readers 
 some of the numberless romances of India, of 
 China, and of Japan, and has carried to Oriental 
 nations a few of the modern tales that Western 
 romancers have told. Now that the romances
 
 24 HOMER: TALES AND ROMANCES. 
 
 of all nations stand on the same shelf as those of 
 our own English tongue it is not such a simple 
 thing to be familiar with them all, nor need we 
 attempt it. Those we like we shall read and 
 re-read and merely glance at the others. How 
 long the popular romances of our time will con- 
 tinue to give pleasure no one can tell. 
 
 For over a hundred and fifty years Robinson 
 CVwAvhaa never lacked an army of young readers 
 and that army is ever increasing in numbers. 
 The stories told by the Brothers Grimm, and the 
 Hans Andersen tales, are read by a greater num- 
 ber every year. 
 
 Will it be thus with Kingsley's Water Babies 1 
 with Hawthorne's Wonder Bookt with Lewis 
 Carroll's Alice in Wonderland 7 or with George 
 MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind? 
 
 Time only can decide. 
 
 Judging by the steadily growing popularity 
 of such books as these it would seem as if they 
 might remain enduring favorites, yet the taste 
 of one generation not unfrequently rejects what
 
 HOMER : TALES AND ROMANCES. 25 
 
 its predecessor pronounced good. What books 
 will be forgotten in a few decades and what 
 books will remain perennially fresh for centuries 
 is beyond the power of the keenest critic to 
 foresee. 
 
 This much, however, can be safely said : Until 
 human nature becomes a widely different thing 
 from what it now is romances will be written and 
 will be read. The heroes and heroines of the 
 stories which are dear to us may pass utterly 
 from men's memories, the tales which many 
 readers have agreed to consider deathless may 
 be forgotten ; but there will then arise new 
 heroes and heroines of romance who will wield 
 as potent a sway over the imaginations of people 
 in future ages as do these of our day. Gener- 
 ations may vanish like shadows in a glass but 
 the love for romance will endure. 
 
 " Last night a mighty poet passed away : 
 
 ' Who now will sing our songs ? ' men cried at morn. 
 
 Faint hearts, fear not ! Somewhere, though far away, 
 At that same hour another bard was born."
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 " When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free 
 
 In the silken sail of infancy, 
 The tide of time flow'd back with me, 
 
 The forward-flowing tide of time ; 
 And many a sheeny summer morn, 
 Adown the Tigris I was borne, 
 
 By Bagdat's shrines of fretted gold, 
 
 High-walled gardens green and old. 
 True Mussulman was I and sworn, 
 
 For it was in the golden prime 
 Of good Haroun Alraschid." 
 
 A CHILDHOOD that had never known the 
 Arabian Nig/its, that had heard not of 
 "good Haroun Alraschid," which was never 
 lighted by the rays from the wonderful lamp of 
 Aladdin, and to which the adventures of Sind- 
 bad were unfamiliar, would be a strangely in- 
 26
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 27 
 
 complete one, or so, at least, it would seem to 
 us now. 
 
 Yet to the English-speaking world these de- 
 lightful Arabic tales have not been generally 
 known till within the last hundred years. Car- 
 maralzaman and Badoura, Zobeide and the three 
 calenders, Noureddin Ali and Bedreddin Has- 
 san are as familiar names to us as those of 
 Crusoe and Friday ; but while our great-great- 
 grandparents in their childhood knew, and proba- 
 bly heartily detested, Sandford and Merton, of 
 Ali Bab*a and the Forty Thieves they probably 
 never so much as dreamed. 
 
 The passionate love of marvelous stories so 
 strongly characteristic of Oriental peoples is not 
 wholly easy for us to fully appreciate, fond as 
 we Western folk are of fiction. To the Oriental 
 the story-teller is journalist, novelist, dramatist 
 and teacher in one. In the coffee-houses of 
 Cairo, the tent of the Bedouin, or in the palaces 
 of Bagdad, the professional story-teller is always 
 welcomed.
 
 28 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 " In mosque and square and gay bazaar " 
 
 the teller of stones can always find eager and 
 attentive listeners. The love for wonderful 
 tales is common to all ranks and it is in perfect 
 keeping with Eastern nature that Shahriyar the 
 king of Samarcand should be as well entertained 
 by the marvelous stories narrated by Schehera- 
 zade as any slave in his palace would have been. 
 To the few students of Oriental languages 
 two centuries ago many of the tales now in- 
 cluded in what we usually call The Arabian 
 Nights were more or less familiar ; but a trans- 
 lation of a number of them into French by M. 
 Galland, in 1704, first brought them to the gen- 
 eral notice of Western readers. A translation 
 of M. Galland's collection into English was 
 afterwards made, and, although it was felt by 
 scholars to be imperfect as well as inaccurate, 
 it became extremely popular. English transla- 
 tions from the Arabic were made from time to 
 time,* the best of which was that by Edward 
 
 * Foster, 1802; Beaumont, 1810; Scott, iSu; Lambe, 1826.
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 29 
 
 William Lane in 1839. In this work the trans- 
 lator has aimed to represent the original as 
 faithfully as possible and to give a truthful 
 and entertaining picture of Arabic customs and 
 manners. 
 
 M. Galland's version is never dull, but it con- 
 tains almost as much of the translator as of its 
 Arabic original, while Mr. Lane's translation in 
 addition to being entertaining has the merit of 
 being much nearer to the original. 
 
 About the origin of the Arabian Nights' En- 
 tertainments a great deal of controversy has been 
 raised ; but with this we need not concern our- 
 selves. That they are of comparatively modern 
 date may, however, be looked upon as settled, 
 as well as the fact of their Arabic authorship. 
 
 Coffee, tobacco and fire-arms not being men- 
 tioned in the Tales, it has been argued that they 
 were written before these came into general use, 
 and Mr. Lane places the year 1530 as an ap- 
 proximate date : Haroun Alraschid, the centre 
 of so many of the Tales, was contemporary with
 
 30 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 Charlemagne, and with him Arabic magnificence 
 seems to have reached its highest point. But 
 the best authorities consider the stories to have 
 been written at a considerably later period than 
 the time of Haroun. 
 
 About the year 1300 a Sultan of Egypt issued 
 an order compelling all Christians to wear blue 
 turbans, and all the Jews yellow turbans, instead 
 of white which the Moslems wore. In the tale 
 called " The History of the Young King of the 
 Black Isles" his people are transformed into 
 fishes, yellow, red, white and blue. The red 
 were the fire-worshipers, the white, Moslems, 
 the blue, Christians, and the yellow, Jews ; and 
 from this it has been argued that the date of 
 this tale at least must be subsequent to the be- 
 ginning of the fourteenth century. 
 
 The interest of the tales themselves is very 
 little affected by the question when they were 
 written ; but as pictures of Eastern life their 
 historical value is of course largely dependent 
 upon the date of their composition. Judging
 
 _^\>J 
 
 ! J13 
 'l ju*JI Jill L^l ^ c 
 
 A PAGE OF ARABIC. 
 
 (Fac-simile of t/te opening of t/ie story of Evis El-Djelis, ' ' The His- 
 tory of the Beautiful Persian" front " The Arabian Nights.' 1 '')

 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 33 
 
 from many of the details in the stories they 
 seem to have been written in Cairo, and doubt- 
 less a large number of them had been related 
 by Eastern story-tellers to eager listeners in 
 palace-court and street-bazaar long before they 
 were put into writing. Some of them show a 
 Hindoo origin, and others are distinctively Per- 
 sian ; but all seem to have been remodeled to 
 suit the tastes and customs of the Arabs who 
 lived in cities. 
 
 Whether one or more persons were concerned 
 in their composition and remodeling is some- 
 thing that cannot be accurately known, but quite 
 probably they are the work of one person, as 
 some excellent critics have supposed. With 
 one exception no similar collection of Arabic 
 tales is known to exist, but in Europe during 
 the Middle Ages, collections of stories by one 
 author were very common. Chaucer's Canter- 
 bury Tales is one of the most noted of these, and 
 Boccaccio's Decameron another. 
 
 As a picture of the times in which they were
 
 34 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 written they are, of course, historically valuable, 
 but they form no part of serious Arabic litera- 
 ture. They correspond in some measure to the 
 lighter novels of our day ; not the novels which 
 stir our deepest feelings, but those which aim 
 simply to amuse. That is all the Arabian 
 Nights' Entertainments aim to do. They are 
 animated, ingenious and amusing, but they are 
 nothing more. 
 
 Compare Homer with these Arabic tales. In 
 Homer our imagination is kindled by the ac- 
 counts of the heroes of whom he sings ; in the 
 Arabian Nights our interest is excited by the ad- 
 ventures that happened to certain people about 
 whom personally we care very little. In Homer 
 it is what Achilles, Hector, Paris and the others 
 really were in themselves that we care for. Char- 
 acter moves us in the Grecian narrative, advent- 
 ure in the Arabic. Popular as these tales have 
 been among the Arabic peoples they have never 
 occupied a high position in Arabic literature 
 both by reason of their literary style, which is
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 35 
 
 far from being the best, and because of their 
 general frivolousness. The scholarly Arab 
 would probably think it a sinful waste of time 
 to read them through and would resent having 
 Arabic literature judged by such specimens of 
 it as these. 
 
 I have not carelessly called the tales frivo- 
 lous. They are so because they have little or 
 nothing to say concerning the realities of life. 
 They are sparkling, but they touch the surface 
 of things only. The fancy is aroused, but the 
 feelings are seldom touched. The mind of the 
 Oriental is not a sympathetic mind. To accounts 
 of the most cruel tortures the Arab listens with 
 indifference, and he can inflict suffering without 
 a moment's hesitation. The greatest misfortune 
 he can conceive of is the loss of money or ma- 
 terial comforts, and the interest of the greater 
 number of Arabic stories turns upon the lack or 
 the possession of riches and what they can bring. 
 No moral lesson is drawn from events as they 
 occur, either directly or indirectly, simply be-
 
 36 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 cause the author does not dream of such things 
 as moral consequences. Vice never seems very 
 black to him, nor goodness especially com- 
 mendable in itself ; and of the development and 
 upward growth of human character he has no 
 conception. 
 
 To the English-speaking world life means 
 much more than the pursuit of our own individ- 
 ual happiness ; it implies a deep sense of our 
 personal accountability for its proper use. Pleas- 
 ure is the chief object of living to the Oriental, 
 and he is indifferent as to whether his end is 
 attained worthily or otherwise. 
 
 We are not to look therefore to the Arabian 
 Nights for any direct moral teaching. But there 
 is in these tales an indirect moral, unintended by 
 the author, yet which is there nevertheless. And 
 it is this : The pursuit of happiness for purely 
 selfish motives fails in reality to bring it to us. 
 The heroes and heroines of these sparkling sto- 
 ries are never secure in their happiness for any 
 long time. Any sudden turn of adventure may
 
 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 37 
 
 wrest it from them ; and they have no strength 
 of character to console them for its loss, or to 
 show them how to rebuild it upon its true basis 
 a love for others equal at least to their love for 
 themselves. " It is only a poor kind of happi- 
 ness that can come from thinking very much 
 about ourselves," says George Eliot in Romola, 
 but these people of whom the unknown author 
 tells us know no other kind. If Western nations 
 are superior to Oriental peoples it is because 
 their ideals are higher, because their aims are 
 less self-centered. It is indeed true that some 
 noble examples of self-sacrifice and loftiness 
 of motive are chronicled in the Arabian annals; 
 they are however not the rule, but only excep- 
 tions. 
 
 If we read the Arabian Nights for amusement 
 simply, we shall find it delightful. There are no 
 tales in the world quite like these in their bril- 
 liancy of invention, gorgeousness of description 
 or ingenuity of adventure. They can never 
 grow stale to young people ; for the love of the
 
 38 THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. 
 
 marvelous is a natural and healthy love in child- 
 hood and youth, and these stories meet that 
 natural desire and in a way that no others can 
 do. Later, when a taste for the adventures of 
 genii and magic-workers fades away, the unde- 
 signed moral of it all will grow clear to us and 
 we shall see that character is more than mate- 
 rial delights, and that no happiness worthy of 
 the name can be hoped for without it.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 MSOP. 
 
 TEACHING by fable is the most ancient 
 method of moral instruction; and allu- 
 sions to it abound in the early history of all na- 
 tions. The dullest minds could be reached by 
 an apologue or a parable, and the brightest ones 
 were not offended by this indirect mode of giving 
 advice. Indeed, the fable seems to have been at 
 one period the universal method of appeal to the 
 reason or the conscience. Kings on their thrones 
 were addressed in fables by their courtiers, and 
 subjects were admonished by monarchs by means 
 of skillfully-told apologues. Eastern .peoples in 
 particular have delighted in them, both because 
 of their natural love for story-telling and be- 
 cause of the opportunity the fable affords for 
 39
 
 40 
 
 pithy condensations of wisdom. Unwritten lit- 
 erature is rich with brief, sententious and easily 
 remembered sayings, and the fable offers the best 
 method of preserving them. The early fables 
 of a race were never long, and thus were readily 
 transmitted by word of mouth from one gener- 
 ation to another. 
 
 India was the birthplace of the fable in its 
 importance and the greater part of all Oriental 
 apologues can be traced to Indian origin. In 
 fact, with one notable exception probably no col- 
 lection of fables has been so widely circulated 
 as the one known throughout India as the Am- 
 wdri-Saha!i, or The Lights of Canopus. Bi'dpai 
 or Pilpaf, the reputed author, was a Brahmin 
 revered throughout India for his wisdom, who 
 became the adviser of the Indian prince Dabs- 
 chelim, a contemporary of Alexander the Great. 
 
 Eastern story-tellers give a very circumstan- 
 tial account of the manner in which Pflpai's fa- 
 bles came to be written. Dabschelim, we are 
 told, greatly desiring to leave behind him some
 
 xaor. 
 
 (After the painting by Velasquez)
 
 JESOP. 43 
 
 literary monument of his reign which should be 
 more enduring than marble or brass, induced 
 Pflpai to prepare a work for the instruction of 
 kings which should illustrate the soundest prin- 
 ciples of wisdom and morality by amusing tales 
 and anecdotes. 
 
 The Brahmin accordingly shut himself up in 
 his study, with one of his disciples for his aman- 
 uensis, and remained there composing and dic- 
 tating for an entire year. At the end of that 
 time the two issued from their retreat and pre- 
 sented the completed volume to Dabschelim who 
 is said to have been quite overwhelmed with 
 joy upon receiving it. 
 
 About the middle of the sixth century the 
 manuscripts were translated into Persian, two 
 centuries later into Arabic, and again into Per- 
 sian in the twelfth century. From this last 
 translation was produced in the fifteenth cen- 
 tury the standard Persian version from which 
 our English translations have been made. All 
 Oriental scholars have united in praising these
 
 44 
 
 apologues which, as Sir William Jones asserts, 
 "comprise all the wisdom of the Eastern na- 
 tions." The book has appeared in twenty differ- 
 ent languages and it is one of the great classics 
 of Eastern nations. 
 
 In the Lights of Canopus as in the still more 
 famous collection to which we shall come pres- 
 ently, animals are introduced as the medium of 
 conversation ; the Indian fables however are 
 connected by a slender thread of narrative. 
 One of the shortest fables, "The Monkey and 
 the Carpenter," will serve as an illustration of 
 their style : 
 
 " It has been related that a Monkey saw a Carpenter 
 sitting on a plank and cutting it, and he had two wedges, 
 one of which he drove down into the crevice of the board 
 so that it might be more easy to cut it and the slip for 
 the stroke of the saw might be opened. When the crevice 
 widened beyond a certain extent, he hammered in another 
 wedge and drew out the former one and in this manner 
 carried on his work. The Monkey was delighted. Sud- 
 denly the Carpenter in the midst of labor on an emergency 
 rose up. The Monkey, when he saw the place vacant, at 
 once sat down on the wood and his tail slipped down into 
 the crevice of the wood in that part which had been cut.
 
 JESOP. 45 
 
 The Monkey drew out from the cleft in the wood the 
 foremost wedge before he hammered in the other one. 
 When the wedge was drawn out both sides of the board 
 sprang together and the Monkey's tail remained firmly 
 fixed therein. The poor Monkey, being ill with pain, 
 groaned, saying : ' It is best that every one in the world 
 should mind his own business : 
 
 ' Whoever does not keep to his own affairs acts very 
 wrongly. 
 
 ' My business is to gather fruit, not to drive a saw ; 
 and my occupation is to disport myself in the woods, not 
 to strike the hatchet or axe. 
 
 ' Whoever acts thus, such will befall him.' 
 
 The Monkey was talking thus to himself when the Car- 
 penter returned and beat him as he deserved, and the 
 affairs of the Monkey through his meddlesomeness ended 
 in his ruin. Hence it has been said : 
 
 ' Carpentering is not the business of an ape? " 
 
 But far the most noted collection of fables, 
 and the one that has exercised the widest influ- 
 ence, is of Greek origin, and generally attributed 
 to ^Esop. Their purpose apparently was to trav- 
 esty or parody human affairs, and under the dis- 
 guise of animals gifted with speech and reason 
 every phase of human weakness or virtue was 
 briefly but effectually caricatured.
 
 40 JKSOP. 
 
 Several eminent scholars have denied the 
 authorship of ^Esop to these fables and have 
 claimed Babrius, who is supposed to have flour- 
 ished between the times of Augustus and Alex- 
 ander Severus, as the author. Others have as- 
 serted them to be the work of Maximus Planudes, 
 a Byzantine monk of the fourteenth century. The 
 famous Dr. Bentley two hundred years ago wrote 
 much upon this topic, denying ^Esop's author- 
 ship ; and from that time to this the question 
 has been a disputed one. Still the weight of 
 authority inclines in favor of ^Esop, and we may 
 without much hesitation consider JEsop as their 
 author. 
 
 That they are mainly the work of one person 
 is evident from their similarity of form. Each 
 relates but a single incident and enforces but a 
 single truth. The lesson to be learned is clear 
 and unmistakable. It is certain that if not all 
 by one writer they show in their construction the 
 influence of a single mind whether that mind was 
 's or not ; and simple, short, direct fables
 
 47 
 
 are usually spoken of as ^Esopian to distinguish 
 them from the long-drawn-out and often mystical 
 apologues of Oriental origin. 
 
 The date and place of birth of ^Esop are alike 
 uncertain. Cotyaeon, a city of Phrygia, is said 
 by Bachet de Mezeriac, a French author of the 
 seventeenth century who wrote a life of ^Esop, 
 to have been his birthplace, while a writer of our 
 own day makes him, a native of Mesembria in 
 Thrace, and he is supposed to have lived in the 
 sixth century before Christ. 
 
 About the personal appearance of ALsop a 
 similar uncertainty exists. The popular con- 
 ception of him is that of a much deformed and 
 even repulsive-appearing man ; an idea derived 
 from a life of him attributed to the same Byzan- 
 tine monk, Planudes, who was said by some to 
 have been the author of the fables. Other 
 writers, however, have described him differently ; 
 and apparently the only point of agreement in 
 the controversy is that he possessed a dark com- 
 plexion.
 
 48 .ESOP. 
 
 It is also as uncertain as the date and place of 
 his birth and his personal appearance, whether 
 JEsop committed his fables to manuscript, or 
 whether they were transmitted through folk-talk, 
 through story-tellers, and through their illustra- 
 tive use by public speakers the collection we 
 possess being gathered into form some centuries 
 later. There are allusions to several of the 
 fables in the Greek literature before the Chris- 
 tian era, but the earliest collection now known 
 bears the date of the thirteenth century after 
 Christ. Their brevity, as we have said, the 
 simple, definite action of their drama, the witty 
 conversation of the few actors, the pointedness 
 of the lessons taught, all would tend to render 
 easy their preservation in ^Esop's own words, 
 even through many generations. The remark- 
 able ease with which the fables are committed 
 to memory by any one, and the tenacity with 
 which they are remembered, certainly come from 
 a quality and an art inherent in their concep- 
 tion and construction. The universal fitting
 
 JESOP. 
 
 49 
 
 the " patness " so to speak of the " moral " is 
 another inherent characteristic of the ^sopian 
 fables, so distinguishing and discriminating them 
 from the common stock of fable fhat the number- 
 less allusions to them and their frequent use as 
 illustrations and enforcements of ethical truth 
 have incorporated them permanently into the 
 great body of general literature. 
 
 All writers about ysop however agree that he 
 was born a slave. We first hear of him as an 
 inhabitant of the island of Samos where his mas- 
 ters were Xanthus and Jadmon. How great their 
 rank we have no means of knowing. All that is 
 now remembered of them is that they were suc- 
 cessively the masters of a slave named ^sop. 
 Jadmon recognizing, doubtless, the brilliant qual- 
 ities of his bondsman, made him a freeman and 
 ere long the slave by birth became the confidant 
 of kings and the equal of philosophers and sages. 
 
 In the reputed lifetime of ^Esop the court of 
 Croesus King of Lydia was the most learned 
 then existing. To the capital city of Sardis were
 
 50 JESOP. 
 
 attracted many of the wisest men of the time and 
 among these JEsop might have been found, hav- 
 ing made his home there from about 570 B. c. 
 by the express invitation of Croesus. 
 
 In conversation with the philosophers whom 
 he met at the Lydian court ysop seems to have 
 been quite able to hold his own, and Croesus 
 appears to have esteemed his shrewd and often 
 humorous advice more highly than the elaborate 
 and lengthy counsels of the philosophers. 
 
 More than once he was sent by the Lydian 
 king on diplomatic missions to the various Gre- 
 cian states. On one of these occasions he was 
 at Athens during a period of disaffection on the 
 part of the citizens towards Pisistratus, their 
 ruler, and by his clever invention of the fable of 
 " The Frogs Desiring a King," now one of the 
 best known of the fables, he restored harmony 
 between Pisistratus and his subjects. At an- 
 other time he showed the Corinthians the folly 
 of being led by impulse in a fable narrating the 
 danger of mob-law.
 
 51 
 
 It was while absent from Sardis on an impor- 
 tant political mission that his death is said to 
 have occurred. A solemn embassy had been 
 sent by Croesus to Delphi, and JEsop was in- 
 structed to offer valuable gifts at the shrine of 
 Apollo and to distribute to each citizen four sil- 
 ver minae. During the negotiations in regard to 
 the distribution differences of opinion arose be- 
 tween ^Esop and the Delphians resulting in his 
 refusal to proceed further with the presentation 
 of the gifts in his charge, which he therefore sent 
 back to Croesus. The Delphians, enraged be- 
 yond measure at thus losing a treasure which had 
 been almost in their hands, at once determined 
 upon revenge. In pursuance of this design a 
 gold cup belonging to the temple was hidden 
 by them in the baggage of ^sop's attendants, 
 and after he had gone a short distance from the 
 city he was followed and brought back on a 
 charge of sacrilege. 
 
 To allay the fierceness of his enemies, JEsop 
 related a number of his fables, among them that
 
 52 JESOP. 
 
 of " The Beetle and the Eagle ; " but the Del- 
 phians were too wrathfully disposed to be open 
 to reason, and the embassador was condemned 
 to death. This cruel sentence was at once 
 carried into execution and JEsop was thrown 
 from a rocky precipice near Delphi. 
 
 Many times in after years must the Delphians 
 have repented of their impolitic haste, for a long 
 series of calamities overtook them soon after 
 which did not end till a fine had been paid 
 to the grandson of Jadmon, the former owner 
 of JEsop. This fine the Delphians voluntarily 
 imposed upon themselves in acknowledgment 
 of their crime, and from this circumstance arose 
 the phrase or proverb " ^sop's blood," used to 
 indicate the certainty of the punishment follow- 
 ing a murder. 
 
 What action was taken by Croesus in the mat- 
 ter has not come down to us, but his own misfor- 
 tunes followed not long after, and history, which 
 is silent as to the avenging of ^Esop's wrongs, is 
 voluble as to the sorrows of Croesus.
 
 53 
 
 Two hundred years after the embassy to Del- 
 phi had ended so tragically the Athenians erected 
 a statue to ^Esop carved by the skill of Lysippus, 
 one of the greatest sculptors of the time. The 
 statue has long since disappeared and the skill 
 of Lysippus is only a tradition in our day, but 
 the name and work of .^Esop are household 
 words ; the brief tales of the Samian Slave have 
 not lost their power to charm and instruct in the 
 lapse of more than twenty centuries. 
 
 With some few noted exceptions the Romans 
 produced no fables and their literature boasts 
 no such collections of tales as India and Greece. 
 
 The most noted mediaeval fable or apologue 
 is the well-known History of Reynard the Fox. 
 To this work may be traced the origin of many 
 of the fables of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Although in modern times the fable has formed 
 part of the literature of all Western nations, it 
 has never assumed the importance it possessed 
 in ancient times, or which it still holds in the 
 estimation of Oriental peoples. The fables of
 
 54 iESOP. 
 
 later authors are with one noted exception read 
 mainly by scholars. In 1668 the first six books of 
 the fables of the great French author, La Fon- 
 taine, were published, and three years later a 
 second collection. These fables have been the 
 delight of successive generations for two hun- 
 dred years, and their popularity remains as great 
 as ever. The student reads them for the charm 
 of their style, the philosopher for their keen an- 
 alyses of life and character, and the schoolboy for 
 the simple delight which the story affords. Edi- 
 tions of La Fontaine's fables are almost innu- 
 merable, and they will probably ever remain as 
 they are now, the most popular fables of the 
 Western world.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 NOT the French Contes de Fees or Contes 
 de Ma Mere /' Oye, but our own American 
 Mother Goose. 
 
 By rights she should be called Grandmother 
 Goose, but " of that," as the crab in the fairy 
 tale said after shaking off one of his legs and 
 while he was waiting for another to grow, " of 
 that, more anon." ' It is difficult to imagine a 
 nursery without a Mother Goose inhabiting it, 
 but English nurseries know her not, or at best 
 as a visitor from America, not as one who be- 
 longs there. Yet the children in the English 
 nursery know as much about the well-merited 
 punishment administered to the piper's son, the 
 astounding egotism of Jack Horner, the sad end 
 
 55
 
 t 
 
 56 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 of the Gotham sages, the perfectly managed 
 domestic economy of the Spratt household, the 
 unpleasant companion of Miss Muffet, the sin- 
 gular adventures of Dr. Foster of Gloucester 
 and the extraordinary elopement of the dish and 
 spoon as do their American cousins. But it is 
 one thing to learn these delightful histories from 
 books called Nitrsery Rhymes, and quite another 
 to have them directly from the lips of Mother 
 Goose herself, as one may say ; and here is where 
 American children have the advantage of Eng- 
 lish children. 
 
 Mother Goose was not only an American 
 woman, but a Bostonian into the bargain. At 
 what time the Goose family came to America is 
 unknown. The name was originally Vertigoose, 
 afterwards changed to Vergoose, and finally 
 shortened to Goose. But the first change was 
 long before the Goose family came to Boston. 
 Boston was a little village but thirty years old 
 when we first hear of them as landholders within 
 its borders. Nearly half the land on Washing-
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 57 
 
 ton street between West and Winter streets be- 
 longed to them, and so did a large piece of land 
 on Essex, Rowe and Bedford streets. At that 
 time all that part of Boston was open field or 
 pasture-land, and the Vergoose family before 
 that date probably lived in the vicinity of Han- 
 over street or Copp's Hill. Isaac Vergoose him- 
 self, the husband of Mother Goose, owned a 
 house and lot on the land which is now the 
 corner of Washington street and Temple 
 Place. 
 
 That the family were wealthy, for that period, 
 we are assured ; but only one of them achieved 
 anything like fame, and that was Mother Goose 
 herself. But for her the Vergoose family might 
 have lived and died and been gathered to their 
 fathers in the Old Granary Burying Ground 
 without leaving anything but their tombstones 
 to posterity. The cackling of a sacred goose in 
 the temple of Juno is said to have once saved 
 the Capitol of Rome from the Gauls, and so it 
 is that the cackling of this venerated Boston
 
 58 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 Goose has preserved the memory of this worthy 
 family to this day. 
 
 It would be pleasant to know something about 
 the childhood of Mother Goose, but of that we 
 are not told in any chronicle. We do not even 
 know where Elizabeth Foster was born, in what 
 part of Boston she dwelt, or when she married 
 Mr. Vergoose and thus unwittingly conferred 
 everlasting lustre upon his hitherto respectable 
 but not famous name. Very probably he thought 
 he was bestowing a great favor upon the young 
 Boston girl when he asked her to be his wife 
 and bear his name ; he the scion of a wealthy 
 Colonial family still in friendly relations with its 
 somewhat aristocratic kin in Bristol, England, 
 and she, we are quite sure, descended from no 
 such grand ancestry. But we can only imagine 
 his state of mind, for history is as silent on this 
 point as it is on every other connected with 
 Mother Goose till 1715. 
 
 Of one thing however we are sure ; that she 
 outlived him although the date of his death is
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 59 
 
 nowhere found in any register. So we grope 
 our way in the dark as regards the maiden and 
 married life of Mother Goose till the year 1715 
 is reached. Then we read in the record of mar- 
 riages in the City Registrar's office that in 
 " I 7 I 5 June 8, was married by Rev. Cotton 
 Mather, Thomas Fleet to Elizabeth Goose" 
 
 Of Elizabeth we hear little except that she 
 was the eldest daughter of Mother Goose. Of 
 Thomas Fleet, her husband, we hear much more. 
 He was born in England and was a journeyman 
 printer in Bristol. It was there that he first knew 
 of the American Vergoose family through its Bris- 
 tol relations. During the reign of Queen Anne 
 a certain clergyman of the English Church, Dr. 
 Sacheverell, having incurred the displeasure of 
 the dominant political party was tried for trea- 
 son before the House of Lords. The affair 
 created great excitement throughout England, 
 even leading to riotous proceedings in some 
 cases. In some of these young Fleet mingled 
 so conspicuously that he afterwards thought it
 
 00 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 prudent to forsake England for America. Ac- 
 cordingly he packed up his belongings and 
 reached Boston in 1712. Whether he brought 
 with him letters of introduction from the Bristol 
 Vergooses to their American cousins is uncer- 
 tain ; he may very likely have done so, for we 
 know that he very soon became acquainted with 
 the honorable Colonial family of Vergoose with 
 such pleasant results that the dignified Cotton 
 Mather was called upon to unite him in mar- 
 riage to one of its daughters. 
 
 His first child was a son whose advent was no 
 doubt a delight to its parents, while to its 
 Grandmother Goose it was a joy unspeakable. 
 But not unsingable, fortunately for posterity. 
 Mrs. Fleet's own presence in the nursery was 
 barely tolerated by the enthusiastic grandmother 
 who spent her whole time there or in wandering 
 about the house with her grandchild in her arms. 
 It is not improbable that it was when thus 
 employed she first sung that now deathless 
 ditty :
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 6l 
 
 " Goosey, goosey, gander, 
 Where shall I wander! 
 
 Up stairs, 
 
 Down stairs, 
 And in my lady's chamber." 
 
 Doubtless all this Thomas Fleet would not 
 have objected to ; but this was not all fortu- 
 nately for us, and for him, as it eventually turned 
 out. Partly to amuse the infant, and more to 
 express her unbounded joy over the fact of its 
 existence, she was continually singing nonsen- 
 sical songs and rhymes which she had learned 
 in the days of her own youth. Probably this 
 could have been borne had she been a fine 
 singer. But this was exactly what she was not, 
 and she was therefore a thorn in the side of her 
 son-in-law Thomas. What Elizabeth thought we 
 are not told, but quite possibly her feelings were 
 tempered with filial affection and gratitude. 
 Such was not the case with her husband, how- 
 ever, who exhausted every means known to him 
 to induce Mother Goose to stop singing. He 
 ridiculed her in public and in private and with
 
 62 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 very little effect in either case. He told her 
 that she destroyed the comfort of the whole 
 neighborhood, which was true enough, for the 
 grandmother's voice was heard for a long dis- 
 tance and Fleet was not the only person who 
 wished she might become suddenly dumb. To 
 his expostulations and to those of the neigh- 
 bors, she only laughed and sang the louder. 
 
 At last it occurred to Thomas one day when 
 the sound of his mother-in-law's voice followed 
 him all the way down to his printing house in 
 Pudding Lane, that he might collect these songs 
 and quaint rhymes which Grandmother Goose 
 was so persistently singing, print them and per- 
 haps turn a few nimble sixpences in that way. 
 With this thought in mind, he listened afterwards 
 with more patience to the not very melodious 
 strains that continually sounded in his ears and 
 wrote them down from day to day till he had 
 exhausted the list of the ditties which his mother- 
 in-law knew. To these he added such as he 
 could collect from other sources and soon after
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 63 
 
 published them in book-form with the title : 
 Songs for the Nursery ; or, Mother Goose's Melo- 
 dies for Children. On the title page was a rude 
 drawing of a goose with a very long neck and 
 wide open mouth and at the bottom of the page 
 the words : " Printed by T. Fleet, at his printing- 
 house, Pudding Lane, 1719. Price two cop- 
 pers." * 
 
 In all probability Mother Goose had no sus- 
 picion of her son-in-law's intention until the 
 book appeared with its derisive title. What she 
 thought when she saw herself thus publicly made 
 sport of we can only guess.f 
 
 * This point has been much disputed. According to an ancient ac- 
 count-book preserved among the Hancock Papers in the library of the 
 N. E. Historic and Genealogical Society Daniel Henchman, a colonial 
 bookseller, published in 17193 volume of Verses for Children which by 
 some has been supposed Jo be identical with Fleet's book. Also, al- 
 though it i certain that Fleet in 1712 had a printing-house on Pudding 
 Lane, we find a statement in Winsor's Memorial History of Boston 
 which tends to discredit the title-page of the traditionary " first edition " 
 of Songs for the Nursery : 
 
 t "In 1713, he [Fleet] moved his business to a spacious and handsome 
 house in Cornhill where he erected the sign of the Heart and Crown. 
 The house served as a home for his family, offices for his book and 
 newspaper printing and for an auction room where, when the labors of 
 his busy day were ended he sold books, household goods, wearing ap- 
 parel and whatever else was looked for at a country auction. He died 
 in July, 1758, aged 73 years."
 
 64 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 John Fleet Eliot, the great-great grandson of 
 Elizabeth (Foster) Goose, writes in 1873 to the 
 N. E. Historic and Genealogical Register : " Mother 
 Goose was a plain, honest and industrious woman, 
 of no literary culture, but who devoted herself 
 wholly to her household duties and could never 
 'have dreamed of the world-wide renown she was 
 destined to attain." 
 
 But at last Thomas Fleet had had his revenge ; 
 a profitable revenge since it brought him coppers 
 in plenty, but I fancy it was not so sweet a re- 
 venge as he had hoped it would be. After the 
 first few moments of angry surprise Mother 
 Goose resumed her wonted good nature, took 
 the heir of the Pudding Lane Printing-House 
 once more io her arms and sang on as calmly 
 as if nothing had happened. But for all that 
 something had happened. Thomas Fleet, with 
 the double purpose of ridiculing his mother-in- 
 law and at the same time making a profitable 
 matter of it, had immortalized her. What other 
 books he may have published few persons care
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 65 
 
 to know; but this one has gone wherever the 
 English language is spoken. We can forgive 
 him his half-malicious joke at the expense of his 
 worthy mother-in-law, who took such excellent 
 care of his boy, as easily as she doubtless did. 
 
 SIGN OF FLEET THE PRINTER, PUBLISHER OF FIRST 
 EDITION OF MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 From that day to this the nonsense-jingles 
 between the covers of Thomas Fleet's publica- 
 tion have formed the stock of nursery song and 
 recital. Each ditty is a story complete in itself, 
 and children remember it, as they do not the 
 more abstract and beautiful lullaby. Generally
 
 66 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 the child is as profound an adept in Mother 
 Goose's works as the nurse or the mother, and 
 sings " Hey diddle diddle " to itself with com- 
 plete satisfaction, and entertains itself at sol- 
 itary play by shouting forth 
 
 " Peter, Peter, 
 
 Pumpkin-eater, 
 
 Had a wife and couldn't keep her! 
 
 He shut her in a pumpkin-shell 
 
 And there he kept her very well I " 
 
 Very few of the Mother Goose ditties can be 
 called lullabies ; there are " Rock-a-by-baby, on 
 the tree-top " and " Bye O Baby Bunting." Gen- 
 erally our lullaby consists of variations upon the 
 one stanza, " Bye-O-baby-bye ; " and old hymns 
 and common melodies are sung instead of the 
 true sleep-songs. Other nations than the Eng- 
 lish-speaking races more frequently sing genuine 
 cradle-songs to their nurslings. 
 
 As to the babies themselves, however much 
 those of various nationalities may differ in certain 
 respects, in one important matter they are all
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 67 
 
 alike they all appreciate a noise that has some 
 approach to measure. 
 
 The small Laplander nestled among his furs 
 falls asleep to the monotonous drone of a lullaby 
 as quickly as an American baby would do. The 
 dusky little South Sea Islander is soothed by 
 the jingling of pieces of metal as readily as his 
 whiter-skinned cousin by similar nursery music. 
 When great Caesar was not great Cassar at all, 
 but only a very small and discontented Cassar 
 in the nurse's lap it is more than likely that he 
 gave a willing ear to the nurse's song : 
 
 " Lalla, lalla, lalla, 
 Aut ftormi, aut lacta." 
 
 It does not sound like much of a lullaby to us, 
 but the small Roman was not critical. Twelve 
 centuries later the infant Italian was often sung 
 to sleep with a cradle-song representing the 
 Virgin Mary hushing the child Jesus. 
 
 Here is one stanza of the nine verses which 
 compose it :
 
 68 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 " Dormi, fili, dormi ! mater 
 
 Cantat unigenito : 
 Dormi puer, dormi! pater 
 
 Nato clamat parvulo : 
 Millies tibi laudes canimus 
 
 Mille y mille, millies." 
 
 George Wither, the friend of Milton, wrote 
 a beautiful " Rocking Hymn " the first stanza of 
 which is as follows : 
 
 " Sweet baby, sleep : what ails my dear ; 
 What ails my darling thus to cry ? 
 Be still, my child, and lend thine ear 
 To hear me sing thy lullaby. 
 
 My pretty lamb, forbear to weep; 
 
 Be still, my dear; sweet baby, sleep." 
 
 An exceedingly popular Spanish lullaby is the 
 following : 
 
 "The Baby Child of Mary, 
 
 Now cradle he has none ; 
 His father is a carpenter, 
 
 And he shall make him one. 
 
 The lady good St. Anna, 
 
 The lord St. Joachim, 
 They rock the baby's cradle, 
 
 That sleep may come to Him.
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 69 
 
 Then sleep thou too, my baby, 
 
 My little heart so dear, 
 The Virgin is beside thee, 
 
 The Son of God so near." 
 
 Of the many German lullabies none is more 
 popular than the famous one beginning : 
 
 " Sleep, baby, sleep ; 
 
 Your father tends the sheep; 
 
 Your mother shakes the branches small, 
 Whence happy dreams in showers fall : 
 
 Sleep, baby, sleep." 
 
 Here is the opening stanza of a very ancient 
 Danish cradle hymn : " Sleep sweetly, little child ; 
 lie quiet and still ; as sweetly as the bird in the 
 wood, as the flowers in the meadow. God the 
 Father hath said, 'Angels stand on watch where 
 mine, the little ones, are in bed.' " 
 
 A French lullaby sung by the mothers of La 
 Bresse, not far from Lyons, to their babies, 
 begins : 
 
 " Le poupon voudrait bien dormlr ; 
 Le souin-souin ne veut pas venir. 
 Souin-souin, vent, vent, vene, 
 Souin-souin, vene, vent done I "
 
 70 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 The Finland peasants sing thus to theirs: 
 "Sleep, little field-bird; sleep sweetly, pretty 
 redbreast. God will wake thee when it is time. 
 Sleep is at the door, and says to me, ' Is not 
 there a sweet child here who fain would sleep ? 
 a young child wrapped in swaddling clothes, a 
 fair child resting beneath his woollen cov- 
 erlet?'" 
 
 The Italians call lullabies ninna-nanna. Here 
 is one which is sung in Logudoro, the middle 
 province of the island of Sardinia : 
 
 "Oh ! ninna and anninia! 
 
 Sleep, baby boy ; 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia! 
 
 God give thee joy. 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia! 
 
 Sweet joy be thine; 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia ! 
 
 Sleep, brother mine. 
 
 Sleep, and do not cry, 
 
 Pretty, pretty one, 
 Apple of mine eye, 
 
 Danger there is none ; 
 Sleep, for I am by, 
 
 Mother's darling son.
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 71 
 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia ! 
 
 Sleep, baby boy ; 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia ! 
 
 God give thee joy. 
 Oh ! ninna and anninia ! 
 
 Sweet joy be thine ; 
 On ! ninna and anninia ! 
 
 Sleep, brother mine." 
 
 A very beautiful lullaby is one which the 
 Roumanian mothers sing : 
 
 " Sleep, my daughter, sleep an hour; 
 Mother's darling gilliflower. 
 Mother rocks thee, standing near, 
 She will wash thee in the clear 
 Waters that from fountains run, 
 To protect thee from the sun. 
 
 Sleep, my darling, sleep an hour ; 
 Grow thou as the gilliflower. 
 As a teardrop* be thou white, 
 As a willow tall and slight; 
 Gentle as the ringdoves are, 
 And be lovely as a star! " 
 
 The history of lullabies and cradle songs is a 
 long one and every nation has numberless ninna- 
 
 * The Roumanian name for the lily of the valley.
 
 72 MOTHER GOOSE. 
 
 
 
 nanna. Those I have selected are perhaps as 
 characteristic as any and will serve to give some 
 idea of their general character. The greater 
 number of lullabies are the invention of the com- 
 mon people like the rhymes in Mother Goose, 
 but now and then a cradle song written by some 
 true poet has become popularized among these 
 folk songs of the nursery. Not long ago a young 
 poet* died in New York City poor and alone, 
 who never had babies of his own to climb about 
 him or to watch while their mother lulled them 
 to rest, but he loved to look at children and one 
 day he wrote one of the most beautiful of modern 
 cradle songs : 
 
 " Sleep, baby, sleep. 
 God gave thee smiles to keep, 
 And merry eyes will wait 
 Thy coming to the gate 
 When thou shalt be a man 
 With all the world to scan. 
 
 Sleep, baby, sleep. 
 
 God gave thee fields to reap 
 
 * James Berry Bensel.
 
 MOTHER GOOSE. 73 
 
 When harvest time is here, 
 With sunshine and good cheer. 
 But first, as thou shalt know, 
 He gave thee much to sow. 
 Sleep, baby, sleep. 
 
 Sleep, baby, sleep. 
 God gave thee tears to weep, 
 But not for now, not now ; 
 Thy sorrow will not bow 
 In days to come, and flee ; 
 It will abide with thee, 
 Sleep, baby, sleep." 
 
 AUTOGRAPH OF MOTHER GOOSE'S HUSBAND.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 THE iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth 
 her poppy," writes the delightful old 
 physician, Sir Thomas Browne, in a famous 
 passage in Hydriotaphia; and it often hap- 
 pens that the deeds in a man's life which 
 seem to him the most important are exactly the 
 ones that posterity deems least worthy of its 
 attention. It has happened over and over again 
 in the annals of literature that some piece of 
 labored writing respecting which the author has 
 been unduly proud has failed to pass the terrible 
 winnowing of time, while some literary trifle, 
 the sport of his leisure hours, is all that pre- 
 serves his name in another age. But for one 
 little work upon which he placed but slight 
 74
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 75 
 
 value it is more than probable that the great 
 Frenchman, Perrault, would be a name to us of 
 this century and nothing more. 
 
 Charles Perrault was born at Paris, January 
 12, 1628, and was the youngest child of Pierre 
 Perrault, an eminent Parisian barrister of that 
 period. The Perraults seem to have taken an 
 active share in the education of their children 
 and in his Memoirs the son writes in regard to 
 this : 
 
 " My mother taught me to read, after which I was sent 
 to the College de Beauvais at the age of eight years and 
 a half. My father took the trouble to make me repeat my 
 lessons in the evening, and obliged me to tell him in Latin 
 the substance of these lessons." 
 
 A rather trying ordeal for so young a lad. 
 He seems in his schooldays to have been fond 
 of making verses and even more fond of argu- 
 mentative philosophy. We are told of him that 
 vacation seemed to him just so much time lost ; 
 but about this point I am somewhat doubtful. 
 A quarrel with his master resulted in his leaving
 
 76 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 college but he continued his studies, and with a 
 friend of his own aga read continually. 
 
 In 1651 he went with two of his friends to 
 Orleans to procure licenses to practice law, fear- 
 ing the stricter requirements of the law-schools 
 at Paris. Although it was late at night when 
 they arrived the notion seized them that they 
 must be examined that evening. Accordingly 
 they managed to arouse those learned Doctors 
 of the Law who hastily put on their law-gowns 
 over their night-clothes and went into the amphi- 
 theatre. A solitary candle flickered on a stand 
 in the great apartment and furnished but a feeble 
 defence against the gloom and shadows of the 
 place. The three doctors seem to have cared 
 more for their fees than for the honor of their 
 profession, and the replies of the young men to 
 the questions put them were approved of although 
 they seem often to have been very wide of the 
 mark. While the examination was going on the 
 valet of the would-be advocates was counting out 
 the amount of the fees, a proceeding which no
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 77 
 
 doubt stimulated the examiners to pronounce a 
 favorable verdict. 
 
 In 1654 Pierre Perrault became receiver-gen- 
 eral at Paris and made Charles his clerk. Nine 
 years later the younger Perrault became the 
 secretary of Colbert, the Prime Minister of 
 Louis xiv. In the exercise of this office he 
 exerted no little influence upon the mind of 
 Colbert and secondarily upon Louis himself. 
 Perrault was chosen by Colbert Secretary of the 
 French Academy, then numbering but a few men 
 of letters, and through Perrault's influence the 
 Academy of Sciences was established. He was 
 rapidly advanced in the favor of Colbert and 
 being appointed Comptroller-General of the 
 royal buildings he was enabled to procure for 
 his older brother Claude the honor of furnishing 
 the designs for the completion of the Louvre. 
 Among the competing architects were Poussin 
 and Bernini, whose chief work is the famous 
 colonnade of St. Peter at Rome ; but the skill 
 and diplomacy of Colbert and Perrault tri-
 
 78 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 umphed and to Claude Perrault was committed 
 the important work, the completion of which 
 marks an important era in French architecture. 
 The influence of the younger Perrault was also 
 strong enough to procure for Claude the con- 
 struction of the Observatory of Paris and the 
 completion of the decorations of La Place du 
 Troni. Many of the adornments of the park at 
 Versailles are the work of Claude Perrault whose 
 genius, however, might have languished in ob- 
 scurity but for the power of his brother Charles, 
 his junior by many years. To Charles Perrault, 
 too, is due the admission of the public to the 
 gardens of the palace of the Tuileries. Even 
 the enlightened Colbert thought they should be 
 kept sacred to the use of royalty, but Perrault 
 felt differently. He was a man of wide sym- 
 pathies and considered as well as understood 
 something of what was needed by those beneath 
 him in rank and station. 
 
 " I am persuaded," he said very simply, but at 
 the same time very beautifully, " that the gar-
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 79 
 
 dens of kings are so large and spacious only 
 that all their children may be able to walk in 
 them." 
 
 His feeling in the matter was so strong that 
 he overcame Colbert's opposition, and the 
 king's garden became the garden of the king's 
 people. Colbert perhaps never fully under- 
 stood his secretary's anxiety on this point and 
 doubtless Perrault's contemporaries considered 
 it an idle if not an unwise proceeding ; but it 
 seems to us of this later day to be verily one of 
 those actions of the just which 
 
 " Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." 
 
 In 1671 Perrault was formally admitted to 
 membership in the French Academy and he 
 contributed materially to the brilliancy and 
 prosperity of that body, into which he intro- 
 duced from time to time many needful reforms 
 in its management and customs. 
 
 The death of Colbert in 1683 closed Perrault's 
 official career and he retired to private life and
 
 80 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 for a time devoted himself to the education of 
 his sons. The leisure which he may have vainly 
 coveted in his public life was now given to lit- 
 erary pursuits and he produced about this period 
 his Paraltele des Anciens et des Modernes, Siede de 
 Louis le Grand, Histoire des Hommes Illnstres du 
 Siede de Louis XIV, Apologie des Femmes and sev- 
 eral lesser works. 
 
 The publication of the first two of these 
 resulted in a prolonged literary war between 
 Perrault and his fellow academician, Desprdaux, 
 in which the advantage of learning seems to have 
 been on the side of the latter, but in wit and 
 good-nature Perrault was decidedly the superior 
 of his antagonist. How little real enmity Per- 
 rault felt in the matter is shown in the general 
 grfod temper of his replies. After a long period, 
 so long indeed that the two adversaries had al- 
 most forgotten the original point at issue and 
 their friends were heartily weary of the dispute 
 a reconciliation was effected greatly to the re- 
 lief of the literary mind of the period. The
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 8 1 
 
 dust of this conflict has settled undisturbed for 
 two centuries and the works which occasioned 
 it lie unread and unopened on library shelves. 
 Despreaux is noted for little else than his part 
 in this long-past quarrel and Perrault, instead of 
 being remembered for the works he labored so 
 hard to defend, is honored now for very different 
 reasons. As the author of the Hotnmes Illustres 
 or the Parallele he is interesting only to the lit- 
 erary antiquarian ; as the author of the immortal 
 Conies de Fe'es or Fairy Tales, his memory should 
 be dear to every child who has trembled over the 
 impending fate of Red Riding-hood, laughed 
 over the adventures of the redoubtable Puss tn 
 Boots, or followed with breathless interest the 
 story of Cinderella from the chimney corner to 
 the trying on of the slipper. 
 
 It must not be understood that Perrault was 
 the inventor of these famous tales, which in 
 various forms had existed from earliest times, 
 as we have already had occasion to notice in 
 the case of Cinderella. But to him is due the
 
 82 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 glory of giving to these popular legends and 
 nursery tales permanent form. From the vague 
 and variable folk-tales which they had been till 
 his time, they became at his touch the real, liv- 
 ing stories which we know. Three of these fairy 
 tales, Pedu a'Ane Les Souhaits Ridicules, and the 
 story of Griselidis were written in verse and 
 these are the least meritorious. One of these, 
 Les Souhaits Ridicules, or The Ridiculous Wishes, 
 contains a moral the application of which is well 
 worth heeding at all times. Briefly its events 
 are as follows : 
 
 " A wood-cutter, tired of his painful life, was one day 
 complaining that cruel heaven had never granted one of 
 his desires, when Jupiter appeared to him and promised 
 to gratify his first three wishes whatever they might be. 
 The delighted man hastened to communicate this good 
 news to his wife, and they agreed that he must not be 
 hasty, but defer his first wish until the morrow. However, 
 seated before a good fire, enjoying the sweets of repose, 
 he thoughtlessly wished for an ell of sausage to accom- 
 pany the wine he was drinking. Scarcely was the wish 
 expressed when his wife perceived an immensely long 
 sausage meandering towards her from the chimney corner. 
 Vexed with her husband's stupidity, she commenced a
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 83 
 
 violent tirade against him : ' When you might obtain an 
 empire, gold, pearls, rubies and diamonds, is it a sausage 
 that you should desire ? ' 
 
 " The husband, though meekly confessing his wrong, 
 was on the verge of wishing himself a widower. At last, 
 exasperated by the continued scolding of his wife, he 
 cried : ' Would to heaven, abominable creature, the sau- 
 sage were hung at the end of thy nose ! ' 
 
 " This prayer was answered. The sausage immediately 
 attached itself to the nose of the irritated wife. This 
 ornament did not add to her beauty, but, hanging before 
 her mouth, it prevented her from speaking with ease, an 
 advantage so great that for a happy moment the husband 
 thought of wishing nothing further. ' I might,' thought 
 he, ' with one leap, become a king ; but then, how the 
 queen would look on the throne with a nose an ell long ! 
 I must let her decide whether she will be a queen with 
 the horrible nose she now has, or remain a woodman's 
 wife with the one she formally had.' 
 
 " Of course she chose the latter. So the poor man did 
 not become a grand potentate, nor fill his purse with gold, 
 too happy to employ his only remaining wish in restoring 
 his wife to her former state." 
 
 The prose tales, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Le 
 Petit Chaperon Rouge, La Barbe-Bleu, Le Chat 
 Botte, Les Fees, Cendrillon, Riquet a la Houppe, 
 and Le Petit Poucet are told in a style which is
 
 84 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 a model for careless grace and felicity. They 
 were written by him with little thought that they 
 would constitute his greatest claim to remem- 
 brance ; but such as they are, the amusement of 
 his lighter hours, these delightful little romances 
 are immortal. One of these prose tales, Les Fees, 
 may possibly be new to some readers, at least in 
 the manner in which Perrault tells it. 
 
 " There was once a widow who had two daughters ; the 
 elder resembled her so much in disposition and looks that 
 whoever saw her saw the mother. They were both so 
 disagreeable and proud that no one could live with them. 
 The younger, who was the real portrait of her father as to 
 gentleness and goodness was, besides, one of the most 
 beautiful girls that one could see. As one naturally likes 
 what resembles himself (loves his like) this mother was 
 exceedingly fond of her elder daughter, and at the same 
 time had a great aversion to the younger and made her 
 eat in the kitchen and work incessantly. 
 
 " Among other things, this poor child was obliged to go 
 twice a day, a full half league from the house to get a 
 large pitcher of water. One day when she was at the 
 fountain there came to her a poor woman who begged her 
 for a drink of water. 
 
 " ' Yes, indeed, my good mother,' said this fair maid ; 
 and immediately rinsing her pitcher, she filled it at the
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 85 
 
 clearest part of the fountain and presented it to her, sup- 
 porting the pitcher that she might drink more easily. 
 
 " The good woman, having drunk, said to her : ' You are 
 so handsome, so good and so obliging that I must make 
 you a gift ; ' for she was a fairy who had taken the form of 
 a poor village woman, in order to see how far the civility 
 of this young girl would go. ' This is my gift to you,' 
 continued the fairy ; ' with each word you speak there 
 will come from your mouth a flower, or a precious stone.' 
 
 " When the beautiful girl reached home, her mother 
 scolded her for returning so late from the spring. 
 
 " ' I ask your pardon, my mother,' said the poor girl, 
 ' for having delayed so long ' ; upon saying these words 
 there came from her mouth two roses, two pearls and 
 two great diamonds. 
 
 " What do I see ! ' said her mother in astonishment ; 
 1 1 think pearls and diamonds are coming from her mouth. 
 How is this, my daughter ?' (This was the first time that 
 she had called her her daughter.) The poor child related 
 all that had happened to her, the words being accom- 
 panied by a shower of diamonds. 
 
 " ' Truly,' said the mother, ' I must send my daughter 
 there. Here, Fanchon, see what comes from the mouth 
 of your sister when she speaks ; wouldn't you be very 
 glad to have the same gift ? You have only to go to the 
 spring for water and when a poor woman asks you for a 
 drink give her some very civilly.' 
 
 " ' It would be fine to see me going to the spring,' 
 replied the rude girl.
 
 86 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 " ' You must go,' replied the mother, ' and immediately, 
 too.' 
 
 " Fanchon went, taking with her the finest silver flask 
 in the house, but grumbling all the way. She had no 
 sooner reached the spring than she saw emerging from 
 the woods a lady magnificently clothed, who came to her 
 and asked for a drink. It was the same fairy that had 
 appeared to her sister, but who had assumed the manner 
 and the garb of a princess in order to see how far the 
 incivility of this girl would extend. 
 
 " ' Have I come here,' said the proud cieature, ' to give 
 you a drink 1 I have brought a silver flask expressly 
 to give Madam a drink, have I ? I think so indeed ! 
 Well ! drink from it if you wish.' 
 
 "'You are not very civil,' replied the fairy, without 
 becoming angry. ' Since you are so disobliging, this is 
 my gift to you ; every time that you speak, a serpent or a 
 toad will come from your mouth.' 
 
 " As soon as her mother perceived her, she cried out : 
 Well I my daughter ! ' 
 
 " ' Well ! my mother ! ' replied the surly one, throwing 
 out two vipers and two toads. 
 
 " ' O heavens ! ' exclaimed her mother, ' what do I see 
 there ? It is her sister who is the cause of it. She shall 
 pay for it ; ' and she ran to beat her but the poor child fled 
 and took refuge in a neighboring forest. 
 
 " The king's son, who was returning fiom the chase, 
 met her and seeing how beautiful she was, asked her what 
 she was doing there all alone and why she was weeping.
 
 CHARLES PERRAULT. 87 
 
 " ' Alas ! sir, my mother has driven me from my home.' 
 " The king's son, who saw five or six pearls and as 
 many diamonds issuing from her mouth, begged her to 
 tell him the cause of it. Then she related to him her 
 whole adventure. The prince fell in love with her ; and, 
 considering that such a gift was worth more than the 
 dowry that any other could bring him, he took her to 
 the palace of his father, where he married her. 
 
 " As for her sister, she made herself so detested, that 
 her own mother sent her away, and the unhappy girl after 
 wandering about without finding any one who would 
 receive her, went to die in the corner of a wood." 
 
 Perrault died May 16, 1703, regretted by the 
 nation at large. During his life he was the 
 object of much enmity, but even his bitterest 
 opponents never considered him other than an 
 upright, honest man. He must have been a 
 rare man of which an adversary could write 
 thus : 
 
 " He possessed all the qualities which form the good 
 and honest man : he was full of piety, probity and virtue ; 
 he was refined, modest, obliging, faithful to all the duties 
 demanded by natural and acquired ties; and, in an im- 
 portant post under one of the greatest ministers which 
 France has ever had and who honored him with his con-
 
 88 CHARLES PERRAULT. 
 
 fidence, he never used his favor for his private fortune 
 but always employed it for his friends." 
 
 It is pleasant to know that this writer to whom 
 we owe so many delightful hours in childhood 
 was a man in every respect so far above reproach 
 in all the relations of life. Of another great 
 Frenchman, his contemporary, to whom we like- 
 wise owe a debt of gratitude, we shall hear a 
 vastly different story. But in the writer Per- 
 rault we can hbnor the man as well.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 THERE is something very attractive to most 
 people in the thought of literary com- 
 panionship extending over a long period of 
 years, or for a lifetime even, and the names 
 thus linked together have a double claim upon 
 our remembrance. Who ever thinks of Beau- 
 mont without Fletcher, of Erckinann apart from 
 Chatrian, of William Howitt and not at the 
 same time of Mary Howitt his wife ? 
 
 It is thus we think of Jacob Ludwig Karl 
 Grimm and of Wilhelm Karl Grimm his brother. 
 It is not easy, so intimately were they associated 
 in their life-work, to always think .of them as 
 two men with separate and distinct individuali- 
 ties ; it is rather of one delightful personality 
 89
 
 90 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 that we speak when we name " the brothers 
 Grimm." 
 
 There was but a year's difference in their 
 ages, Wilhelm having been born in Hanau, Ger- 
 many, in 1784, and Jacob a year later, in 1785. 
 Their father was amtmann or bailiff of the dis- 
 trict, but removed to Steinau when Jacob was 
 about ten years old and, dying soon after, left 
 his family comparatively poor. 
 
 When very young Jacob was noted for his 
 precocity. He read with ease when his mates 
 were still involved in the mysteries of the alpha- 
 bet. The death of his father might have put 
 an end to the education of the brothers but for 
 the kindness of their aunt, Henrietta Philippina 
 Zimmer, who lived at the Electoral Court at 
 Cassel. She invited the boys to Cassel and un- 
 der her care they prepared for the university at 
 the Lyceum in Cassel. A taste for drawing 
 seems to have been common with the brothers 
 at this time a taste shared also by a younger 
 brother Emil, who afterwards became a profes-
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 91 
 
 sor of the art. After leaving the Lyceum the 
 brothers studied at the University of Marbourg 
 together and here they came under the instruc- 
 tion of the learned jurist Savigny, whose influ- 
 ence had a marked effect upon them, and it was 
 during this period that they received the first 
 impulse towards linguistic study to which their 
 lives thereafter were largely devoted. 
 
 In the winter of 1805 Savigny, who was then 
 in Paris, sent for Jacob Grimm to assist him in 
 his work there. So complimentary an invitation 
 was not to be put by, but Frau Grimm's anxiety 
 about her son's safety was so great that while 
 he was on his way to Paris she could not sleep 
 but was constantly getting up from bed to notice 
 the weather fearing, like the loving German 
 mother that she was, that he might freeze to 
 death in the diligence, or meet with some acci- 
 dent. She did not live to enjoy the fame her 
 sons afterwards attained, but died in 1808, while 
 Jacob was a clerk in the War Department with 
 the wretched salary of one hundred thalers a year.
 
 92 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 In July, however, of that year he became the 
 librarian of the King of Westphalia, an office 
 which brought him a handsome salary and lei- 
 sure to pursue his studies. It must have been 
 a quiet place, this royal library of Westphalia, 
 for no one but the king could take books from 
 it, and his Majesty seldom availed himself of his 
 privilege. Here for five years Jacob lived and 
 studied, much of the time with his brother Wil- 
 helm, until the restoration of the Hessian gov- 
 ernment put an end to the kingdom of West- 
 phalia. A year or two later he was appointed 
 second librarian in the Electoral library at 
 Cassel and to his great delight a place was also 
 found for Wilhelm in the same library, and here 
 they remained till 1829. 
 
 The thirteen years which they spent here were 
 full of hard work for both, but it was labor into 
 which they put their whole souls, and work which 
 none could do as well as they. While Jacob was 
 custodian of the Westphalian library he and his 
 brother had published several books together as
 
 W1LHKLM KARL GRIMM.
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 95 
 
 well as separately, mainly in the department of 
 legendary tales and ballads. But it was in 1812 
 that they published the volumes which have 
 made their names familiar to every German child 
 and to countless children beside in other lands. 
 These were the three volumes of the Children's 
 Tales and Household Tales, the Kinder-und 
 Hausmdnhen. The stories in these books were 
 gathered from the peasantry in Hesse and Hanau 
 and written down in a style unequaled for sim- 
 plicity, ease and truthfulness. Many of these 
 tales were told them by the wife of a cow-herd 
 in Niederzwharn, near Cassel, who seems to 
 have been in many respects a most remarkable 
 woman. Her memory appears to have been a 
 perfect mine of folk-lore and she seems to have 
 delighted in relating these tales. Say they : 
 
 " She told her stories thoughtfully, accurately and with 
 wonderful vividness, and evidently had a delight in doing 
 it. First she related them from beginning to end, and 
 then, if required, repeated them more slowly, so that after 
 some practice it was easy to write from her dictation." 
 
 Of their own part in the work, that of putting
 
 96 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 these tales into permanent form, the brothers 
 tell us : 
 
 " Our first aim in collecting these stories has been ex- 
 actness and truth. We have added nothing of our own, 
 have embellished no incident or feature of the story, but 
 have given its substance just as we received it. It will of 
 course be understood that the mode of telling and carry- 
 ing out particular details is due to us, but we have striven 
 to retain everything that we knew to be characteristic, 
 that in this respect also we might leave the collection the 
 many-sidedness of nature." 
 
 It is the simple style in which the brothers 
 cast these tales that has invested them with so 
 great a charm, the homely directness which has 
 lost nothing in its translation from the peasant 
 dialects in which they were first heard, to the 
 polished High German tongue. 
 
 But the Grimms had something more in mind 
 than simply the collection of a number of curious 
 peasant nursery tales. They believed that in 
 the study of the history of nations the humbler 
 spheres of life must not be disregarded. Before 
 their day history concerned itself very little
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 97 
 
 with the life of the common people. Their ex- 
 istence was not considered to have any bearing 
 upon the nation's life and it is for this reason 
 that we search in vain in the histories written 
 previous to this century for any glimpses of the 
 actual life of the people who form the major 
 part of any nation. Modern history in the main 
 is written from a different stand-point and does 
 not disdain to show us something of the life of 
 the yeoman as well as of that of the rulers and 
 nobles. To this change in the manner of writ- 
 ing history the Grimms were most important 
 contributors, since they were practically the first 
 to. recognize the importance of considering the 
 humbler walks of life as an aid in the study of 
 history. 
 
 For several years after this the brothers con- 
 tinued to write and publish together and among 
 the works thus produced were Old German For- 
 ests, a selection of extracts from the Elder Edda, 
 a collection of German legends, and a volume 
 of Irish fairy legends. But the first great work
 
 98 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 of Jacob Grimm's life was a German grammar, 
 in four large octavo volumes which appeared at 
 intervals from 1819 to 1837. Of this work, 
 which was really a study of the German lan- 
 guage, it has been said that it showed to the 
 learned world for the first time what a language 
 is. While this book was in progress he pub- 
 lished a profound work on the legal antiquities 
 of Germany which aimed to show how close a 
 relation exists between a nation's law and its 
 manners and customs and its archaeology. 
 
 While Jacob Grimm was engaged upon themes 
 like these, Wilhelm was equally busy although 
 the books that he published were not of so am- 
 bitious a character as those of his brother. One 
 of these, however, a work on the Heroic Legends 
 of the Germans, was considered by Jacob to be 
 Wilhelm's masterpiece. The same year in which 
 this appeared, 1829, the brothers received ap- 
 pointments to the University of Gottingen, Jacob 
 as professor and librarian, Wilhelm as assistant 
 librarian. Although they regretted leaving Cas-
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 99 
 
 sel, the change in many ways was advantageous 
 and the salaries attached to their new positions 
 being liberal they were not subject to pecuniary 
 embarrassments as heretofore. 
 
 At Gottingen Jacob lectured often on com- 
 parative German grammar and some other topics 
 and Wilhelm, whose style was not unlike his 
 brother's, upon old German literature and the 
 Niebelungenlied. Both, it is pleasant to know, 
 were great favorites with the students at the 
 University. The principal work produced by 
 Jacob Grimm at Gottingen was his well-known 
 German Mythology in which book he clearly 
 demonstrated that common superstitions and 
 beliefs are often the remains of a nation's ear- 
 liest religion. 
 
 In 1837 certain political events occurred which 
 put an end to the residence of the Grimms in 
 Gottingen. William iv. of England, who was 
 also King of Hanover, having died, the two 
 kingdoms were declared distinct and the Duke 
 of Cumberland, brother to William iv., became
 
 IOO THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 the new King of Hanover. The new monarch 
 refusing to recognize the liberal constitution 
 which his brother had given to Hanover, a pro- 
 test was entered against the act by the Univer- 
 sity of Gottingen signed by seven of the pro- 
 fessors, among whom were the brothers Grimm. 
 The immediate result of this was the removal 
 from office by the king of the seven professors 
 and the order that three of them, Dahlman and 
 Jacob Grimm and Gervinus, should leave the 
 kingdom within three days. The exiled pro- 
 fessors were accompanied to the frontiers by 
 the students in a body who resolved not to re- 
 demand the lecture fees which they had paid 
 the professors in advance. 
 
 A year later Wilhelm followed Jacob to Cassel 
 where they began jointly to prepare their great 
 German Lexicon, " Deutsehes Worterbueh," the 
 first volume of which appeared in 1852 and the 
 last in 1862. In 1841 the brothers were invited 
 to Berlin as members of the Academy by the 
 King of Prussia, Frederic William iv., and in
 
 JACOB LUUWIG KARL GRIMM.
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 103 
 
 Berlin the remainder of their lives was mainly 
 spent. Although Wilhelm from this time pub- 
 lished a number of minor works his principal 
 labor was given to the great Lexicon, the work 
 upon which in the last seven years of Wilhelm's 
 life was shared equally with his brother. Dur- 
 ing his life in Berlin Jacob Grimm published a 
 History of the German Language in two large 
 volumes and a number of other works beside 
 working diligently upon the Lexicon with his 
 brother. When one thinks of the amount of 
 work achieved by these two men in the course 
 of their lives it seems as if they could never 
 have known an idle moment, yet Wilhelm de- 
 voted only the daytime to study and Jacob would 
 never refuse a visitor at any time. 
 
 Nothing seems ever to have marred the har- 
 mony which existed between these two. In 
 their early years they roomed together, studied 
 at the same table and even dressed alike, and 
 for a long time after they became men they had 
 their study-chamber in common. Later they
 
 104 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 occupied study-chambers which joined. Wilhelm 
 was intolerant of interruptions and could work 
 only in silence, while Jacob, who if left to him- 
 self would keep at work without intermission, 
 was able to resume his task with perfect ease 
 after any interruption. The marriage of Wil- 
 helm in 1825 did not disturb the intimacy of the 
 brothers, for Jacob became one of his brother's 
 family and Frau Grimm attended to his interests 
 as faithfully as to those of her husband. The 
 brothers possessed their library in common and 
 of this library Jacob was custodian. So familiar 
 was he with his books that he could find any one 
 of them at night without a light, and he de- 
 lighted to get up and put his hand on some vol- 
 ume for which the others were searching in vain. 
 Besides their common passion for books they 
 were equally fond of flowers. They had little 
 opportunity to indulge this taste as their life 
 was spent in cities, but in Wilhelm's windows 
 primroses bloomed luxuriantly while in Jacob's 
 were gilliflowers and heliotrope.
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 105 
 
 It was not until December, 1859, that the 
 earthly end of this beautiful friendship came. 
 Then the long companionship was broken by 
 the death of Wilhelm. On the twentieth of 
 September, 1863, nearly four years later, a short 
 illness closed the life of Jacob, the greatest of 
 the two brothers whose long lives were so full 
 of noble achievement and were such eminent 
 examples of the value of patient industry. The 
 character of the younger brother was the strong- 
 er of the two and to him was due the planning 
 and original suggestion of everything which 
 they wrote in common. He combined in him- 
 self a delicate poetic sense with the exactness 
 and thoroughness of the scientist, while his devo- 
 tion to truth was the mainspring of his life. His 
 literary style was unlike that of any writer of 
 his time except that of his brother, whom in 
 originality of thought he much excelled. But 
 the life of both was modeled upon the same 
 plan and the attainments of Wilhelm are inferior 
 in degree only, and not in kind to those of his
 
 106 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 
 
 brother. How complete the harmony and mu- 
 tual comprehension was may be seen from the 
 dedication of the third volume of Jacob's gram- 
 mar : 
 
 "Mv DEAR WILHELM: When last winter you were 
 so ill, I was obliged to fear that your faithful eyes might 
 perhaps never light upon the pages now before you. I 
 was seated at your table, in your chair, and my mind was 
 filled with inexpressible sadness when I saw with how 
 much order and neatness you had read and extracted from 
 the first volumes of my work. It appeared to me then 
 that I had written it for you alone, and that, if you were 
 taken away from me, I could never proceed any further 
 with its composition. God's mercy has protected us 
 and left you with us, and it is therefore to you in all jus- 
 tice the present volume more especially belongs. It has 
 been said truly, that certain books are written for pos- 
 terity ; but it is nevertheless even more true, that at the 
 same time each work of the kind belongs first of all to 
 the limited circle in which we live, and that that circle 
 alone contains the key to its most intimate sense, which 
 often may remain sealed to all the rest. At any rate, 
 when you read me, you who know exactly my manner, 
 with all its commendable qualities and its defects, I expe- 
 rience more satisfaction than if I were read by a hundred 
 others, who may not comprehend me properly here and 
 there, or to whom my work, in many a part of it, may be
 
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM. 107 
 
 a matter of indifference. But as for you, I know that you 
 peruse every portion of my book with the most impartial 
 and most constant interest, and that not only on account 
 of the subject itself, but also for my own sake. May you 
 therefore be fraternally contented with that which I now 
 dedicate to you."
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 
 
 " La Fontaine's Fables are like a basket of strawberries : 
 you begin by taking out the largest and best, but little by lit- 
 tle you eat first one, then another, until at last the basket is 
 empty." MADAME DE SEVIGNE. 
 
 READERS of Charles Dickens's Child's 
 History of England will readily call to 
 mind the famous chapter relating to Charles n., 
 so often called " The Merry Monarch." In this 
 chapter the writer in a strain of the bitterest 
 irony proceeds to relate many of the most objec- 
 tionable acts of that royal profligate, applying the 
 adjective " merry " to each of them. The satire is 
 doubtless overdone, for Dickens seldom knew 
 
 when to draw the line between moderation and 
 
 x 
 
 excess in passages of this kind, but nevertheless 
 1 08
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 109 
 
 the chapter serves to point with terrible distinct- 
 ness the frightful mockery of the term when 
 applied to Charles ir. True, the king was 
 merry enough, but it was mirth for which his 
 people paid dearly. 
 
 But the irony which applies the title "good" 
 to one whose life outraged the social virtues is 
 sharper than that which styles a good-natured, 
 and yet a vindictively cruel king a " merry mon- 
 arch." In both cases the irony was unconscious. 
 King Charles certainly made merry with his 
 favorites and they did not dream of there being 
 anything incongruous in the title as applied to 
 him. La Fontaine in his life-time was personally 
 known to comparatively few. Long after his 
 death, when he was known to posterity mainly 
 through his Fables, he came to be styled "Le ban 
 La Fontaine" with perfect sincerity; his readers, 
 who did not trouble themselves to look up the 
 history of his life, doubtless imagining that a 
 man who could write so wisely could hardly be 
 other than " good."
 
 110 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 
 
 Let us glance at his career and judge for our- 
 selves how far he merits the title which seems 
 almost to put him into the calendar with the 
 saints. 
 
 Jean de La Fontaine was born July 8, 1621, at 
 Chateau-Thierry in Champagne, France. His 
 early education was obtained at a small village 
 school and later at Rheims, a town of which he 
 often spoke fondly in later years. At nineteen 
 he was sent to the seminary of Saint Magloire to 
 study for the priesthood at the suggestion of one 
 of the canons of Soissons who fancied he saw 
 in the young man an inclination to that profes- 
 sion. But his indolent nature rebelled against 
 the rigor of seminary rules and at the end of 
 eighteen months he returned home. It was no 
 doubt a fortunate decision on his part, for it is 
 not easy to see how one of La Fontaine's tem- 
 perament and disposition could have reflected 
 any honor upon the calling of a priest. While 
 it is of course possible that he might in this 
 profession have led an upright, helpful life and
 
 JEAN UE LA FONTAINE.
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 113 
 
 been "an ensample of godly living" to his pa- 
 rishioners, the weight of probability is much 
 against such a supposition. 
 
 When he was twenty-two his father, who was 
 government Inspector of the Woods and Forests, 
 relinquished this office to his son whom he 
 married soon after to Marie Hericart, a young 
 woman of great beauty, and, as was proved later, 
 of much sharpness of temper. It does not ap- 
 pear that La Fontaine desired either the office 
 or the wife, but his habitual indolence led him 
 to submit to being guided rather than be at the 
 trouble of remonstrating or of making an inde- 
 pendent choice. Knowing this we are not sur- 
 prised to read that his Inspectorship, which he 
 held for twenty years, was constantly neglected 
 by him, and that his marriage proved anything 
 but a blessing. After some time he and his wife 
 were separated by mutual consent, but he con- 
 tinued to communicate with her by letters at 
 intervals. 
 
 The elder La Fontaine had all his life been
 
 ii4 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD.' 
 
 given to verse-making and he vainly tried to 
 induce his son to follow in the same path. What 
 example and precept, however, failed to do, was 
 accomplished at last by accident. Dining with 
 some military friends at Chateau-Thierry, an 
 officer present recited an ode of Malherbe. La 
 Fontaine listened to the recitation silent with 
 admiration, and on returning home he set him- 
 self to committing to memory the whole of the 
 volume which contained the ode, and thereafter 
 devoted himself to original versification. 
 
 In 1665 his first woik of importance appeared, 
 the Contes et Nouvelles en Vers. No reputable 
 author of the present day would venture to publish 
 a book of the character of this one, which while 
 brilliant was at the same time exceedingly gross. 
 However, it was thoroughly in keeping with 
 the taste of the age and this fact must be borne 
 in mind ere we condemn too severely its author. 
 Nothing can be more intolerant than to judge the 
 character of a man of an earlier century by the 
 moral standards of our own time. Until the pres-
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 115 
 
 ent century a grossness and freedom of speech 
 was tolerated in common conversation to an ex- 
 tent that we cannot now comprehend. People 
 of irreproachable morals indulged in what would 
 at this time be called extreme indelicacy of ex- 
 pression, with very little idea of there being any- 
 thing reprehensible in the practice. 
 
 In 1667 La Fontaine published a second col- 
 lection of Conies and in 1671 a third. Twenty- 
 one years after the appearance of this third 
 series La Fontaine fell suddenly and danger- 
 ously ill. All his life up to this time had been a 
 career of pleasure undisturbed by any serious 
 thought of what was to come of it all. In an 
 age of speculation and 'philosophic inquiry he 
 had remained untouched by its spirit. He had 
 literally taken no thought for the morrow either 
 from the standpoint of faith or of scepticism. 
 He had lived as the gay world immediately 
 around him lived, and like the nominal Chris- 
 tians of his time he turned to religion only when 
 pleasure had no more in store for him. Dur-
 
 Il6 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 
 
 ing his illness he was visited by Father Pou- 
 jet, vicar of the parish of St. Roch in Paris, 
 who undertook to bring back this careless but- 
 terfly soul to the Church. Poujet was most as- 
 siduous in his visits, and La Fontaine, always 
 intellectually indolent, was at this time when 
 enfeebled by illness little disposed to question 
 seriously concerning points of faith. The result 
 is easy to foresee. La Fontaine was reconciled 
 to the Church. The few objections raised by 
 the poet were successfully met by the priest who 
 as a condition of the Church's forgiveness 
 required that La Fontaine should make an au- 
 thentic recantation of the Conies and a formal 
 expression of his sorrow for having written so 
 immoral a book. 
 
 It is by no means probable that the poet at 
 all realized the force of Poujet's objections ; it 
 is doubtful if his mind was so constituted that 
 he could do so. He yielded nevertheless, and 
 even burnt an unpublished comedy of his own to 
 which his confessor objected and this, which he
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 1 17 
 
 esteemed his best work, was no light sacrifice 
 for him to make. 
 
 To La Fontaine's greatest work, the Fables 
 which bear his name, Father Poujet could for- 
 tunately bring no objection. The year 1668 
 was the date of the publication of the first of 
 these in a volume dedicated to the Dauphin and 
 entitled Fables Choisies Mines en Vers. La Fon- 
 taine at first seems to have limited himself to 
 versions of the ^Esopian fables as rendered in 
 Latin verse by Phasdrus, who flourished in the 
 time of Tiberius ; but later he drew from the old 
 French fables of Marie de France composed in 
 the thirteenth century, as well as from subse- 
 quent narrators of fables. 
 
 These fables met with speedy recognition, and 
 for two hundred years and more have never been 
 named but with praise. Says a recent writer : 
 
 "The fables have long since passed out of the region 
 of criticism ; where copies or imitations, they are held by 
 the assent of all men to have surpassed their originals, 
 and where original, they take the foremost rank amongst 
 the gems of European literature. The profoundness and
 
 Il8 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 
 
 at the same time their infinite simplicity, are consigned 
 unalterably to the author's credit in his contrasting, but 
 equally undisputed titles of ' The Inspired Innocent ' and 
 ' The Solomon of Poets.' " 
 
 A period of ten years elapsed between the ap- 
 pearance of the first and second collections of 
 Fables, the latter being published in 1678-79. 
 As in the first collection, a number of the fables 
 were dedicated to individuals and many of them 
 were inspired by contemporary events. At this 
 .time the poet was at the height of his reputation 
 and his popularity, except at court, was very 
 great. For the composer Lully he wrote about 
 this period the opera of Daphne which was the 
 beginning of his efforts in dramatic composition. 
 
 Doubtless few poets of the present day would 
 feel moved to celebrate in verse the virtues of 
 any medicinal agent, least of all that of quinine, 
 but at the suggestion of the Duchesse de Bouillcn 
 La Fontaine wrote a poem of two cantos on the 
 subject, called Le Quinquina. The poem was 
 published in 1682, soon after the use of quinine
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 119 
 
 had become popular. Thirty years before the 
 chief of the Jesuits in America had carried pow- 
 dered quinine to Rome where it was sold for a 
 long time at most exorbitant prices as the poudre 
 des peres or poudre des Jesuites. An English- 
 man named Talbot in 1679 introduced a mode 
 of infusing it in wine, and in France it then 
 became known as le remede anglais. 
 
 In 1683 he obtained the great prize of literary 
 ambition in France a seat in the French 
 Academy though not without some opposition 
 in the course of which the immorality of the 
 Conies was repeatedly urged as a reason for his 
 non-admission. 
 
 After his recovery from the illness before 
 mentioned he gathered into a volume the fables 
 he had composed in the years following the issue 
 of the second collection of apologues, and also 
 wrote several hymns. But he was now past 
 seventy years old and there was little more for 
 him to do. His slender remaining strength was 
 devoted to the practices of religion and it was
 
 I2O LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 
 
 found after his death that the hair shirt of the 
 austere penitent had long been worn next his 
 skin. His death occurred on April 13, 1695, at 
 the house of one of his friends, M. d'Hervart, 
 and he was buried beside his friend Moliere in 
 the parish churchyard of St. Joseph. 
 
 In some respects La Fontaine remained a 
 child to the hour of his death. He was incapa- 
 ble of taking care of himself in ordinary affairs 
 of life and was always dependent upon one pro- 
 tector or another. He was almost entirely with- 
 out resentment and the simplicity of his nature 
 presents a refreshing contrast to the duplicity 
 of many of his contemporaries. That in an age 
 when virtue was the exception to the general rule 
 La Fontaine was conspicuous for his violations 
 of moral obligations may be accounted for by 
 the fact that his was a nature which found it 
 difficult to take account of moral distinctions. 
 He seemed to have been born with very clouded 
 moral perceptions, if indeed he can be said to 
 have had in some directions any moral sense at
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 121 
 
 all. His native indolence made vice not only 
 easier to him than virtue, but with his consti- 
 tutionally perverted sense of right and wrong 
 often made it appear the only natural course to 
 pursue. This does not clear him from blame, 
 for some degree of free agency he certainly pos- 
 sessed, but after all is said that can be urged 
 against him there remains much to his credit. If 
 he were not "good" in the ordinary acception 
 of the term he possessed some desirable attri- 
 butes of goodness. We read of him that he was 
 " unaffected, truthful and compassionate ; he 
 stood firmly by his friend in trouble, and was 
 invariably patient and forgiving." He was 
 capable of strong attachments, and in one very 
 notable instance stood manfully by the friend 
 who had once befriended him, the Minister 
 Fouquet, in the disgrace that befell his former 
 patron, and did much to allay popular indigna- 
 tion against that fallen dignitary. 
 
 In society his absent-mindedness became al- 
 most a proverb and his manners were very
 
 122 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 
 
 frequently, taciturn, even boorish. In discus- 
 sions he never listened to his opponents and 
 talked on, hearing only the sound of his own 
 voice. On one occasion in a conversation on 
 dramatic art La Fontaine strongly condemned 
 the custom of stage " asides," saying that nothing 
 could be more absurd than to suppose that an 
 actor could be heard in the gallery and not by 
 people beside him. The discussion became a 
 heated one, and the poet's voice rose high above 
 all the rest. He did not know that all the while 
 Despreaux, one of the company, was inces- 
 santly calling him aloud all kinds of names 
 "La Fontaine is a scoundrel, a blockhead, a 
 calf, an owl," till every one around him was 
 laughing. On his then inquiring what the mat- 
 ter was, Despreaux said : " Here am I calling you 
 the hardest names I can think of and you don't 
 hear me, although I am near enough to touch 
 your elbow ; and yet you think it extraordinary 
 that one actor shpuld not be able to hear an- 
 other who may be ten paces away from him."
 
 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD. 123 
 
 One of the most serious indictments against 
 La Fontaine is his neglect of his son. The youth 
 was educated by a friend of La Fontaine's, and 
 from the time of his removal from his father's 
 notice the poet seems to have forgotten him 
 completely, never inquiring for or alluding to 
 him. After the youth's college course was com- 
 pleted a meeting was arranged between the 
 father and son who had not met for nearly six 
 years. The occasion was a dinner, and after it 
 was over La Fontaine's friend asked him what 
 he thought of the young man who had just left 
 them. The poet replied that he seemed modest 
 and quite well informed for his age. 
 
 " It is your own son," said his friend. 
 
 "Ah, indeed," replied La Fontaine, "I am 
 glad to hear it." Then he suffered the matter to 
 drop as if it were a trifling episode of a pleasant 
 nature which had merely served its turn. 
 
 It is a nature full of contradictions this of the 
 great French fabulist and it is open to much 
 well-deserved blame, yet there is not a little in it to
 
 124 LA FONTAINE "THE GOOD." 
 
 attract, and in thinking of him it is well to bear 
 in mind the words of his dear friend Maucroix : 
 
 " We have been friends for more than fifty years, and 
 I thank God for having allowed the extreme friendship I 
 bore him to continue up to a pretty good old age without 
 interruption or coolness, as I can say that I have ever 
 loved him with affection as much the last day as the first. 
 May God in his mercy, take his soul into his holy rest ! 
 His was the sincerest and most candid heart I ever knew. 
 Never any disguise. I do not know if he ever told a lie 
 in his life."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 " He who gives to the -world one pure and good story, the 
 aim of which is to sow seeds of virtue, a love of right, and 
 that poetic trust in the workings of a wise and good God, he 
 who successfully does all this is a very great man, whose 
 name is to be remembered, who should be thanked and praised, 
 and one and to such this truth will be more than that title 
 or honor one of those whom we should upon our bended 
 knees thank God for having made." 
 
 EDOUARD LABOULAYE, of whom the 
 above was written, was for more than 
 one reason the French writer best beloved in 
 America of all the people of his time. In the 
 early days of our great Civil War when the final 
 issue appeared doubtful, or the dissolution of 
 the Union seemed impending and foreign na- 
 tions confidently expected its downfall, there 
 125
 
 126 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 were a few clear-sighted men in England and 
 France who saw deeply enough into the causes 
 of the conflict to understand them and whose 
 active sympathy for the Union never wavered. 
 Foremost among these men in England was 
 John Bright ; in France the voice of Edouard 
 Laboulaye rang clearest in our behalf. It is 
 for this that his memory is reverenced by an older 
 generation of Americans ; it is as the author of 
 Abdallah and the delightful fairy tales called Les 
 Contes Bleus that he is beloved by a younger. 
 
 He was born in Paris, January 18, 1811, and 
 as in early youth he showed marked talent for 
 disputation he began the study of law and juris- 
 prudence at an early age. Of an enthusiastic 
 temperament, he threw his heart into the pursuit 
 and became known among his fellow students 
 as an indefatigable worker. When but twenty- 
 eight he published a famous legal work, The Law 
 of Real Property in Europe, a book which shows 
 in its preparation great research and which gave 
 him a reputation as a scholar. It received the
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAVE. 127 
 
 honor of being "crowned," or formally approved 
 by the French Academy. In 1842 he published 
 an Essay on the Life and Doctrines of Frederic de 
 Savigny, the great modern jurist of Germany, 
 and in the following year an elaborate treatise 
 upon the Civil and Political Condition of Women 
 from the Time of the Romans. This latter work 
 and a learned essay in 1845 u P 9n the Criminal 
 Laws of the Romans, both received prizes from 
 the Academy. Not far from this time he was 
 elected a member of the Academy, and in 1849 
 he became Professor of Comparative Legislation 
 in the College de France. 
 
 Laboulaye was always an admirer of Anglo- 
 Saxon institutions and it was in consequence of 
 this, no doubt, that he was led to write in 1855 
 and 1856 his Political History of the United States. 
 About this time he translated into French the 
 works of Dr. Channing, and wrote Studies on 
 Germany and the Slavonian Countries and an im- 
 portant work on Religious Liberty. Of his 
 books Paris in America has been perhaps the
 
 128 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 most widely read. It appeared in 1863, was 
 speedily translated and hardly a circulating 
 library in this country was then without it. He 
 was gifted with a delightful humor to which he 
 gave full play in this entertaining allegory. In 
 this year he published also a noted work upon 
 the Limits of the State. In 1866-67 appeared 
 his Memoirs of Franklin, and in 1872 Political 
 Letters. 
 
 In the midst of the labor given to these grave 
 works, to his daily lectures in the College de 
 France and to many duties, this busiest of men 
 found time to write in 1859 the beautiful story 
 of Abdallah, which fascinates every child who 
 reads it. Hardly less charming are the fairy 
 tales known as Les Contes Bleus, which were 
 written in 1862. His Prince Carriche which is 
 not so well "known as it deserves to be, was given 
 to the world in 1868. 
 
 As regards romance, adventures and dra- 
 matic actions and endings, many of Laboulaye's 
 fairy tales might be given a place in the Thou-
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE.
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 131 
 
 sand and One Nights Entertainments, while in 
 beauty of style and delicate humor and grace 
 and noble sentiment there is nothing at all in 
 the Arabian Nights with which to compare them. 
 " Yvon and Finette," the first story in Les 
 Contes Bleus, opens in this entertaining style : 
 
 " Once upon a time there lived in Brittany a noble lord, 
 who was called the Baron Kerver. His manor-house was 
 the most beautiful in the province. It was a great Gothic 
 castle, with a groined roof and walls, covered with carv- 
 ings that looked, at a distance like a vine climbing an 
 arbor. On the first floor six stained glass balcony win- 
 dows looked out on each side toward the rising and the 
 setting sun. 
 
 " In the morning, when the baron, mounted on his dun 
 mare, went forth into the forest, followed by his tall grey- 
 hounds, he saw at each window one of his daughters, with 
 prayer-book in hand, praying for the house of Kerver, 
 and who with their fair curls, blue eyes, and clasped 
 hands, might have been taken for six Madonnas in an 
 azure niche. 
 
 " At evening, when the sun declined and the baron 
 returned homeward, after riding round his domains, he 
 perceived from afar, in the windows looking toward the 
 west, six sons, with dark -locks and eager gaze, the hope 
 and pride of the family, that might have been taken for 
 six sculptured knights at the portal of a church."
 
 132 EDOUARD REN'E LEFEfeRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 A story with such a delightful beginning as 
 this must surely have as fascinating a sequel. 
 And so it proves. Yvon, the thirteenth child of 
 the Baron Kerver, at the very threshold of his 
 adventures, becomes the servant of an exacting 
 old giant, and but for Finette, the daughter of a 
 fairy and the slave of the giant, is in a fair way 
 never to get beyond the threshold. Finette, 
 however, proves to be a most remarkable young 
 woman and discloses to Yvon many ways of 
 outwitting the old giant. After Finette had 
 provided herself with three golden bullets, two 
 silver ones, and one more of copper, they leave 
 the service of the giant, but it takes all the mys- 
 terious power of the silver and copper bullets to 
 get them fairly out of his clutches. After this 
 Yvon falls under the spell of a sorceress and 
 forgets all about Finette who goes through a 
 surprising list of adventures. At one time 
 when a seneschal wished to marry her she fled 
 from him into the stable and hid behind the 
 cow.
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 133 
 
 " ' You shall not escape me, sorceress ! ' cried the senes- 
 chal; and with a grasp like that of Hercules he seized the 
 cow by the tail, and dragged her out of the stable. 
 
 " ' Abracadabra ! ' cried Finette. ' May the cow's tail 
 hold on, villain, and may you hold on the cow's tail till 
 you both have been around the world together.' " 
 
 And behold the cow darted off like lightning, 
 dragging the unhappy seneschal after her. 
 Nothing stopped the two inseparable comrades; 
 they rushed over mountain and valley, crossed 
 marshes, rivers, quagmires and brakes, glided 
 over the seas without sinking, were frozen in 
 Siberia, and scorched in Africa, climbed the 
 Himalayas, descended Mont Blanc, and at 
 length, after thirty-six hours of a journey the 
 like of which had never been seen, both stopped 
 out of breath in the public square of the village. 
 A young woman who can send off a suitor in 
 this style is certainly a person to make herself 
 respected and to inspire beholders with the feel- 
 ing that she can do pretty much as she likes, 
 and we are quite prepared to. hear that she tri- 
 umphs over all obstacles and by the aid of the
 
 134 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 last golden bullet reaches Yvon and lives with 
 him happily ever after. 
 
 The other tales in Les Contes Bleits are written 
 in this happy fluent style ; but Abdallah is con- 
 ceived in a graver manner. It is the story of 
 the search for the four-leaved shamrock whose 
 possessor would lack nothing. How the sacred 
 plant was at last won is thus told : 
 
 " While Abdallah admired these marvels in silence, an 
 angel descended towards him ; not the terrible Azrael, but 
 the messenger of celestial favors, the good and lovely 
 Gabriel. He held in his hand a tiny diamond leaf; but, 
 small as it was, it shed a light that illumined the whole 
 desert. His soul was intoxicated with joy; the son of 
 Yusuf ran to meet the angel. He paused in terror ; at his 
 feet was a vast gulf, full of fire and smoke, bridged only 
 by an immense arch made of a blade of steel which was 
 finer than a hair and sharper than a razor. 
 
 " The Bedouin was already seized with despair, when he 
 felt himself supported and urged on by an invisible power. 
 Hafiz and Leila were on either side of him. He did not 
 see them ; he dared not turn for fear of awaking ; but he 
 felt their presence, he heard their soothing words ; both 
 supported and carried him along with them. ' In the 
 name of the clement and merciful God!' he cried. At 
 these words, which are the key to Paradise, he was
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 135 
 
 transported like lightning to the other side of the bridge. 
 The angel was there, holding out the mysterious flower. 
 The young man seized it. At last the four-leaved sham- 
 rock was his, the ardor of desire was quenched, the veil 
 of the body was lifted, the hour of recompense had struck. 
 Gabriel turned his eyes toward the bottom of the garden, 
 where divine majesty was enthroned. Abdallah's glance 
 followed that of the angel, and the eternal splendor flashed 
 in his face. At this lustre which no eye can endure, he 
 fell with his face to the ground, uttering a loud cry. 
 
 " This cry man's ear has never heard, man's voice has 
 never repeated. The delicious joy of the shipwrecked 
 mariner who escapes the fury of the waves, the delight 
 of the bridegroom who presses his beloved for the first 
 time to his heart, the transports of the mother who finds 
 the son for whom she has wept all the joys of earth are 
 naught but mourning and sorrow to the cry of happiness 
 which rose from the soul of Abdallah." 
 
 The works I have named by no means com- 
 prise all of Laboulaye's writings. He was a 
 constant contributor to newspapers and periodi- 
 cals and from time to time put forth pamphlets 
 on various subjects. Among these was one 
 which was almost as popular in the United 
 States as the famous Paris in America, and 
 which bore the title Why the North cannot accept
 
 136 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAVE. 
 
 of Separation. It was a judicious piece of rea- 
 soning and did much good. 
 
 "No American," writes Mr. John Bigelow, 
 " was probably more convinced than he was 
 that nowhere in this world outside of the United 
 States could be found such durable guarantees 
 to the people, of the right to life, liberty and 
 the pursuit of happiness. He thought it there- 
 fore a matter of world-wide concern that our 
 republic should prove its capacity to deal with 
 the enemies of its own household. He was one 
 of the few conspicuous Frenchmen perhaps 
 beside M. de Tocqueville, it would be difficult 
 to name a third who knew where the sover- 
 eignty of the people began, and he never ceased 
 to deplore the inability of his countrymen to 
 recognize the limitations of the powers of the 
 State as taught by the fathers of the republic." 
 
 In 1869 and 1870 when Napoleon in. was 
 laying his plans for the war with Germany he 
 succeeded in attaching to his cause a number 
 of the prominent single-minded patriotic French-
 
 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 137 
 
 men of the time, among whom were such men 
 as Prevost Paradol, Emile Ollivier and Edouard 
 Laboulaye. Trusting in the good faith of the 
 Emperor Laboulaye supported the famous Ple- 
 biscite of 1870, and like the others he found 
 his confidence had been misplaced. Like other 
 Frenchmen of that time he believed in the all- 
 conquering power of French armies, and when 
 France was subdued by the armies of the Ger- 
 mans, and a humiliating peace followed, it not 
 unnaturally rilled his soul with bitterness. To 
 him Bismarck was always thereafter " the incar- 
 nation of vandalic barbarism," and the pleas- 
 ant relations he had hitherto held with many 
 German literary men were never again imbued 
 with the old-time cordiality. Yet under the 
 Republic his merits received more public recog- 
 nition than they would have ever gained under 
 the Empire. In 1871 he became a member 
 of the National Assembly, in 1873 a Director of 
 the College de France, and in 1875 a Senator for 
 life.
 
 138 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 Laboulaye sympathized with all important re- 
 forms and was an ardent believer in the absolute 
 freedom of education. He was a supporter of 
 the co-operative principles and urged the es- 
 tablishment of great libraries for the working 
 classes. But in spite of his interest in all move- 
 ments for the improvement of his race he was 
 not in these later years the centre or source of 
 any great public influence. He never became 
 a politician in any but the highest sense. His 
 standards of right were too lofty to allow him 
 ever to stoop to trickery or double dealing of any 
 sort. Perhaps it was for this reason that he 
 failed to achieve the political influence that no 
 doubt he would have enjoyed wielding, but his 
 failure was of that character which is success if 
 we view it aright. 
 
 As a lecturer he was greatly admired. His 
 daily lectures in the College de France lasted one 
 hour and his class-room was always crowded. 
 So eager was the competition for seats that 
 many who came to listen would wait through
 
 EDOUARD RENE LF.FEBRE LABOULAYE. 139 
 
 the hour of the preceding lecturer in order to 
 be sure of hearing Laboulaye. " All sorts and 
 conditions of men " were among his hearers. 
 The roughest men were shoulder to shoulder 
 with scholars and exquisites. In the throng 
 women were often present, many drawn there 
 merely from curiosity, but others from a sincere 
 desire to profit by the lecture. He was a fluent 
 and elegant speaker and his discourses sparkled 
 with humor. Says one American woman who 
 often listened to him in 1869 : 
 
 " The subject was Montesquieu's Writings. M. Labou- 
 laye held in his hand a volume of the Esprit des Lois and 
 read from it, stopping continually to elucidate, or defend 
 sentiments or opinions therein contained. Indeed Mon- 
 tesquieu was only a text from which to preach upon every 
 known subject : religion, politics, manners, literature and 
 art. Now and then the lecturer would condescend to 
 launch a satire against the airy nothingness of a lady's 
 bonnet, the glazed hat of a Paris coachman, the demoli- 
 tions of Haussmann in short, he touched upon many a 
 subject never dreamed of in Montesquieu's philosophy. 
 No lecture ever passed without some allusion to our coun- 
 try in glaring and flattering contrast to every other. . . 
 It did not surprise us to learn that the Emperor had for-
 
 140 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 bidden M. Laboulaye to lecture any more upon American 
 politics at the College de France. The conclusions of the 
 audience was too quickly drawn, and the applause undis- 
 guised, but it will make no difference with Laboulaye, 
 for he can teach what lessons he chooses from the poli- 
 tics of Otaheite." 
 
 It was a cherished hope with him to visit 
 America and lecture in French upon the topics 
 most dear to him, but the political events pre- 
 ceding the Franco-Prussian War compelled him 
 to relinquish the idea and the fitting opportunity 
 never afterwards presented itself to him. Had 
 he carried out his intention there is no doubt 
 that he would have received one of the most 
 cordial welcomes ever accorded to any of his 
 countrymen. Americans owe his memory a 
 debt of gratitude not easily repaid. For years 
 he was an untiring advocate of the best things 
 in American institutions and his strongest ef- 
 forts were devoted to giving his countrymen an 
 intelligent comprehension of American princi- 
 ples. To his articles and influence is due the 
 fact that the Journal des Debats, one of the most
 
 EDOUARt) RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 14! 
 
 powerful journals in France if not in all Europe, 
 took a decided stand in favor of the Union 
 cause during our Civil War. 
 
 In person Laboulaye was about five feet seven 
 inches in height, of pleasant manners and 
 generally attractive appearance. His forehead 
 was high and large, and his lips and chin full 
 and prominent, while his small eyes sparkled 
 with humor and kindliness. His dark olive 
 complexion was seen to fullest advantage, for 
 he wore no beard, and his thin brown hair was 
 brushed smoothly upon his head. He was 
 usually dressed in a black frock coat buttoned 
 close to the chin, which gave him something of 
 a clerical appearance. His health was always 
 frail and this fact withdrew him somewhat from 
 the world in general. Says one who knew him 
 well : " He was a man of most exemplary char- 
 acter and life. He had no habits for whiph his 
 admirers had to apologize. He lived as ever in 
 his great Task-master's eye, nor was his name 
 ever associated with any cause, business or
 
 142 EDOUARD RENE LEFEBRE LABOULAYE. 
 
 enterprise which did not reflect back upon him 
 all the dignity he conferred upon it." 
 
 It is not said that he made no mistakes or 
 committed no errors of judgment. No one is 
 infallible, and it has sometimes happened that 
 the gravest mistakes, those fraught with the 
 most terrible consequences, have been made by 
 the best of men ; but it is told of him with per- 
 fect truth that he was faithful to his highest 
 convictions of right, and that he was never 
 swayed from them by considerations of policy. 
 He rightly deserves our reverence not only 
 because he was the author of " one pure and 
 good story the aim of which is to sow seeds of 
 virtue," but because he was a man, and such 
 men are not many, of whom it could with perfect 
 truth be said and though it was a simple 
 thing it was a grand thing to say: 
 
 " He had no habits for which his admirers had 
 to apologize 1 "
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, "THE GOLDSMITH 
 OF THE NORTH." 
 
 WASHINGTON IRVING wrote once of 
 Oliver Goldsmith: "To be the most 
 beloved of English writers, what a distinction, 
 that, for a man ! " 
 
 The story-teller of Copenhagen is perhaps 
 dearer to the hearts of countless young readers 
 than any other writer who ever lived. And what 
 a distinction that is for any man to win ! 
 
 Goldsmith and Andersen in certain impor- 
 tant particulars were much alike. Both were 
 simple and childlike in their natures; both 
 were excessively vain Goldsmith was as fond 
 of fine clothes and as proud of appearing in 
 them as any peacock of showing its plumage, 
 143
 
 144 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 and Andersen imagined himself the centre of 
 everyone's thoughts both were plain in feature 
 even to positive ugliness, and both possessed a 
 simplicity of literary style which goes directly 
 to the hearts of their readers. 
 
 In regard to the vanity of these two men it 
 should be said that it was of the most harmless 
 character. Goldsmith never was envious of 
 another's success, Andersen never let his self- 
 esteem manifest itself in any way to the injury 
 of another. The Danish writer was probably 
 the most conceited man of his time, but it was 
 a simple-hearted vanity which he could no more 
 help, at least in later life, than a hen can help 
 letting the whole poultry-yard know when she 
 has laid an egg. For many years his was the 
 most familiar figure in Copenhagen. Says one 
 writer of Andersen : 
 
 " High and low, rich and poor, he belonged to all. If 
 he went out for a walk, everyone saluted him ; if he visited 
 the theater, all present welcomed him ; children worshiped 
 him, claimed him as belonging peculiarly to them ; every
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 145 
 
 household reserved for him a warm corner by the stove ; 
 not a family, from the king to the peasant, but had a knife 
 and fork and a seat at the table ready for him." 
 
 It would be a rare nature indeed that such 
 an amount of adulation would not affect, yet 
 Andersen's sweetness of disposition was "such 
 that it did not make him arrogant or selfish ; it 
 simply distorted his vision and made him look 
 at the world in general through the meshes of a 
 net-work composed of the letters of his own 
 name. 
 
 It must not, however, be imagined that because 
 Andersen was so universally beloved by his coun- 
 trymen that they regarded him as the greatest 
 glory of their literature. On the contrary the 
 Danes have always been puzzled to account for 
 the admiration with which he is regarded in 
 other lands to the neglect of several other 
 Danish writers whom they rightfully regard as 
 superior to him. But the reason is not so far 
 to seek. The simplicity of his style made trans- 
 lation comparatively easy. English readers first
 
 146 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 made his acquaintance through the translations 
 of his works by Mrs. Mary Howitt, herself a 
 delightful writer for young people, and excellent 
 Swedish and German versions appeared very 
 early in his literary career. Then, too, people 
 who made acquaintance with his works in their 
 childhood have never been able to forget their 
 love for the teller of fairy tales, and have re- 
 garded his novels with much the same feeling of 
 uncritical admiration. To the majority of read- 
 ers Andersen is the only Danish writer, a state 
 of things as unfair to Denmark's other great 
 authors as harmful to the fame of Andersen 
 himself. But even when the just claims of his 
 contemporaries have been satisfied much, very 
 much, remains to be grateful for in the genius 
 of Hans Andersen 
 
 He was born in Odense, the chief town on 
 the Danish island of Funen, on April 2, 1805. 
 His father was a shoemaker by trade, and a 
 person of a melancholy disposition, a trait which 
 at times showed itself in the character of his
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 149 
 
 famous son. Says Andersen in The Story of 
 My Life: 
 
 " During the first day of my existence my father is said 
 to have sat by the bed and read aloud in Holberg, but I 
 cried all the time. ' Wilt thou go to sleep, or listen 
 quietly?' it is reported that my father asked in joke; but 
 I still cried on ; and even in the church, when I was taken 
 to be baptized, I cried so loudly that the preacher, who 
 was a passionate man, said, ' The younker screams like a 
 cat ! ' which words my mother never forgot. A poor 
 emigrant, Gomar, who stood as godfather, consoled her 
 in the meantime by saying that the louder I cried as a 
 child, all the more beautifully should I sing when I grew 
 older." 
 
 The prophecy so early made was abundantly 
 realized in later years. To the poor shoemaker's 
 son was given a singing voice that has echoed 
 round the world and gathered half the children 
 in Christendom about his knees. It is pleasant 
 to read of those early years in Odense. One 
 of the very first events that he recalls is the 
 visit of the Spaniards to Funen when he was 
 but three years old. A Spanish soldier took 
 him up in his arms, danced him on his knees
 
 150 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 and kissed him with tears in his eyes, mindful, 
 no doubt, of some little Alfonso or Benita left 
 behind in far-off Spain. Once when he was six 
 years old he stood one evening with his mother 
 and her neighbors in St. Knut's churchyard, 
 gazing at the great comet which blazed its path- 
 way across the sky, and the sight of which made 
 a deep impression upon his childish mind. He 
 writes thus of an incident of his childhood : 
 
 " Sometimes during the harvest, my mother went into 
 the field to glean. I accompanied her, and we went like 
 Ruth in the Bible, to glean in the rich fields of Boaz. 
 One day we went to a place the bailiff of which was 
 well known for being a man of a rude and savage dis- 
 position. We saw him coming with a huge whip in his 
 hand, and my mother and all the others ran away. I had 
 wooden shoes on my bare feet, and in my haste I lost 
 these and the thorns pricked me so that I could not run, 
 and thus I was left behind and alone. The man came 
 up and lifted his whip to strike me, when I looked him 
 in the face and involuntarily exclaimed ' How dare you 
 strike me, when God can see it ? ' " 
 
 He was very young when he first went to the 
 theater with his parents, and an odd figure the
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 151 
 
 homely little fellow must have cut from his own 
 account of himself : 
 
 " As to my dress, I was rather spruce ; an old woman 
 altered my father's clothes for me; my mother would 
 fasten three or four large pieces of silk with pins on my 
 breast, and that had to do for vests ; a large kerchief was 
 tied round my neck with a mighty bow ; my head was 
 washed with soap and my hair curled, and then I was in 
 all my glory. In that attire I went with my parents for 
 the first time to the theater." 
 
 The first exclamation of the future poet and 
 romancer on entering the theater was sufficiently 
 prosaic, and was to the effect that if he had as 
 many casks of butter at home as there were 
 people in the theater that he could eat quantities 
 of butter. His imagination was soon stimulated, 
 however, and as he could go but seldom to the 
 theater he procured a programme every day 
 from the person who distributed the playbills, 
 and seating himself in a corner would imagine 
 a whole play from the title and list of characters. 
 
 Hans was still a mere lad when his father 
 died, and after this event he was left much to
 
 152 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 himself while his mother went out washing in 
 order to earn their living. He was fond of 
 reading plays, and the more tragic they were the 
 better. From reading plays he soon came to 
 writing them and strange affairs they must have 
 been. His first piece was a most doleful tragedy 
 in which the entire dramatis persona died miser- 
 ably. This youthful effusion having met with 
 adverse criticism from a neighbor he began a 
 new piece in which a king and queen figured. 
 He says : 
 
 " I thought it not quite right that these dignified per- 
 sonages, as in Shakespeare, should speak like other men 
 and women. I asked my mother and different people 
 how a king ought properly to speak, but no one knew 
 exactly. They said that it was so many years since a king 
 had been in Odense, but that he certainly spoke in a 
 foreign language. I procured myself, therefore, a s/ort 
 of lexicon, in which were German, French and English 
 words with Danish meanings, and this helped me. I 
 took a word out of each language, and inserted them into 
 the speeches of my king and queen. It was a regular 
 Babel-like language, which I considered only suitable for 
 such elevated personages. I desired now that everybody 
 should hear my piece. It was a real felicity to me to
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 153 
 
 read it aloud, and it never occurred to me that others 
 should not have the same pleasure in listening to it." 
 
 The delight which the boy took in his crude 
 fancies was the same sort of pleasure, with com- 
 paratively little modification, which the man 
 afterwards took in his finished work. He was 
 in some respects always a child, and he retained 
 to the last the simplicity of heart which charac- 
 terized his childhood and youth. He never 
 grew old in feeling, but remained perennially 
 young at heart. In the opening chapters of 
 The Story of My Life we get many glimpses of 
 his childhood as well as the continued account 
 of his later years ; but he put much of himself 
 into his novels, and in Only a Fiddler, one may 
 read the story of his longing for fame, his aspi- 
 rations and his disappointments. 
 
 He was twenty-three when his first work of 
 any importance appeared, entitled A Pedestrian 
 Journey from Holmen's Canal to Amaek. Hoi- 
 men's Canal is one of the principal features of 
 Copenhagen, and Amack or Amager is an island
 
 154 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 connected with the city by long bridges, so the 
 journey in question was not a long one. The 
 book which is mainly in rhyme and humorous 
 in character, met with sudden and unexpected 
 success and in consequence his confidence in 
 his own powers could never afterwards be 
 shaken. In 1829 a play of his called Love on 
 St. Nicholas's Tou>er was acted with great suc- 
 cess and the next year his first volume of poems 
 appeared and became immediately popular. It 
 was while on a journey through the Danish 
 provinces in this year that he fell in love, and 
 of this event we are told in the Story of My Life. 
 His love was not returned and he cherished the 
 memory of this, his only love episode, throughout 
 his long life. In his next volume of poems, 
 Fancies and Sketches, published soon after, we 
 find many traces of this sorrow. His Skygge- 
 billeder, or Shadow-Pictures, was his next book, 
 a volume containing an account of his travels 
 in the Hartz Mountains. A year or two later, in 
 1834, he published what must be reckoned, all
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 155 
 
 things considered, his greatest work, the famous 
 Improvvisatore. It is rarely that a man of one 
 nationality enters so completely into the life of 
 another people as does Andersen in this won- 
 derful book. Madame de Stael ambitiously 
 adds to her Corinne the sub-title "or Italy," 
 but with far more truth might it be added to 
 The ImprovTtsatore. The book is Italy. North- 
 man as he was by birth, Andersen was Italian 
 by temperament, and the fervor, the excitability, 
 the enthusiasm, the longing to impart to others 
 the details of one's own life so characteristic of 
 Italians, and to a less extent of other nations of 
 the south of Europe, were part of his very nature. 
 No wonder, then, that he could enter so fully 
 into the heart of Italian life as he does in the 
 brilliant pages of the wonderful Improvvisatore. 
 It was the. grown-up public for which he had 
 written up to this time, but he was soon to gather 
 about him another and much more extensive 
 circle of readers, the children of Denmark at 
 first, and later those of half the world. It was
 
 156 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 for these that he wrote in 1835 the first series 
 of his Eventyr or Fairy Tales as we call them. 
 The collection thus begun he added to from 
 time to time during a long course of years. No 
 writer of his time has surpassed Andersen in 
 the ability to gain the attention of children by 
 story-telling. The sweet simplicity of these 
 tales never fails to win their admiration. Him- 
 self as guileless as a little child he saw very 
 clearly into child nature and children know him 
 for one of themselves. 
 
 Andersen's pen was very busy in these first 
 years of authorship and, indeed, it was never 
 long idle. In 1836 he gave to the world his 
 novel called O. T., or Life in Denmark, as no- 
 table a picture of Danish life and customs as 
 The Improvvisatore. The letters " O. T." were 
 formerly branded on Danish criminals, and are 
 the initials of the Odense Tughthuus, or 
 House of Correction. In the same year his 
 pastoral drama, Parting and Meeting, was acted 
 on the stage with decided approval and in 1837
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 157 
 
 was published his novel Only a Fiddler. With 
 Andersen's countrymen this is probably the 
 most popular of any of his works and it is 
 quite as faithful a picture of Danish life as O. T. 
 The hero's father is the shoemaker of Odense, 
 the melancholy father of Andersen himself, and 
 the trials and sufferings of the talented Fiddler 
 are drawn from events in Andersen's own life. 
 
 In 1839 he visited Sweden, and in his auto- 
 biography he tells us in an artless sort of way 
 how he met with the once famous but now neg- 
 lected Miss Bremer on board a steamboat in. 
 the course of his journey. While in Sweden he 
 wrote a drama called The Mulatto which was so 
 warmly applauded by the Swedes that he was 
 invited to the university-city of Lund, where the 
 students gave him a great banquet and a sere- 
 nade. A Picture Book without Pictures was his 
 next book, and in 1841 the results of a tour 
 through Italy and Greece were embodied in A 
 Poefs Bazaar, a book which met with greater 
 favor abroad than at home. In 1846 the first
 
 158 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 part of his autobiography, The Story of My Life, 
 was published, at subsequent periods continued 
 to 1855, and then to the close of 1867. In this 
 book it is easy enough to see the remarkable 
 vanity of the man, but with this inordinate self- 
 esteem was mingled so much of real gentleness 
 and sweetness of temper that to judge harshly 
 of Andersen because of his vanity becomes 
 nearly impossible. Less popular than his other 
 novels was the one entitled The Two Baronesses, 
 his next work, but it is very well worth reading 
 .for its pictures of Danish life and its masterly 
 delineation of character. In 1851 Pictures of 
 Sweden appeared which by an English critic has 
 been considered as his most delightful work, the 
 autobiography excepted. It is certainly a fasci- 
 nating book, though it hardly deserves the rank 
 the critic mentioned accords it. During these 
 years he was continually producing dramas 
 many of which were exceedingly popular. One 
 of these, called Ole Lnkoie, was a sort of wonder- 
 comedy in which the adventures of the dream-
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 159 
 
 god, who figures in more than one of his fairy 
 tales, were narrated. A Poet's Day Dreams was 
 his next book. This appeared in 1853 and was 
 followed at intervals of a few years by several 
 collections of his Wonder Stories, and still later 
 came the results of a Spanish tour called In 
 Spain. 
 
 In 1873 his health began to fail and the end 
 seemed not far off, yet he partially recovered 
 and was seen again in the homes where he was 
 always welcome. At last these visits had to be 
 given up because his strength no longer admitted 
 of his climbing the stairs that led to his friends' 
 apartments. In the last winter of his life a 
 young lad, the son of one of his friends, devoted 
 himself to the care of the aged poet with an 
 almost filial affection. When the weather per- 
 mitted he would take him out for a daily walk, 
 sustaining his feeble steps and guarding him 
 from over-exertion in the tenderest manner, and 
 when it was too cold for this the boy would sit 
 by his friend cheering him with his bright boyish
 
 l6o HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 fancies or listening to some fairy tale that would 
 never be written. Young Robert Henriques did 
 in his own person what all young people whom 
 the dear old man had loved and written for 
 would gladly have done had the tender privilege 
 been theirs. 
 
 April 2, 1875, was his seventieth birthday and 
 deputations came from all parts of Denmark to 
 greet him on that day ; he was presented with a 
 copy of one of his tales in thirty-two languages, 
 money was raised to erect his statue in Copen- 
 hagen and to build a home for poor children 
 which should bear his name, and on the little 
 house in Odense where he was born was placed 
 a tablet with his name and the date of his birth. 
 He never appeared in public after this and four 
 months later, on the fourth of August, 1875, he 
 entered into rest. 
 
 On the day of his funeral all the city shops 
 were closed and Copenhagen was draped in 
 mourning. The Church of Our Lady was filled 
 with those who had loved him. On the coffin
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. l6l 
 
 were heaped flowers, laurels and palms, and 
 near it stood a great company of children strew- 
 ing flowers. Close by, too, stood the King with 
 his eldest son and Prince John of Gliicksburg, 
 bareheaded and in their regal robes. In his 
 simple, artless way the dead poet had loved 
 pomp and beauty all his life and so at his funeral 
 all the magnificence and ceremony that he would 
 have delighted in were not wanting. Just at the 
 hour of noon the great organ began a tender 
 prelude and then that vast company, king and 
 peasant, rich and poor, sang Andersen's own 
 hymn, " Like to the Leaf which Falleth from the 
 Tree." Then Dean Rothe recited one of An- 
 dersen's last poems and spoke earnestly and 
 tenderly of the man whom all Denmark had 
 delighted to honor and was followed by the aged 
 bishop of Odense, who said the farewell from 
 the birthplace of Andersen. After this Carl 
 Plough's poem, " Sleep, Weary Child," written 
 for the occasion, was sung and Andersen's 
 friend, the composer Hartmann, played on the
 
 l62 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 
 
 organ the music he had written long before for 
 the funeral of Thorwaldsen. As the music 
 trembled into silence people from all parts of 
 the church went up to the chancel and laid 
 wreaths and flowers upon the coffin. In the 
 centre of these tributes lay a palm branch and 
 wreath from Odense, the city of his birth, the 
 scene of his early struggles. When the last 
 wreath had been brought the coffin was borne 
 down the centre aisle by a number of students 
 followed by the various delegations from all 
 parts of Denmark bearing crape-bordered ban- 
 ners, and a long procession of mourning friends. 
 All along the route to the cemetery people sat 
 at their windows clad in deep mourning and 
 many of the houses and 'all the shipping in the 
 harbor had flags at half-mast. As the proces- 
 sion left the church great numbers of poor peo- 
 ple hastened into the building to gather the 
 leaves and flowers which had fallen from his 
 coffin and even the smallest leaf was lovingly 
 cherished.
 
 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. 163 
 
 In spite of his love for splendor and show he 
 never became forgetful of his own poor estate 
 in early youth or ceased to have the warmest 
 sympathy with the humblest person. His vanity, 
 his self-esteem were in him the most amiable of 
 foibles, the heart beneath was one of the tencler- 
 est and gentlest that ever beat. On a laurel 
 wreath from Berlin which lay upon his coffin 
 was fastened this inscription, as touching as it 
 is full of tender truth : 
 
 " Thou art not dead, though thine eyes are closed. 
 In children's hearts thou shalt live forever."
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 IN the winter of 1711-12 all London was very 
 busy talking about a certain man who had 
 recently returned from a voyage to the Southern 
 Seas. At the coffee-houses the men about town 
 conversed of him with Addison and Steele and 
 the other literary men of the day. Fine ladies 
 in their sedan-chairs going to and from the play 
 were full of the topic, and even the linkboys 
 who stood without the doors of the playhouse 
 till the acting should be over discussed it with 
 the waiting chairmen. Hosts of people visited 
 the sailor, whose name was Alexander Selkirk, 
 and listened to his account of the solitary life 
 he led for four years upon the island of Juan 
 Fernandez. After a time several accounts of 
 164
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 165 
 
 Selkirk's adventures appeared in print, then 
 fresher topics came to the surface and so this 
 nine days wonder passed from mind. 
 
 Several attempts, it is true, were made to use 
 it as literary material, but they failed and it 
 seemed as if Selkirk and his narrative had made 
 no lasting impression upon the age. But never- 
 theless one man of genius had kept the affair in 
 mind, and in 1719 this Selkirk germ flowered 
 into the immortal Robinson Crusoe. Its author 
 was perhaps the one man of his time who could 
 develop such a tale as Robinson Crusoe from the 
 outline furnished by Selkirk's adventures. He 
 possessed in a remarkable degree the gift of 
 circumstantial narration the power, that is, of 
 inventing a series of facts which shall seem per- 
 fectly natural, and the ability to throw over these 
 facts, no matter how extraordinary in themselves, 
 a wonderful air of reality. Among his contem- 
 poraries were men of greater gifts than he, but 
 no one but Defoe, it is safe to say, could at that 
 time have written a romance like this.
 
 1 66 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 It is not a very clear notion that we get of 
 Daniel Defoe from the works of his contempo- 
 raries or from the writers of our own day. An 
 accomplished essayist writing thirty years ago 
 calls him a "model of integrity," and a more 
 recent writer says, " He was a great, truly great 
 liar, perhaps the greatest liar that ever lived." 
 Of these two estimates the latter is perhaps 
 nearest the truth. 
 
 He was born in London in 1661, the son of a 
 butcher in the parish of Cripplegate, named Foe. 
 When he was about forty he changed his signa- 
 ture from " D. Foe " to " Defoe," and seems after 
 that period to have written his name " Daniel 
 De Foe " or " Daniel Defoe " as it pleased him. 
 In 1731 he died in Moorfields, London, accom- 
 plishing in his life of seventy years a vast amount 
 of literary work, more in quantity than any man 
 of his time, busy as some of them were. 
 
 The list of his writings includes two hundred 
 and ten works, ranging over the greatest variety 
 of topics, and yet authorship was by no means
 
 DANIEL DEFOE.
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 169 
 
 his only claim to notice in his time. 'He was 
 an active politician throughout his life and was 
 manufacturer, merchant and journalist by turns. 
 He was originally intended for the ministry, but 
 after completing the course of training for that 
 purpose abandoned the idea of that profession, 
 a fortunate decision, for his talents, however 
 great, were not those best fitted for exercise in 
 the pulpit. In 1685 he became a hose merchant, 
 but his success in this business may be guessed 
 from the fact that seven years later he was 
 obliged to flee from his creditors. Tradition 
 states that he went to Bristol and was there called 
 the " Sunday Gentleman " from his appearing 
 in public only on that day, for fear of the bailiffs 
 kept him indoors the rest of the week. Later 
 on we hear of him in various occupations, among 
 others that of the manufacture of bricks, and it 
 is pleasant to read that he labored diligently to 
 pay his creditors. 
 
 In 1697 his first important work was pub- 
 lished, entitled An Argument Showing that a
 
 1 70 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 Standing Army with Consent of Parliament is not 
 Inconsistent with a Free Government. The title 
 may not sound attractive to us now, but the book 
 was very effective in its day, and is a marvel of 
 direct and vivacious reasoning. From this time 
 forward he used his pen vigorously upon all the 
 foremost topics of the period, and when he wrote 
 The True-Born Englishman he became suddenly 
 famous. It appeared near the end of King 
 William's reign, at a time when the king was ex- 
 ceedingly unpopular and the dislike of foreigners 
 was at its height. Defoe in this satire declared 
 that no such thing as a true-born Englishman 
 existed, that they were all descended from for- 
 eigners. One would naturally imagine a turbu- 
 lent London mob would have hung the audacious 
 author before his own door. But they did noth- 
 ing of the kind. The witty, hard-hitting strokes 
 of his satire tickled the English sense of humor 
 and eighty thousand copies of the pamphlet were 
 sold in London streets. A still more famous 
 political work of his entitled The Shortest Way
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 171 
 
 with Dissenters appeared in 1703. Never was a 
 jest taken so seriously, or a whole nation so com- 
 pletely "sold" as we should now say. In this 
 work the author satirically urged that if all per- 
 sons attending non-conformist chapels should be 
 banished from the country, and all non-conform- 
 ist preachers hanged, the evil of Dissent would 
 be ended forever. Extreme as these measures 
 of the clever writer seem, and in the urging of 
 which he was only satirizing the intolerance of 
 churchmen, they for a time much delighted the 
 High Churchmen ; but when these discovered 
 that they had been tricked their rage knew no 
 bounds. For a time Defoe concealed himself, 
 but that the printer and publisher should not 
 suffer in his stead he surrendered himself. The 
 House of Commons ordered his book burned by 
 the common hangman, and at his trial he was 
 condemned to pay a large fine to the Crown, 
 to stand three times in the pillory, be imprisoned 
 during the Queen's good pleasure, and find 
 sureties for his good behavior for seven years.
 
 172 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 In the State of Delaware the pillory is still 
 occasionally used, and one may sometimes see 
 there a culprit undergoing that most unpleasant 
 kind of punishment. But the shame of such a 
 punishment lies in its desert, and Defoe had 
 done nothing to deserve his sentence. For three 
 days the most popular Englishman of the period 
 stood there in the pillory about which gathered 
 the multitude who covered the pillory platform 
 with flowers, while barrels of ale and wine were 
 drunk in his honor by his enthusiastic admirers. 
 He remained in prison till August, 1703; but 
 various works of his were sent to the press from 
 there, and the time was by no means lost. It 
 would be impossible to detail here a tenth part 
 of Defoe's adventures. His restless nature was 
 ever impelling him into controversy and intrigue. 
 To most remarkable powers of argument and 
 wonderful skill as a satirist he united an unscru- 
 pulous disposition and a confidence in his ability 
 to extricate himself from any complications into 
 which his activity might plunge him a con-
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 173 
 
 fidence, it must be confessed, not unsupported 
 by experience. 
 
 Our modern habit of close investigation is 
 fast disposing of the literary anecdotes which 
 are often told in connection with authors. For 
 instance, it used to be asserted that a certain 
 London bookseller having on his shelves a large 
 number of copies of a very dull book by Drelin- 
 court, called The Fear of Death, induced Defoe 
 to write a " puff " for this volume and that the 
 True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal 
 was the result, and that The Fear of Death ac- 
 cordingly rapidly disappeared from the book- 
 seller's shop. The reason for the sudden de- 
 mand for the book consisted in the fact that the 
 ghostly Mrs. Veal earnestly recommended the 
 perusal of the work. Alas for the facts ! If 
 the inventor of this tale had had the fear of lying 
 before his eyes, he would have told us that De- 
 foe's book was first published without any refer- 
 ence to The Fear of Death, which was already 
 popular and needed no " puffing " of this sort.
 
 174 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 But as " error runs a mile while truth is putting 
 on his boots " this anecdote is likely to survive 
 as long as the world cares to listen about Defoe. 
 And that will be for centuries to come, for as 
 the author of Robinson Crusoe his hold upon the 
 hearts of young people is perhaps greater than 
 that of any other writer. 
 
 It is with Defoe that the art of novel-writing 
 really begins. Fiction, in prose at least, was 
 new to the world then, and the reading public 
 were eager to read Moll Flanders, Captain Sin- 
 gleton, and the other romances which Defoe 
 rapidly gave to the world. It is not easy to 
 think of a period when people found themselves 
 reading novels for the first time. The sensa- 
 tions of a child old enough to think about the 
 matter who tastes candy for the first time in his 
 life can fitly be compared to the feelings of the 
 first novel-readers. These books of Defoe's are 
 not such as we should enjoy now, for they are 
 coarse in tone and deal with customs and man- 
 ners to which we are now fortunately strangers ;
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 175 
 
 but the)' show his wonderful power of story-tell- 
 ing, a power which reaches its height in Robin- 
 son Crusoe. 
 
 " Homely plain writing," Defoe termed his 
 style, but it is this "homely" directness of his 
 that constitutes the charm of Robinson Crusoe. 
 It was written in the full maturity of his powers, 
 for he was fifty-eight years old at the time, and 
 all the bent of his life was such as to fit him for 
 this sort of writing. Few men could make fic- 
 tion seem more like fact than he. His whole 
 career was such as to create a general belief 
 that he was untrustworthy ; yet he could pass 
 himself off with the Tories as a Tory, and with 
 the Whigs as a Whig, while he was constantly 
 appearing before the public in assumed charac- 
 ters. Now while all this is by no means to his 
 credit, it does show his inventive spirit in a very 
 strong light, and how he was able by the exer- 
 cise of this faculty to throw around the simple 
 story of a man living on a desert island such a 
 wonderful air of reality. When we read Robin-
 
 176 DANIEL DEFOE. 
 
 son Crusoe we feel that the hero would not nat- 
 urally have acted in any other way than he 
 actually did. And it is this fact which gives its 
 life to the book. Defoe might have kept his 
 inventive powers in their place and never have 
 gained his reputation for untrustworthiness, and 
 still have given Robinson Crusoe to the world as 
 perfect as it is now, no doubt, but we must look 
 at facts as they are and not as we should wish 
 them to be. And the fact is that this immortal 
 story-teller was a man to whom the truth was a 
 stranger. He was seldom straightforward. He 
 was fertile in expedients to pass off falsehood for 
 truth, and it is this gift of invention which, right- 
 fully exercised in Robinson Crusoe, made, when 
 carried into actual practice in life, so untrust- 
 worthy a character as his. 
 Says one biographer : 
 
 "If he is judged by the measures that he labored for, 
 and not by the means that he employed, few Englishmen 
 have lived more deserving of their country's gratitude. 
 He may have been self-seeking and vain-glorious, but in
 
 DANIEL DEFOE. 177 
 
 his political life self-seeking and vain-glory were elevated 
 by their alliance with higher and wider aims." 
 
 And with this judgment we leave him, remem- 
 bering always that if he were lacking in integrity 
 of purpose he could nevertheless serve his coun- 
 trymen nobly, and that in spite of all his faults 
 he was great enough to write for his time, and 
 for all time, Robinson Crusoe.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE " THE VALIANT." 
 
 SEVENTY years ago one of the most popular 
 names in German literature was that of an 
 author whose French surname strikes one some- 
 what oddly in a list of German authors. Once 
 the works of Friedrich Heinrich Karl Fouque', 
 Baron de la Motte, were among the treasures of 
 every German household, and whenever a forth- 
 coming volume of his was announced the libra- 
 ries were besieged with applications for it. But 
 long before his death the high tide of popularity 
 had subsided and with it ebbed the taste for the 
 romantic school of composition of which he was 
 one of the great masters ; yet one work of his 
 has become a classic and is likely to live on. 
 Nearly a century before his birth the revoca- 
 178
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 179 
 
 tion of the Edict of Nantes had driven his family 
 from France. They sought refuge in Holland, 
 and Fouqud's grandfather having entered the 
 Prussian army, the family became citizens of 
 Prussia at a later period. His grandfather, also 
 named Friedrich, rose to distinction in the Prus- 
 sian service and was honored with the precarious 
 friendship of Frederick the Great. Being a person 
 of rare prudence he succeeded in avoiding all 
 the sunken rocks and dangerous shallows in the 
 stream of courtly favor and his friendly relations 
 with the choleric monarch continued unbroken 
 throughout his life. 
 
 His son entered the Prussian service likewise, 
 at one time being an officer of dragoons, and it 
 was while he was living at Brandenburg on the 
 Havel, not then being in active service, that his 
 son Friedrich was born, on the twelfth of Febru- 
 arv > J 777- The family admiration for the mon- 
 arch was so great that the child was named, not 
 unnaturally, for the illustrious emperor who stood 
 sponsor for him at his baptism. His earliest
 
 l8o LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 years were spent on his father's estate at Sacro, 
 near Potsdam, and later at Lentzke, not far 
 distant. He was an only child and much pains 
 was taken with his education which was con- 
 ducted at home under various tutors, one of 
 whom, the author August Hiilse, encouraged in 
 every way the dawning literary tastes of the boy. 
 
 It was not exactly a lonely life that he spent 
 at Lentzke, but it seems to have been somewhat 
 monotonous. Still there were certain events in 
 it to look forward to, or to recall when they 
 were once past ; for his holidays were almost 
 always spent with relatives who lived in a de- 
 lightfully romantic old castle near Halle, a cir- 
 cumstance which no doubt strengthened his 
 inborn love of the romantic side of life and lit- 
 erature. Sometimes, too, there were visits to 
 Potsdam from which the boy would return wild 
 with enthusiasm for the great Frederick whom 
 he had seen and who perhaps had given him a 
 kind word or two or patted his godson's head. 
 
 The sound of military music and the sight of
 
 /'I 
 
 LA MOTTE KOUQUE.
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 183 
 
 the soldiers had their due share in fostering the 
 military spirit in this son and grandson of a 
 soldier and the prospect of pursuing the study 
 of law at the University of Halle grew less and 
 less alluring. At last he gave up the design of 
 doing so altogether, and in 1794 entered the 
 army as tibercompleter Cornet in the service of 
 the Grand Duke of Weimar, and when only 
 nineteen served in the fatal campaign of the 
 Rhine. For several years after this he led a 
 semi-military life with his regiment, but was not 
 in active service. 
 
 He married early, but the marriage was not a 
 fortunate one, and a divorce took place. In 1802, 
 when but twenty-five, he married again, the lady 
 being the Frau von Rochow, who as Caroline, 
 Baroness de la Motte Fouque, became an au- 
 thor of note whose books still find a place in 
 libraries. 
 
 About this time he procured -his discharge 
 from the army and devoted himself to a literary 
 career which was to last for forty years. His
 
 184 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 first work, Dramatische Spiele, was published by 
 the famous brothers Schlegel in 1804. The 
 friendship of the Schlegels, particularly that of 
 August Wilhelm, was of great benefit to the 
 young writer. By the latter he was induced to 
 study Spanish poetry, a pursuit quite in harmony 
 with Fouque"s romantic vein. This initial work 
 was soon followed by Romanzen aus dem Thai 
 Ronceval, the first fruits of the Schlegel influence, 
 and by two plays, the Falk and the Reh. Much 
 encouraged by the discriminating praise of the 
 Schlegels Fouque continued vigorously at work, 
 producing in 1806 a metrical version of an old 
 prose romance, the Historic rom edlem Ritter 
 Galmy, and the poem Schiller's Todtenfeir which 
 latter.was written in conjunction with Bernhardin. 
 In 1808 came the romance called Alvin, which 
 brought him many literary admirers, among 
 whom was his contemporary, Jean Paul Richter, 
 who styled him " Der Tapfere" or "The Val- 
 iant." In the same year, too, was published his 
 Sigurd der Schlangentodter, the first of his books
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 185 
 
 appearing with his name, the others having been 
 published under the pseudonym " Pellegrin." 
 He continued writing and publishing at frequent 
 intervals up to the year 1814, when among other 
 pieces of literary work he produced his famous 
 Jahreszciten, a series in four parts, the spring num- 
 ber consisting of his famous romance t7ndtne,ihe 
 summer number containing Die Beiden, Haupt- 
 leute, the autumn division Aslauga's Ritter and 
 Algin und Jucnnda and the winter division, Sin- 
 tram und seine Gefahrten. 
 
 In the midst of this active literary career he 
 had in 1813 returned to the army and at the bat- 
 tle of Liizten he twice narrowly escaped with his 
 life. In the night after the battle he was en- 
 trusted with the carrying of an important dis- 
 patch and while in the discharge of this duty 
 his horse stumbled in deep water and threw him. 
 From this accident an illness resulted which 
 disabled him from military service. He accord- 
 ingly received an honorable discharge, was pre- 
 sented with the decoration of the " Johann-
 
 l86 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 terorden " or cross of the Order of St. John, 
 and was raised to the rank of major of cavalry. 
 He now returned to his home at Neunhausen 
 with his wife and daughter, and once more re- 
 sumed his pen. 
 
 The list of his works published after this date 
 is a long one, but they are quite forgotten now 
 for the most part, and slumber quietly on library 
 shelves. In 1831 his wife died and removing 
 to Halle he married there for the third time. 
 Here his last years were peacefully spent in 
 writing and in lecturing at the university on the 
 history of poetry, and having gone to Berlin in 
 1843 for the purpose of delivering his lectures 
 in that city as well, he died there quite sud- 
 denly, January 23. 
 
 His was a well-filled life, but the highest meas- 
 ure of his achievement was reached when he 
 was yet a comparatively young writer, when in 
 1814 the exquisite romance Undine was given to 
 the world. The same year witnessed the ap- 
 pearance of a story of chivalry which Fouque'
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 187 
 
 considered one of his most successful works, 
 Die Fahrten Thiodolf des Islanders, but the judg- 
 ment of posterity has not confirmed its author's 
 estimate. Of all his many books only the chiv- 
 alric romance Der Zauberring published in 1811 
 and Jahreszaten, which contains the famous Un- 
 dmesurvive. These, particularly the latter, have 
 weathered the fluctuations of popular taste and 
 have become so integral a part of the literature 
 and the thought of the time that they cannot 
 readily be displaced. And after all only the 
 very greatest authors go down to posterity with 
 more than a book or two under the arm. Some- 
 times the book is a very small one, sometimes 
 it is reduced to a few pages, a single leaf even, 
 but the literary immortality that depends upon 
 but a single leaf is often as sure as that of a 
 Homer or a Cicero. 
 
 That the greater part of Fouque's work was so 
 soon consigned to neglect was owing to the fact 
 that he had so slight a hold upon the life of his 
 time. He was not a deep thinker or a man of
 
 l88 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 highly-wrought feelings. The problems of mod- 
 ern life except as viewed occasionally from a 
 military standpoint had little attraction for him 
 and he failed to grasp them in any adequate 
 measure, and the coldness of his temperament 
 effectually prevented him from putting any great 
 amount of passion into his romances. The ro- 
 mantic school of literature of which, following 
 the lead of the brothers Schlegel, he was so 
 eminent a representative, appeals mainly to the 
 fancy and the imagination and has almost no 
 power over the emotions. The distinguishing 
 characteristic of Fouqud's mind seems to have 
 been the attempt to present an ideal of Chris- 
 tian knighthood. In some form or other this 
 ideal appears uppermost in his fancy in nearly 
 all his works reaching his apotheosis in Undine 
 and Aslauga's Ritter. A very just estimate of 
 his character in this respect is made by Carlyle 
 who says : 
 
 " A pure, sensitive heart, deeply reverent of truth and 
 beauty and heroic virtue, a quick perception of certain
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE " THE VALIANT." 189 
 
 forms embodying these high qualities, and a delicate and 
 dainty hand in picturing them forth are gifts which few 
 readers of his works will contest him. At the same time, 
 it must be granted, he has no preeminence, either of head 
 or heart, and his circle of activity, though full of ani- 
 mation, is far from comprehensive. He is, as it were, 
 possessed by one idea. A few notes, some of them in 
 truth, of rich melody, yet still a very few, include the 
 whole music of his being. The Chapel and the Tilt-yard 
 stand in the background or the foreground, in all the 
 scenes of his universe. He gives us knights, soft-hearted 
 and strong-armed ; full of Christian self-denial, patience, 
 meekness, and gay, easy daring ; they stand before us in 
 their mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and ac- 
 companiment of squire and dame, and frequently the 
 whole has a true, though seldom a vigorous, poetic life. 
 If this can content us, it is well ; if not, there is no help ; 
 for change of scene and person brings little change of 
 subject ; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too 
 clearly the influence of its unseen presence. Nor can it 
 be said that in this solitary department his success is of 
 the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of Chris- 
 tian knighthood in existing poetic forms, to wed that old 
 sentiment to modern thoughts was a task which he could 
 not attempt. He has turned rather to the fictions and 
 machinery of former days, and transplanted his heroes 
 into distant ages and scenes divided by their nature from 
 our common world. Their manner of existence comes 
 imaged back to us faint and ineffectual, like the crescent 
 of the setting moon.
 
 IQO LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 These things, however, are not faults, but the want of 
 merits. Where something is effected, it were ungracious 
 to reckon up too narrowly how much is left untried. In 
 all his writings Fouque shows himself as a man deeply 
 imbued with feelings of religion, honor and brotherly 
 love ; he sings of faith and affection with a full heart ; 
 and a spirit of tenderness, and vestal purity, and meek 
 heroism sheds salutary influences from his presence. 
 He is no primate or bishop in the Church Poetical; but 
 a simple chaplain, who merits the honors of a small "but 
 well-discharged function, and claims no other." 
 
 There are few things in the German language 
 more beautiful than the sweet simplicity of 
 Fouque's style. " Exquisite " is the word which 
 must be used to describe it and no reader of 
 Undine or Aslauga's Ritter will care to apply to 
 it any other term. Its airy grace is inimitable. 
 Says one of his critics. : 
 
 " Fouque aimed at ethereal beauty, delighted in word- 
 painting, and flitted continually between the glories of a 
 crimson Spanish sunset and the cold steel-blue of a north 
 German nightfall." 
 
 Very few of Fouque's writings have been trans- 
 lated into English. Undine and Sintram have,
 
 LA MOTTE FOUQUE " THE VALIANT." 19 1 
 
 it is true, and more than once ; and the Zauber- 
 ring and Aslauga's Ritter have appeared in an 
 English dress ; but these are all and for the 
 reasons already named it is not likely that the 
 list of translations will be increased. 
 
 Aslauga's Ritter has found fewer readers than 
 Undine. Aslauga, it will be remembered by 
 readers of the Nibelungen Lied, was the daughter 
 of Siegfried and Brynhild, and in this romance, 
 long after she had ended her days as the wife 
 of the Danish king Ragnar Lodbrog, she ap- 
 pears to the Knight Froda and becomes the 
 inspiration of his life. A passage from Car- 
 lyle's translation of the tale will give some idea 
 of the style of this charming romance : 
 
 " But Edwald continued dreaming, dreaming ; and 
 many other visions passed before him, all of a lovely cast, 
 though he could not recollect them, when far in the morn- 
 ing he opened his smiling eyes. Froda and his mysteri- 
 ous song alone stood clear before his memory. He now 
 saw well that his friend was dead but he sorrowed not 
 because of it in his mind, feeling as he did, that the pure 
 heart of the hero and singer could nowhere find its proper 
 joy, save in the Land of Light, in blissful communion
 
 192 LA MOTTE FOUQUE "THE VALIANT." 
 
 with the high spirits of the ancient time. He glided 
 softly from his sleeping Hildegardis into the chamber of 
 the departed. He was lying on his bed of rest, almost 
 as beautiful as he had looked in the vision; and the gold 
 helmet on his head was entwisted in a wondrous, beam- 
 ing lock of hair. Then Edwald made a fair shady grave 
 on consecrated ground, summoned the castle chaplain, 
 and with his help interred in it his heroic Froda." * 
 
 * For a very beautiful version of the story of Aslang, the reader 
 must turn to The Fostering if A slang in William Morris's Earthly 
 Paradise.
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 WHEN by chance we hear the name of 
 Elsinore what other name comes at 
 once to our thoughts like an echo of the first ? 
 What name but Hamlet ! With Verona are 
 linked forever in our memories the names of 
 Juliet and Romeo. Grand Pre and Acadie sum- 
 mon recollections of Evangeline and Gabriel. 
 Westward of Chili, far out in the Pacific, lies 
 an island visited by few but familiarly known 
 the world over because along its sands and 
 through its woods once roamed Robinson Cru- 
 soe. In the Indian Ocean lies another island, 
 once owning allegiance to Holland, then to 
 France, and now to England the island of 
 Mauritius or Isle de France, which is dear to 
 
 193
 
 IQ4 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA. 
 
 hundreds of thousands of hearts simply because 
 it was once the home of Paul and Virginia. 
 
 Yet none of these people had ever an actual 
 existence. They never breathed our air, never 
 lived and never died, but yet they are more real 
 to us than nine tenths of the people we meet 
 upon our daily walks, more real than those whose 
 names crowd the pages of history. And they 
 will be just as real, just as actual personalities 
 far down the centuries to come as they are to 
 us of the present one. They are part of our 
 individual life and they are part of the world's 
 life also. 
 
 Do you ask why this is so ? Simply because 
 these men and women stand for vital, endur- 
 ing facts which the world recognizes as such. 
 Every one perceives in the person of Hamlet 
 the struggle that is eternally going on in souls 
 that acknowledge a duty before them and who 
 lack decision of character to perform it without 
 hesitation. Robinson Crusoe and his adven- 
 tures represent the age-long struggle of man
 
 JACQUES-HENRl-UERNARDIN DE ST. PIERRE.
 
 THE AUTHOR OF "PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 197 
 
 with circumstances. Disappointed and unhappy 
 but ever-faithful love sees itself reflected in the 
 story of the Veronese lovers, or those of Acadie, 
 or of far-distant Mauritius. It is because these 
 people of the imagination in one sense are in 
 another sense not creatures of the imagination 
 at all, but people of the past and of the future 
 as well as of the present, since they represent 
 some of the springs of action in human char- 
 acter, that they are so real to us. They do exist 
 as truly as ever Queen Elizabeth or Cromwell 
 did, and Elsinore, Grand Pre', Verona, Juan 
 Fernandez and Mauritius are not more real 
 than they. 
 
 In the salon of Madame Necker in Paris 
 there was gathered upon one occasion, one hun- 
 dred years ago, a brilliant company of literary 
 people to listen to the reading of a romance 
 entitled Paul and Virginia by the author, one 
 Jacques-Henri-Bernardin de St. Pierre. As the 
 reading proceeded the attention of the listeners 
 flagged, some of them whispered to each other
 
 198 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 and looked at their watches, those near the door 
 stole out, and one or two either went to sleep or 
 pretended to do so. Some of the ladies wept 
 over the sorrowful conclusion, but as no word 
 of praise was heard at the end of the reading 
 they did not dare to confess that they had been 
 interested. Who can blame the author if he 
 left the salon in the deepest depression believing 
 that his literary sentence-of-death had been 
 pronounced ? 
 
 He had up to this time published no book, 
 but had for many years devoted himself to the 
 preparation of a work called Arcadia, and it is 
 from the materials gathered for this that The 
 Studies of Nature, Paul and Virginia and The 
 Indian Cottage were written. But the result of 
 the reading at Madame Necker's was a blow to 
 his literary ambition, and but for a fortunate 
 accident Paul and Virginia, incomparably the 
 best of his works, might never have seen the 
 public eye. 
 
 Among the friends of St. Pierre was Horace
 
 THE AUTHOR OF "PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 199 
 
 Vernet, the celebrated artist. Visiting his friend 
 one day in the humble quarters which St. Pierre 
 then occupied, he found him sunk in despair, 
 for the disastrous scene at Madame Necker's 
 was never out of his mind. Vernet inquired 
 the cause of his friend's grief, and when told 
 asked to have the narrative read to him. That 
 St. Pierre was loth to undertake a second read- 
 ing of the unlucky manuscript can well be 
 believed, but his reluctance yielded to the other's 
 persistence, and he began. Vernet's mood of 
 critical attention soon gave way to one of un- 
 restrained delight, and when the reading was 
 finished he rose and embraced his friend, ex- 
 claiming enthusiastically, " Happy genius ! you 
 have produced a chef-d'oeuvre! My friend, you 
 are a great painter and I dare promise you a 
 splendid reputation." 
 
 The effect of this warm praise upon St. 
 Pierre's drooping spirits was to give him confi- 
 dence in his own powers. By and by he took 
 courage and printed his Paul and Virginia and
 
 200 THE AUTHOR OF "PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 became at once one of the foremost literary men 
 of his time. He had been long in winning dis- 
 tinction, but it was substantial fame when it 
 came at last. He was of respectable but not 
 noble origin, and was born at Havre on January 
 19, 1737, so that when he become famous he 
 was more than forty years old. 
 
 As a boy St. Pierre was noted for his affec- 
 tionate, loving disposition and his fondness for 
 animals. On one occasion his father pointed 
 out to him the lofty towers of the cathedral of 
 Rouen. The boy gazed earnestly upwards and 
 his father, wishing to see how the sight would 
 impress a child, asked what he thought of them. 
 But Henri had eyes only for the swallows cir- 
 cling round the spires, and exclaimed, " Mon 
 Dieu! qu'elles volent haut ."' "How high they 
 fly ! " a reply which seems greatly to have 
 disappointed his father who looked for a very 
 different response. 
 
 A prominent trait in his character was his 
 impulse always to side with the oppressed, and
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA. 2OI 
 
 any form of suffering roused his sympathies 
 instantly. When he was very young he read 
 with eager interest the Lives of the Saints and 
 once concluded he would be a hermit like some 
 of the saintly heroes of whom he had read. 
 Accordingly he took a lunch with him into the 
 woods, expecting as soon as his earthly suste- 
 nance was exhausted that angels would appear 
 with further supplies. Evening came, but not 
 the angels, and the arrival of his nurse who 
 found him asleep at the foot of a tree cut short 
 an experiment that might have sorely tested 
 his faith. 
 
 Something of this same simplicity of faith 
 that led him to make the attempt just narrated 
 remained with him all his life. In a century 
 dominated by scepticism, and amongst a people 
 who held their religious beliefs very lightly, he 
 was conspicuous for the depth and sincerity of 
 his faith. But his faith was of the heart and 
 not of the head ; it was founded upon sentiment 
 and not upon reflection. This simplicity and
 
 202 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 singleness of intent, however admirable in itself, 
 led him into a maze of contradictions and 
 absurdities when he attempted to explain the 
 purposes of natural phenomena. He asks in 
 one place in his Eludes de la Nature : 
 
 " Why do some trees shed their leaves and others do 
 not ? It is difficult to explain the cause but easy to recog- 
 nize the purpose. If the birch and the larch of the north 
 cast their leaves at the approach of winter, it is to furnish 
 a bedding for the beasts of the forests ; and if the cone- 
 like fir-tree preserves its foliage all the year, it is to fur- 
 nish the same beasts with shelter amid the snows." 
 
 Regarding this extraordinary statement, a 
 critic says : 
 
 " Shelter and bedding at once, it is evident, would have 
 been too good for these poor animals ; so it is arranged 
 that their bedding shall be under bare trees, and shall all 
 be covered up by snow, when the time comes for them to 
 fly to the hospitable shelter of the evergreens. Again 
 he tells us that the reason why cocoanuts grow on high 
 trees is that by the noise of their fall they may attract the 
 animals whom they furnish with food. It apparently did 
 not occur to him that the cocoanut on the ground was 
 quite as visible an object as the acorn, which also serves
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 203 
 
 various animals for food, and yet falls without noise. 
 . . It makes no difference to M. de St. Pierre how 
 many different constructions any established order of 
 things may be capable of bearing, so long as there is one 
 out of them all that suits his purpose is quite enough to 
 prove that it alone is the true interpretation of the phe- 
 nomena. Thus, on the same page, he tells with admira- 
 tion how some trees are so fenced round with thorns that 
 the birds who lodge in them are protected from all at- 
 tacks from below, and how other trees, that are fenced 
 round in the same way, have long rope-like growths de- 
 pending from their branches, so that monkeys and other 
 animals that devour birds' eggs can climb up and take 
 the citadel by surprise. So whether the birds escape 
 their adversaries, or whether they fall a prey to them, 
 there is equal reason to admire the wonderful designs of 
 the Creator, who is now on the side of the birds and now 
 on that of the monkeys." 
 
 The unscientific temper of his mind and his 
 inability to see more than one aspect of the case 
 at a time of course renders his conclusions of 
 little value in many instances ; but his disposi- 
 tion to see good in everything, though carried 
 by him to illogical extremes, had its root in the 
 best principles of human nature, and was as 
 conspicuous in his childhood as in his later years.
 
 204 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 At the age of twelve he read Robinson Crusoe 
 and was immediately filled with a wild desire to 
 have an island of his own and establish a 
 society. As years went on this desire deepened. 
 At the Jesuit college in Caen, at Martinique, 
 where he went with his uncle, as a lieutenant in 
 Germany, and at Malta, the notion was still in 
 his mind and at the age of twenty-six he set out 
 for Russia to ask Catherine n. for a grant of 
 land near the Caspian Sea where he might 
 carry out his theories. But as might have been 
 expected he received no encouragement at the 
 Russian Court and the project which had been 
 so long cherished was at length reluctantly 
 abandoned. 
 
 At the age of thirty he returned to France, 
 and after the lapse of a year was offered the 
 position of engineer to an expedition to the 
 Isle of France, and Madagascar, which he ac- 
 cepted. Always ready to believe the best of 
 those with whom he came in contact St. Pierre 
 gave a ready ear to those who told him that now
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 205 
 
 he would have the chance to carry out his 
 benevolent theories in founding a community in 
 Madagascar. Hardly had the expedition sailed 
 when he ascertained that it was practically a 
 slave-hunting affair and the people concerned 
 in it very far from being those upon whose as- 
 sistance he could count. The disappointment 
 was a severe one, but its effects were lasting; 
 he indulged in no more dreams of founding 
 Utopias. He left his uncongenial companions 
 when he reached the Isle of France and re- 
 mained there a resident of the island for more 
 than two years. During this time he devoted 
 himself to the study of natural history, and pos- 
 sibly the outlines of the story of Paul and Vir- 
 ginia were shaping themselves in his mind during 
 that time. Some of the results of his life here 
 were made public on his return to his native 
 country in his book called Voyage to the Isle of 
 France. It met with some attention and the 
 Etudes de la Nature was even better received ; 
 but as before stated it was the publication of
 
 206 THE AUTHOR OF "PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 Paul and Virginia which made him famous. 
 The world at once reversed the contemptuous 
 judgment which the frequenters of the Necker 
 salon had passed upon the tale, and at the end 
 of a century its verdict remains practically un- 
 changed. 
 
 A striking instance of St. Pierre's indepen- 
 dence of character was shown in 1798 when at 
 a meeting of the Moral Science department of 
 the Institut he appended to a report which he 
 read before it a strong avowal of his own belief 
 in God. Hardly had the assembly become 
 aware of his line of argument when the mem- 
 bers burst forth with exclamations of rage and 
 derision. Nearly all his hearers were atheists, 
 and his words at once aroused the most vehement 
 opposition. They scoffed at his age, ridiculed 
 what they called his superstition, and some even 
 challenged him to a duel. Vainly St. Pierre 
 endeavored to make himself heard, and at last 
 when one of the members cried out " I swear 
 there is no God and I demand that his name
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 207 
 
 never again be pronounced within these walls ! " 
 he retired from the disorderly assembly. As to 
 the fitness of time and place for making his 
 avowal, there is room for difference of opinion ; 
 but in regard to his courage and independence 
 in so doing there can be no question. 
 
 If St. Pierre's earlier years were full of vicis- 
 situdes and anxieties, the latter half of his life 
 was peaceful and happy. Rather late in life he 
 married M'lle Didot and became the father of 
 two children whom he named Paul and Virginia. 
 To them he thus tenderly refers in his Harmo- 
 nies of Nature : 
 
 " When I was unmarried and when I published the 
 first volume of my Studies of Nature, I said in that work, 
 without suspecting that there would be any truth in my 
 prophecy, that ' the next generation would in some respect 
 belong to me.' This was meant to apply only to those 
 improvements in education with which I was then occu- 
 pied ; but I have had my wishes fulfilled in other respects, 
 for I can hardly go into a public walk without hearing 
 mothers or nurses, brothers or sisters, call children by 
 the name of Paul and Virginia. I often turn uncon- 
 sciously around and imagine for the moment that these
 
 208 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 
 
 are my children, for I also have a Virginia and a Paul, 
 who form a crown of roses for my gray hairs. I embrace 
 accordingly the opportunity of using their names with the 
 greater pleasure, as it will enable me to exhibit a sketch 
 of their opening dispositions. My Virginia is now five 
 years old, and will soon become capable of understanding 
 such lessons ; my Paul is an infant scarcely twelve months 
 old, but he discovers the mildest disposition, and the 
 warmest affection for his little sister." 
 
 Some time after the death of the mother of 
 his children, St. Pierre married again and this 
 second marriage appears to have been as fortu- 
 nate as the first. The last years of his life 
 seem indeed to have been exceptionally happy. 
 His young wife was devoted to him, in his chil- 
 dren he took constant delight, and the income 
 from his works, to which a Government pension 
 was now added, enabled him to live at ease and 
 minister to the wants of others. The vexations 
 and trials of his youth were now far in the past 
 and his old age was a calm and peaceful one. 
 He had just passed his seventy-eighth birthday 
 when on the twenty-first of January, 1814, his 
 serene old age was merged into another life.
 
 THE AUTHOR OF " PAUL AND VIRGINIA." 209 
 
 We may smile at his early follies, his absurd- 
 ities, his simplicities, but it is a kindly smile, a 
 smile where no trace of a sneer can linger. All 
 his long life he retained a childlike singleness of 
 temper and gentleness and when the final sum- 
 mons came, " Lo ! he whose heart was even as 
 a little child's, answered to his name and s-tood 
 in the presence of the Master."
 
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