fois à Paris, se réunira comme le Congresès Orientalistes d’une façon périodique; la prochaine session se tiendra à Londres dans deux ans, et M. Ch. T. Leland, président de Gypsy-lore Society, sera chargé de l’organiser.’
“J’aurai au reste l’honneur de transmetter à Folk-lore Society l’analyse sommaire du Congrès qui est publié par les soins de l’Administration et les Mémoires in extenso qui seront imprimés à part.
“Veuillez agréer, Monsieur le President, l’assurance de mes sentiments les plus distingués
Secrétaire général du Congrès.”
You will authorise me, I trust, to express to Monsieur Sébillot our sense of his courteous communication, and our hope that the French Society may go on “from strength to strength advancing”. Though she came rather late into the field of scientific folk-lore, it is to France that we owe our most familiar and dearest fairy-tales, those of Perrault and Madame d’Aulnay. If the French collected their volks-lieder and their märchen later than did Germany, Denmark, and England, at least they collected them with assiduity and success, and have criticised them with learning and acuteness. It is not needful to do more than mention M. Sébillot himself, M. Cosquin, my own esteemed adversary in theory, M. Henri Gaidoz, to whose energy and erudition our science is such a debtor, M. Carnoy, M. Loys Brueyre, M. Eugène Rolland, and M. Gaston Paris, whose learning is so vast and so genial, with all the many living French authors who, not only at home but in Africa and Asia, widen the boundaries of our knowledge.
M. Sebillot speaks particularly of folk-tales, and their classification. From the Journal of the Society, and its reports, you know how that labour of the Danaids is speeding. For one, I look almost in despair at the vast mass of material, at the myriad tales told in every language known of mortals. “There is a deep, and who shall drain it?” says Sophocles; and who, indeed, shall drain and dredge what the Hindoos call the Ocean of the Stream of Stories?
