with, for its combined sense of humour and dramatic power.
The first adjective of our title also needs a similar extension of its meaning. I have acted on Molière's principle, and have taken what was good wherever I could find it. Thus, a couple of these stories have been found among descendants of English immigrants in America; a couple of others I tell as I heard them myself in my youth in Australia. One of the best was taken down from the mouth of an English Gipsy. I have also included some stories that have only been found in Lowland Scotch. I have felt justified in doing this, as of the twenty-one folk-tales contained in Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland, no fewer than sixteen are also to be found in an English form. With the folk-tale as with the ballad, Lowland Scotch may be regarded as simply a dialect of English, and it is a mere chance whether a tale is extant in one or other, or both.
I have also rescued and re-told a few Fairy Tales that only exist nowadays in the form of ballads. There are certain indications that the "common form" of the English Fairy Tale was the cante-fable, a mixture of narrative and verse of which the most illustrious example in literature is Aucassin et Nicolette. In one case, I have endeavoured to retain this form, as the tale in which it occurs, Childe Rowland, is mentioned by Shakespeare in King Lear, and is probably, as I have shown, the source of Milton's Comus. Late as they have been collected, some dozen of the tales can be traced back to the
