The Sun.
London, England, 1861-01-02 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

aeron's Born. A book of Fairy Tales. By
Henry Morley. Chapman and Hall.
Another volume of Christmas fairy tales quaint
and dreamy, humorous and romantic, appears under
favourable auspices. The pen of Henry Morley,
and the pencil of Charles Bennett, to bath of which
the public are indebted for a large share of enter-
tainments, have assisted in its publication. Two
of the twelve tales do not come before us for the
first time. The humorous " Adventures in Skitz-
land," and " The King of the Hearth," have pre-
viously appeared in the pages of .Household Words,
and the readers who can recall them to mind,
may easily imagine the style and character of the
other tales. Many of them have a quiet moral
lurking under their legends of elves and sprites ;
but as the author says in his pleasant introductory
verses—

" English wit rings best
With an earnest undertone;
'Tia when reason lies under the jest,
That an Englishman's laugh is his own."
One or two of the shorter tales, however, arc un-
worthy of introduction,‘beiug simply absurd, with-
out further recommendation, and would have been
better omitted from among their sprightly and
sensible companions. But there are plenty
of a higher class, among which we may
mention " The Stavesacre Fairies," and
" The Bag of Minutes." The latter tells us of
a youth who received from old Father Time the
gift of a bag full of minutes, and who, consequently -7
had always spare time at his command. This
privilege, which at first seemed to be an inestima-
ble advantage was at last discovered to be worse
than useless ; and, accordingly, by the advice of a
sage counsellor, the Bag of Minutes, was scattered
to the winds, " and ever since then, grains of spare
time, seldom to be caught, are thought to be dancing
up and down the world." Those who have such
grains at their command cannot do better than
procure Mr. Morley's pleasant volume wherewith
to occupy them.

Little Ella and the Fire King, and other Fairy
Tales. Edinburgh : Edmonston and Douglas.
This is a very amusing little volume adapted
for the young, and it presents a great deal of
variety in its pages. The little sketches are easy
of comprehension, and some of them' are very en-
tertaining. Little Ella is a very striking warning
to little maidens who think too much of them-
selves, and are vain and selfish. She found, indeed,
that all is not gold that glitters, and the fairy
palace she so desired to inhabit proved anything
but an Elysian abode when she really entered it.
" The Wonderful Apple-tree" is an instance of the
great harm committed by those who give way to
idleness, and think only of present amusement in-
stead of future welfare. " A Pig for an Hour,"
is a lesson for greedy children, as it
shows how Wilfred was beset with troubles
even after he was able to satisfy himself
with all varieties of food. The adventures he met
with were sufficient to deter the most inveterate
glutton from his course, and the allegory introduced
of his being transformed into a pig, is a very
happy one, bringing before the young in an effec-
tive manner the results of their conduct as it
appears in the eyes of others. " The Silver Dog
and his Puppies" is a very interesting little tale,
but the little girls did not deserve the treasures
bestowed upon them. This lively series of sketches
is an admirable present for any child, and it is
very elegantly brought out, and it is an ornamen-
tal addition to any table, while it is a source of
amusement to a child, and belongs to that attractive
class of books for juvenile readers which is one of
the greatest improvements in the changes of
modern literature.

Holidays with Hobgoblins and Tales of Strang.
Things. By Dudley Costello. John Camden

Hotten.

In this little volume are combined original ghost
stories, which are as much in season at Christmas
time as geese are at Michaelmas, but why or where-
fore is a matter of history so remote that we are
unable to trace its origin, and superstitious traditions
and amusing researches into the writings of the
ancients on monsters and the marvellous. Among
the ghost stories, the " Haunted House near Hamp-
stead Heath" and " The Apparition of Monsieur
Bodey" are most worthy of note. The chapter on
" Traditions and Superstitions" gives a brief ac-
count of the hold which superstition had upon the
minds of men in the " dark ages ;" but goes on to
show that in many rural districts, in spite of the
schoolmaster being abroad, the people cling to the
traditions which have been handed down from sire
to son from time immemorial with a religious vene-
ration. It is in the nature of humanity to require
some basis to rest their belief upon, and when rea-
son fails them they pin their faith on the invisible
world of spirts.
" Weary from doubt to doubt they fly,
We welcome fond credulity,
Guido confident though blind."
In proof of how far superstition will carry some
people, the following history of the melancholy fate
of a peasant and his wife in the centre of France
will show :

The witch's Familiar was almost invariably a toad ; but
a frog was made to figure in that capacity only a few years
ago with fatal consequences. The history of the occurrence
is a sad example of the effects of superstitious fear. It hap-
pened in the commune of Bussy-en-oth, in the department
of the Aube, in France, in the year 1841. A young man
of that village had been passing the day enjoying the very
French amusement of fishing for frogs. lie had caught a
great many, and placed them alive in a bag. On his way
home he saw a peasant walking slowly on the road before
him, the large half-open pocket of whose coat invited the
fisherman to the perpetration of a practical joke. Accord-
ingly, as he passed the peasant, he managed, unperceived,
to slip one of the frogs into his pocket. The peasant un-
suspectingly walked on, reached his cottage, and tired with
the labours of the day, soon afterwards went to rest,
throwing his clothes as usual on his bed. In the middle
of the night, Jacquemin—that was the peasant's name—
was awakened by feeling something cold crawling over his
face, and uttering indistinct cries ; it was, of course, the
frog that had crept out of Jacquemin's pocket, and had
paused on its journey to croak. Jacquemin, who was of an
exceedingly timorous nature, lay as still as death till his
nocturnal visitor departed, nothing doubting that he had
been visited by a spirit.
The man's character for simplicity was so generally
known, that people were always playing tricks upon him;
and on the very next morning after the preceding visitation,
one of his friends came into his cottage, and told him that
his old uncle, who lived at Sens, had just died, and advised
him to set off and claim his share of the inheritance.
Jacquemin, on hearing the news, made no more ado, but at
once set out with his wife for Sens, distant eight leagues
from where he lived. Arrived at the house of the supposed
deceased, the first person he saw was his uncle sitting in
his arm-chair. Anybody else would have perceived that
he had been duped, but this poor fellow, firmly believing
that his uncle was dead, was seized with sudden terror,
and dragging his wife out of the house, set off again to
Bussy, without giving time for a word of explanation. In
the meantime, the frog had not abandoned his cottage, but
had taken refuge in a .hole in the flooring, from whence,
every now and then, it uttered dismal croaks. Jacquemin,
convinced that he had seen his uncle's ghost, fancied that
these noises were made by the spirit, and the agony he -un-
derwent became insupportable. A prey to the direst fear,
Jacquemin at last hung himself one morning in his hayloft.
On the following day, his wife, despairing for the loss of
her husband, threw herself into a pond, and was found
drowned—a double suicide, caused by an imbecile super-
stition.

Under the head of " Monsters," we find a curious
description of those wonderful creatures in the
existence of which our forefathers placed implicit
faith. In olden times, such was the credulity of
mankind and so great was their love of the marvel-
lous and impossible, that a traveller who related
simple unvarnished truth would have been set
down as an imposter ; and it must have been from
this conviction that Marco Polo, the first Eastern
explorer to whom we are indebted for so much
valuable information, has furnished (we suppose by
way of sauce to help the truth down the throats of
the sceptical world) a most ingenious account of the
Chinese Dragon. Ihe name of the author led us,
on opening the volume, to anticipate a store of
amusement. We have not been disappointed ; and
we think that the reader, when he reaches the last
page, will be of the same opinion.

Advices were received at Lloyd's yesterday of
the wreck, near Boulogne, of the ship Ardville, from Macao
to London, with 616,7001b5. of tea and other cargo on
board. The Sourisquois, from Bombay to London, is also
telegraphed as being on shore near the same place, " in a
bad position."
THE LATE ATTEMPTED MURDER IN IRELAND.--
At the Capel-street Police-office on Monday, Joseph
Dwyer, the party charged with the attempt to murder
William Mulholland on Thursday evening last, was brought
up and the charge against him investigated. The pur-
chase of the pick-axe and the shovel by him, and also of the
pistol, powder, caps, was proved, and he was identified by
Mulholland as his assailant, and by the salesman at Hyam's
as the person who ordered the clothes. It was also proved
that, after being duly cautioned, he stated to the police that
he did not intend to kill the man. He was committed for
trial at the commission. Mr. Curran stated that the defence
would be insanity, and that he would clearly prove, at the
proper time,
that for the last twelve months Dwyer had
been of unsound mind.
DEATH FROM SUFFOCATION BY A PIECE OF
ROAST BEEF.—Yesterday Mr. Payne, the coroner for the
City of London, held an inquest at the Old Tavern, Great
on the body of Cornelius Picton Koagar. It
appeared the evidence of Mr. Joseph Butler, of Beer-
lane, Tower-street,T from
0
er ro-s treet, the deceased went into the coffee-room
of the Shades Tavern, and ordered some coffee, when he
suddenly dropped his head on the table. The landlord
immediately sent for a medical gentleman, who instantly
came, but found him dead. On making a post mortem
examination a solid piece of roast beef was found stuck in
his throat, which suffocated him, The jury returned a
verdict of "Accidental Death."