It will be seen that this book is not milk for babes, but meat for strong men.  Among the tales are some—­and those, perhaps, the most interesting—­which Mr. Dasent justly characterizes as “intensely heathen,” and yet in which the Saviour of the world or his apostles appear as interlocutors or actors, which alone unfits the volume for the book-table of the household room.  We are led to insist upon this trait of the collection the more, because the translator’s choice of language often seems to be the result of a desire to adapt himself to very youthful readers,—­though why should even they be led to believe that such phrases as the following are correct by seeing them in print?—­“Tore it up like nothing”; “ran away like anything”; “it was no good” [i.e. of no use]; “in all my born days”; “after a bit” [i.e. a little while]; “she had to let him in, and when he was, he lay,” etc.; “the Giant got up cruelly early.”  These, and others like them, are profusely scattered through the tales, apparently from the mistaken notion that they have some idiomatic force.  They jar upon the ear of the reader who comes to them from Mr. Dasent’s admirably written Introductory Essay.

The book is one which we can heartily recommend to all who are interested in popular traditions for their own sake, or in their ethnological relations.

* * * * *

Love, From the French of M.J.  Michelet.  Translated from the Fourth Paris Edition, by J.W.  Palmer, M.D., Author of “The New and The Old,” “Up and Down the Irawaddi,” etc.

M. Michelet perhaps longs, like Anacreon, to tell the story of the Atrides and of Cadmus, but here we find him singing only of Love.  It is a surprise to us that the historian should have chosen this subject;—­the book itself is another surprise.  It starts from a few facts which it borrows from science, and out of them it builds a poem,—­a drama in five acts called Books, to disguise them.  Two characters figure chiefly on the stage,—­a husband and a wife.  The unity of time is not very strictly kept, for the pair are traced from youth to age, and even beyond their mortal years.  Moral reflections and occasional rhapsodies are wreathed about this physiological and psychological love-drama.

Here, then, is a book with the most taking word in the language for its title, and one of the most distinguished personages in contemporary literature for its author.  It has been extensively read in France, and is attracting general notice in this country.  Opinions are divided among us concerning it; it is extravagantly praised, and hastily condemned.

On the whole, the book is destined, we believe, to do much more good than harm.  Admit all its high-flown sentimentalism to be half-unconscious affectation, such as we pardon in writers of the Great Nation,—­admit that the author is wild and fanciful in many of his statements, that he talks of a state of society of which it has been said that the law is that a man shall hate his neighbor and love his neighbor’s wife,—­admit all this and what lesser faults may be added to them, its great lessons are on the side of humanity, and especially of justice to woman, founded on a study of her organic and spiritual limitations.