spared a great deal of tediousness, some positive failures, and the spoiling, or at least the blotting and marring, of many excellent situations. But to praise the good points of fairy stories, from the brief consummateness of _Le Chat Botte_ to the longer drawn but still perfectly golden matter of _La Biche au Bois_, would really be superfluous. One loathes leaving them; but one has to do it, so far as the more unsophisticated part of them is concerned. Yet the duty of the historian will not let him be content with these, and, to vary "The Brave Lord Willoughby" a little, "turning to the [_others_] a thousand more," he must "slay," or at least criticise. [Sidenote: The main _Cabinet des Fees_--more on Mme. d'Aulnoy.] He who ventures on the complete _Cabinet des Fees_[226] in its more than forty volumes, will provide himself with "cabin furniture" of nearly as good pastime-quality, at least to my fancy (and yet I may claim to be something of a Balzacian), as the slightly larger shelf-ful which suggested itself to the fancy of Mr. Browning and provoked (_as_ "cabin furniture") the indignation of Mr. Swinburne. But he had better look over the contents before he takes it on board, or he will find himself, if his travelling library is anything like as large as that of the patriarch Photius, in danger of duplication. For the _Cabinet_ holds, not merely the _Arabian Nights_ in the original translation of Galland, but also Hamilton: as well, of course, as much of what we may call the classical fairy matter proper on which we have already dwelt, and which is known to all decent people. Still, he will find more of Mme. d'Aulnoy than, unless he is already something of an expert, he already knows, and perhaps he will not be entirely rejoiced at the amplification. She wrote more or less regular heroic romances,[227] which are very inferior to her fairy tales; and though these are not in the _Cabinet_, she sometimes "mixes the kinds" rather disastrously in shorter pieces. The framework of _Don Gabriel Ponce de Leon_, which enshrines the sad but charming "Golden Sheep," and a variant of _Cendrillon_, is poor stuff; and _Les Chevaliers Errans_ only shows what we knew before, that the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not the time or the place in which to find the loved one, if that loved one is mediaeval. Still, this invaluable lady does generally reck and exemplify her own immortal rede. "Il me semble," says Prince Marcassin to the fairies, "a vous entendre, qu'il ne faut pas meme croire ce qu'on voit." And they reply, "La regle n'est pas toujours generale; _mais il est indubitable que l'on doit suspendre son jugement sur bien des choses, et penser qu'il peut entrer quelque chose de Feerie dans ce que nous paroit de plus certain_." [Sidenote: Warning against disappointment.]