belong to literature, and must remain within their own portals. And so with customs. They may be pleasing and reveal some of the beauties of the older joyousness of life which has passed away, it is to be regretted, from modern civilisation; they may be revived in May-day celebrations, in pageants, in providing our schools with games which tell of the romance of living. But they do not belong to the lover of the beautiful or to the revivalists. Equally with the folk-tale they belong to science. And so also with superstitions. The Psychical Research Society, the spiritualists, the professional successors of the mediæval witch and wizard, may turn their attention to traditional superstitions; but the folklorist refuses to hand them over, and claims them for science. This use of traditional material for modern purposes is not the only danger to proper definitions. There is also its appearance in the earlier stages of literature. The traditional narrative, the myth, the folk-tale or the legend, is not dependent upon the text in which it appears for the first time. That text, as we have it, was not written down by contemporary or nearly contemporary authority. Before it had become a written document it had lived long as oral tradition.[183] In some cases the written document is itself centuries old, the record of some early chronicler or some early writer who did not make the record for tradition's sake. In other cases the written document is quite modern, the record of a professed lover of tradition. This unequal method of recording tradition is the main source of the difficulty in the way of those who cannot accept tradition as a record of fact. In all cases the test of its value and the interpretation of its testimony are matters which need special study and examination before the exact value of each tradition is capable of being determined. The date when and the circumstances in which a tradition is first reduced to literary form are important factors in the evidence as to the credibility of the particular form in which the tradition is preserved; but they are not all the factors, nor do they of themselves afford better evidence when they are comparatively ancient than forms of much later date and of circumstances far different. It cannot be too often impressed upon the student of tradition that the tradition itself affords the chief if not the only sure evidence of its age, its origin, and its meaning; for the preservation of tradition is due to such varied influences that the mere fact of preservation, or the particular method or date of preservation, cannot be relied upon to give the necessary authority for the authenticity of the tradition. Tradition can never assume the position of written history, because it does not owe its origin, but only its preservation, to writing.