It might, of course, be said with truth that the Odyssey, and parts of most of the world's Epics are literary expansions of the _Märchen_. But these, we may be confident, were not made of set literary purpose. Neither Homer, nor any poet of the French _Chansons de Geste_, cried, 'Here is a good plot in a child's legend, let me amplify and ennoble it.' The real process was probably this: adventures that from time immemorial had been attributed to the vague heroes of _Märchen_ gradually clustered round some half divine or heroic name, as of Heracles or Odysseus, won a way into national traditions, and were finally sung of by some heroic poet. This slow evolution of romance is all unlike what occurs when a poet chooses some wild-flower of popular lore, and cultivates it in his garden, when La Fontaine, for example, selects the Fable; when the anecdote is developed into the _fabliau_ or the _conte_, when Apuleius makes prize of _Cupid and Psyche_ (a _Märchen_ of world-wide renown), when Fénelon moralises the fairy tale, or Madame d'Aulnoy touches it with courtly wit and happy humour, or when Thackeray burlesques it, with a kindly mockery, or when Dr. Frederik van Eeden, or Dr. Macdonald, allegorises the nursery narratives. To moralise the tale in a very ancient fashion: Indian literature was busy to this end in the Buddhist Jatakas or Birth-stories, and in the _Ocean of the Stream of Stories_. Mediæval preachers employed old tales as texts and as illustrations of religious and moral precepts. But the ancient popular fairy tale, the salt of primitive fancy, the drop of the water of the Fountain of Youth in modern fiction, began its great invasion of literature in France, and in the reign of Louis XIV. When the survivors of the _Précieuses_, when the literary court ladies were some deal weary of madrigals, maxims, _bouts-rimés_, 'portraits,' and their other graceful bookish toys, they took to telling each other fairy tales.[1] On August 6, 1676, Madame de Sévigné tells her daughter that at Versailles the ladies _mitonnent,_ or narrate fairy tales, concerning the Green Isle, and its Princess and her lover, the Prince of Pleasure, and a flying hall of glass in which the hero and heroine make their voyages. It is not certain whether these exercises of fancy were based on memories of the _Pentamerone_, and other semi-literary Italian collections of Folk-Tales, or whether the witty ladies embroidered on the data of their own nurses. As early as 1691, Charles Perrault, inventing a new _genre_ of minor literature, did some Folk-Tales into verse, and, in 1696, he began to publish his famous _Sleeping Beauty_, and _Puss in Boots_, in Moetjens's miscellany, printed at the Hague. In 1696 Mlle. L'Héritière put forth a long and highly embroidered fairy tale, _Les Enchantements de l'Eloquence_, in her _Bizarrures Ingénieuses_ (Guignard), while Perrault's own collected _Contes de ma Mère l'Oye_ were given to the world in 1697 (Barbin, Paris).