The artificial fairy tale was in the eighteenth century a regular literary _genre_, a vehicle, now for satire, now for moralities. The old courtly method has died out, naturally, but the modern _Märchen_ has taken a hundred shapes, like its own enchanters. We have Kingsley's _Water Babies_, a fairy tale much too full of science, and of satire not very intelligible to children, and not always entertaining to older people, but rich in tenderness, poetry, and love of nature. We have the delightful _Rose and the Ring_, full of characters as real to us, almost, as Captain Costigan, or Becky Sharpe. Angelica is a child's Blanche Amory; Betsinda is a child's Laura Bell, Bulbo is the Foker of the nursery, and King Valoroso a potentate never to be thought of without respectful gratitude. How noble is his blank verse. --'He laid his hands on an anointed king, --Hedzoff! and floored me with a warming pan!' Then we have the _Phantastes_ of Dr. Macdonald, which the abundant mysticism does not spoil, a book of poetic adventure perhaps too unfamiliar to children. To speak of Andersen is superfluous, of Andersen so akin in imagination to the primeval popular fancy; so near the secret of the heart of childhood. The _Tin Soldier,_ the _Ugly Duckling_ and the rest, are true _Märchen_, and Andersen is the Perrault of the North, more grave, more tender, if less witty, than the kind Academician who kept open for children the gardens of the Louvre. Of other modern _Märchen_, the delightful, inimitable, irresponsible nonsense of _Alice in Wonderland_ marks it the foremost. There has been, of course, a vast array of imitative failures: tales where boisterousness does duty for wit, and cheap sentiment for tenderness, and preaching for that half-conscious moral motive, which, as Perrault correctly said, does inform very many of the true primeval _Märchen_. As an inveterate reader of good fairy tales, I find the annual Christmas harvest of them, in general, dull, imitative,--_Alice_ is always being imitated,--and, in brief, impossible. Mere vagaries of absurdity, mere floods of floral eloquence, do not make a fairy tale. We can never quite recover the old simplicity, energy, and romance, the qualities which, as Charles Nodier said, make Hop o' my Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard 'the Ulysses, the Figaro and the Othello of children.' There may possibly be critics or rather there are certain to be critics, who will deny that the modern and literary fairy tale is a legitimate _genre_, or a proper theme of discussion. The Folklorist is not unnaturally jealous of what, in some degree, looks like Folk-Lore. He apprehends that purely literary stories may 'win their way,' pruned of their excrescences, 'to the fabulous,' and may confuse the speculations of later mycologists. There is very little real danger of this result. I speak, however, not without sympathy; there was a time when I regarded all _contes_ except _contes populaires_ as frivolous and vexatious.