The stories, which present themselves in this class of book about the inhabitants of Scotland and Wales, generally bear on the pilfering propensities occasioned by poverty, facilitated by geographical position, and justified by the sense of wrong. Their habits of parsimony were acquired by the Scots during centuries of miserable and oppressive misgovernment, and survived the stern necessity out of which they arose. The Welsh borderer, if one judges from the tales current about him in the old _facetiæ_, and from what history itself reveals, combined with an addiction to “lifting” and drunkenness a certain pusillanimity of spirit, which may be less injurious to the community, but is more to be contemned in the individual. He was too often, besides being a thief and a sot, a sneaking rascal. The nursery rhyme about Taffy is a piece of veracious tradition, an accurate reflex of the state of society in the lower grades in the Principality down to the last century, or even until Wales was brought within the operation of more stringent laws and a more efficient police. The humorous side of the numberless legendary anecdotes about the Cambro-Britons has been rendered abundantly visible by the gatherers of _Ana_; but when we regard this material in the aggregate, and explore a little beneath the surface, we arrive at the interesting discovery that in this, as in every other group of similar relics, there is a good deal deserving of careful study and collation, and that the whole body of such literature ought henceforth to be, much more than it has, I think, hitherto been, treated as a branch of the national Folk-lore. The merriments at the expense of Taffy, if they do not turn on his dishonesty, are pretty sure to deal with his passion for liquor and toasted cheese. Congruity and fitness are seldom respected in this line of literary work; and in one of the Hundred Merry Tales, St. Peter, upon the representation of God that the Welshmen in heaven, with their noisy ways, were a nuisance to all the rest, engages to get rid of them. He goes to the entrance-gates and shouts _Cause bobe!_ and forthwith every Cambro-Briton rushes out to see where his favourite delicacy is to be had. The sly apostle, the moment they are all outside, closes the door, and the Christian Elysium is its old self again. This whimsical piece of invention may be bracketed with a second narrated in the so-called _Tales of Skelton_, in which the other gastronomic failing of the Principality is amiably depicted; although the two stories are of different types, the one being a pleasant extravagance, while the other, which I now give, may have been an actual incident. It professes to be an account “how the Welshman did desire Skelton to aid him in his suit to the king for a patent to sell drink.”