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Folk Tales Every Child Should Know
When the traveller looks at Rome for the first time he does not realize that there have been several cities on the same piece of ground, and that the churches and palaces and other great buildings he sees to-day rest on an earlier and invisible city buried in dust beneath the foundations of the Rome of the Twentieth Century. In like manner, and because all visible things on the surface of the earth have grown out of older things which have ceased to be, the world of habits, the ideas, customs, fancies, and arts, in which we live is a survival of a younger world which long ago disappeared. When we speak of Friday as an unlucky day, or touch wood after saying that we have had good luck for a long time, or take the trouble to look at the new moon over the right shoulder, or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing, we are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which our remote forefathers lived. We do not realize how much of this vanished world still survives in our language, our talk, our books, our sculpture and pictures. The plays of Shakespeare are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of the English people in his time or in the times not long before him. If we could understand all these references as we read, we should find ourselves in a world as different from the England of to-day as England is from Austria, and among a people whose ideas and language we should find it hard to understand. In those early days there were no magazines or newspapers, and for the people as contrasted with the scholars there were no books. The most learned men were ignorant of things which intelligent children know to-day; only a very few men and women could read or write; and all kinds of beliefs about animals, birds, witches, fairies, giants, and the magical qualities of herbs and stones flourished like weeds in a neglected garden. There came into existence an immense mass of misinformation about all manner of things; some of it very stupid, much of it very poetic and interesting. Below the region of exact knowledge accessible to men of education, lay a region of popular fancies, ideas, proverbs, and superstitions in which the great mass of men and women lived, and which was a kind of invisible playground for children. Much of the popular belief about animals and the world was touched with imagination and was full of suggestions, illustrations, and pictorial figures which the poets were quick to use. When the king says to Cranmer in "Henry VIII:" "Come, come, my lord, you'd spare your spoons," he was thinking of the old custom of giving children at christenings silver or gilt spoons with handles shaped to represent the figures of the Apostles. Rich people gave twelve of the "apostles' spoons;" people of more moderate means gave three or four, or only one with the figure of the saint after whom the child was named. On Lord Mayor's Day in London, which came in November and is still celebrated, though shorn of much of its ancient splendour, the Lord Mayor's fool, as part of the festivities, jumped into a great bowl of custard, and this is what Ben Jonson had in mind when he wrote: ......Buy Now (To Read More)
Ebook Number: 15164
Author: Mabie, Hamilton Wright
Release Date: Feb 24, 2005
Format: eBook
Language: English
Editor: Mabie, Hamilton Wright, 1846-1916
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