PREFACE

with two exceptions only, those which
delighted our fathers and grand-
fathers in their childhood.

In the form in which we havethem they
are not older than the end of the seven-
teenth century. The majority of them
were written by Charles Perrault, whose collection
of Fairy Tales appeared in 1697, dedicated to one
of the royal family of France. It contained ‘ Blue
Beard,’ ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Puss in Boots,’
‘Riquet and his Tuft,’ ‘Hop-o’-my-Thumb,’ ‘ Little
Red Riding-Hood,’ ‘Cinderella,’ “The Wishes,’ etc.
To each of these tales was added a moral in bad
verse. The morals have been forgotten, the tales
are immortal. But although written by Perrault,
he did not invent the stories, they were folk-tales
which he wrote in simple words as they had been
told him in his childhood, or as he had seen them
in earlier collections.

‘The tales of Perrault,’ says Dunlop, ‘are the best
of the sort that have been given to the world.
They are chiefly distinguished for their simplicity,
for the naive and familiar style in which they
are written, and an appearance of implicit belief
on the part of the relater, which, perhaps, gives us

Vv

 

HE Fairy Tales in this little book are, PREFACE