Fairy Records. By Caroline Moscrop. (Chapman and Hall.)—These fairy stories
are absurd, without being really fanciful. Sometimes the " fairy " element is not assimilated at all with the tale in which it appears. In the first "record," for instance, we have a story in which everything is perfectly rational and collected and like ordinary life, except that the heroine, who is otherwise a well-behaved, somewhat common-place girl, has the habit of paying a visit, when the moon is at the full, to the Queen of the Mermaids. This, of course, gives a feeling of incongruity which is not present when everything is made to have something of the fairy character. It is like the strain of madness which sometimes occurs in a brain generally well ordered, and produces some- thing of the same repulsive effect. And where this fault is not to be found, we cannot see that there is any delicacy or skill in the writing. And there are some barbarisms in the matter of proper names which are simply monstrous. The Princess Frightina is bad enough, but what are we to say to a prince who has his name changed from Ignora- mus to Redeemus? There is something peculiarly ludicrous, too, in finding in the middle of some utterly impossible story such a very zeal- sounding name as Ellis Chandler, who, we are told, was the tutor of a fairy prince. These are little things, but exactly such as test a writer's capacity for such work. A fairy-tale written without taste is a very distressing affair indeed.
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