[230] _Ricdin-Ricdon_, one of those which pass between Coeur de Lion and Blondel, is of the same kind, is also good, and is longer.
[231] She seems, however (see vol. 37 as above), to have been a real person.
[232] The would-be anonymous compiler (he was really Gueulette, on whom _v. inf._) of this and the other collections now to be noticed, when acknowledging his sufficiently evident _supercherie_ and some of his indebtednesses (_e.g._ to Straparola), defends this on Edgeworthian principles. But though it is quite true that a healthy curiosity as to such things may be aroused by tales, it should be left to satisfy itself, not forestalled and spoilt and stunted by immediate information.
[233] The once very popular _Tales of the Genii_ (_v. inf._) which are often referred to by Scott and other men of his generation, seem to have dropped out of notice comparatively. We shall meet them here in French.
[234] The late Mr. Henley was at one time much interested in this point, and consulted me about it. But I could tell him nothing; and I do not know whether he ever satisfied himself on the subject. Lesage _is_ said (though I am not sure that the evidence goes beyond _on dit_) to have revised the work of Pétis de La Croix in the _Days_; and some of his own certainly corresponds to it.
[235] Or, as it was once put, with easy epigram, when the artificial fairy tale is not dreadfully improper it is apt to be dreadfully proper.
[236] Nothing suits the entire group better than the reply of the ferocious and sleepless but not unintelligent Sultan Hudgiadge, in the _Nouveaux Contes Orientaux_, when his little benefactress Moradbak says that she will have the honour to-morrow of telling him a _histoire Mongole_. "Le pays n'y fait rien," says he. And it doesn't.
[237] All of them, be it remembered, the work of Gueulette (_v. inf._).
[238] The recently recovered "episodes" of this are rather more like the _Cabinet_ stories than _Vathek_ itself; and perhaps a sense of this may have been part of the reason why Beckford never published them.
[239] He came to ask, or rather demand, Zibeline's hand for his master: and the fairy made his magnificence appear rags and rubbish.
[240] Mr. Toots's "I'm a-a-fraid you must have got very wet." When Courtebotte returns from his expedition, across six months of snow, to the Ice Mountain on the top of which rests Zibeline's heart, "many thousand persons" ask him, "_Vous avez donc eu bien froid?_"