tales are, as a general rule, provided with exemplary morals. Virtue in them is, in the long run, almost always triumphant, and honest right seldom fails to overcome dishonest might. An exception must perhaps be made in the case of certain stories about thieves, in which the audacious ingenuity of the malefactor is called as a witness in his favor, and eventually procures for him not only an acquittal but a reward. But such freaks of popular fiction as the Highland "Shifty Lad," the German and Scandinavian "The Master Thief," and all the rest of their felonious kinsmen, belong to a peculiar class. They are, for the most part, purloiners who, like Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, have been rendered heroic by literature. There have been periods, moreover, in which properly regulated larceny was regarded in the light of an art or science, and these records of theft may date back to some such unprejudiced epoch. However this may be, they occur in most of the collections of the tales of the common people. But the modern introducers of folk-tales into polite society, the writers who, like Perrault, have made the fortune of the fairy-tale by rendering it neat and trim and fit to be received into drawing-rooms, have generally avoided subjects which might be looked upon with suspicion by stern moralists, and have selected as the heroes and heroines of their tiny dramas only such beings as regulate their lives in accordance with modern opinions about right and wrong. In the case of Perrault's "Contes" there is only one notorious exception to this rule. The true hero of "Le Maître Chat, on le Chat Botté," is not the miller's son who passes under the name of the Marquis de Carabas, but the cat which gains for him the hand of the princess, by means of several falsehoods and the murder of an unsuspecting and hospitable ogre. The success of the youthful peasant whom these manœuvres convert into a king's son-in-law, and that of the intriguing cat itself, which becomes a grandee, and no longer chases mice except by way of relaxation, do not lend themselves to edification. The story, as it runs in Perrault's pages, teaches a distinctly immoral lesson. It was all very well for the author to tack on to it a moralité, to the effect that industry and tact are of more use to young people than a rich inheritance. The conclusion at which an ordinary reader would arrive, if he were not dazzled by fairy-land glamor, would probably be that far better than either tact or industry on a master's part is the loyalty of an unscrupulous retainer of an imaginative turn of mind. The impropriety of this teaching is not balanced by any other form of instruction. What the story openly inculcates is not edifying, and does not secretly convey any improving doctrine,
But this great fault appears to be mainly due to the pains which its narrators have taken to make it presentable. They have ignored its proper beginning and its fitting termination, and they have thereby suppressed the whole of its moral significance. At the same time they have conferred upon it the characteristic attraction which it did not originally possess, and which has had much to do with its worldwide success, in the shape of the boots which the cat asked its master to make for it in order that it might tread thorn bushes unpricked. It is impossible to say whether this stroke of genius was due to Perrault's unassisted imagination, or to the fancy of the narrators from whom he drew so much of his inspiration. All that we know with certainty is that the animal which figures as the hero of the story wears, as a general rule, no boots and indeed is, in most instances, not only no booted cat, but no cat at all. In what seem to be the more archaic forms of the tale, the leading animal is usually a fox; and its behavior, throughout the whole of its history, appears to be more in accordance with vulpine than feline traditions. But of that more anon.