friendship, although Dickens was not at all blind to the eccentricities and exquisite personal funniness of his Danish guest. He told Andersen that his house at Gad's Hill was 'full of admiring and affectionate friends of yours, varying from three feet high to five feet nine," and he wrote him charming letters of which this is a very pleasant specimen, interesting from the point of view both of the writer and the recipient :

"Gad's Hill Place, 2nd September, 1857. "My DEAR ANDERSEN-I have been away from here--at Manchester-which is the cause of this slow and late reply to your two welcome letters.

"You are in your own home again by this time, happy to see its familiar face, I do not doubt, and happy in being received with open arms by all good Danish men, women, and children.

"Everything here goes on as usual. Baby (too large for his name this long while!) calls auntie all over the house, and the dogs come dancing about us, and go running down the green lanes before us, as they used to do when you were here. But the days are shorter, and the evenings darker, and when we go up to the Monument to see the sunset, we are obliged to go directly after dinner, and it gets dark while we are up there; and as we pass the grim dog, who rattles his chain, we can hardly see his dim old eyes, as we feed him with biscuit. The workmen, who have been digging in that well in the stable-yard so long, have found a great spring of clear bright water, and they got rather drunk when they found it (not with the water, but with some gin I gave them), and then they packed up their tools and went away, and now the big dog and the raven have all that place to themselves. The corn-fields that were golden, when you were here, are ploughed up brown; the hops are being picked; the leaves on the trees are just beginning to turn, and the rain is falling as I write, very sadly, very steadily. "We have just closed our labour in remembrance of poor Jerrold, and we have raised for his widow and daughter two thousand pounds. On Monday I am going away with Collins, for a fortnight or so, into odd corners of England, to write some descriptions for Household Words.' When I come back I shall find them dining here by lamplight. And when I come back I will write to you again.

"I never meet any of my friends whom you saw here but they always say: How's Andersen ? where's Andersen ?' and I draw imaginary pictures where you are, and declare that you desired to be heartily remembered to them. They are always pleased to be told this. I told old Jerdan so the other day, when he wrote to me asking when he was to come and see you!

"All the house send you their kind regards. Baby says you shall not be put out of the window when you come back. I have read To be or not to be,' and think it a very fine book, full of great purpose admirably wrought out, a book in every way worthy of its great author. Good-bye, dear Andersen. Affectionately your friend, CHARLES DICKENS."

But, although Dickens felt a genuine attachment to and admiration of Andersen, it is known that he was far from being blind to his extraordinary eccentricities his habit of jumping about; his tendency to mix port, claret, and sherry into one glass, and sip them off slowly, saying, as he stroked his stomach, "That good for him ;" his child-like way of throwing himself on the mercy of other people when the very smallest obstacle to comfort presented itself; and, not least, his wonderfully "casual" way of letting his correspondence take care of itself. His friends in Denmark were equally aware of all these funny little foibles, and here is a letter of great humour from the witty poet, Henrik Hertz, author of " King Réné's Daughter:"

"2nd April, 1858.

"Accept my heartiest thanks, dear friend, for the gift of your new Fairy Tales.'

"But do explain to me this new system of conveyance that you have invented for your parcels of books and letters. If it is as safe as it is convenient I shall certainly adopt it at once. Yesterday in the middle of the day two soldiers called here and put into my hands a parcel addressed to me, which they both had found in the street in Nyhavn, and therefore both wished to deliver. It was very fortunate that it was only found by two such conscientious people; for if a company had been going by, no doubt the whole troop would have felt it a duty to come marching up to me. I can quite understand how it was; you threw the packet out of window on the chance that some sympathetic soul or other would take it to its destination. But can one really here in the town treat books and letters as if they were children or paper kites, that can be thrown out in the certainty that somebody will take them on where they ought to go? Ought one to wait and watch till somebody comes and takes the packet up, or can one composedly go away at once? And are you sure that the practice is not in any way immoral or against the law?

"I could go on asking all sorts of questions, for I am quite fascinated by this new way of forwarding things. I have a devilish big packet that is to be taken to Randers by a skipper; but if I were only sure that it would go safely if I just threw it out of window, like a kite, why I should save myself the trouble "But in any case I hope that every one to whom such a discovery is sent, may, on opening the package, see such a charming contents as I did then. Your affectionate HENRIK HERTZ.

"P. S.-Excuse my sending you this letter in the old-fashioned way. But I am not yet experienced in the new."

A more serious weakness in Andersen, his inability to endure criticism, or to acknowledge the critic's right to touch his work at all, is commented on with striking tact and delicacy in a letter from Dr. Georg Brandes, the eminent historian of literature, whose volume on Lord Beaconsfield has just been translated for the English public. Brandes was just publishing, for the first time, that valuable critical study on Andersen which is now to be found in his volume of "Characteristics."

"Copenhagen, 19th July, 1869.

"DEAR SIR-Thanks for your kind letter. It was a real pleasure to me to see that you have taken my little essay in bonam partem. It was written with a good intention, but I have so long been accustomed to be rewarded by anything rather than thanks for what I write, that I was not at all sure how you would take it. "My last article will appear on Sunday. It is of the same length as the others. It attempts to put the development of your genius in a clear light.

"What I wrote about your relation to criticism was perfectly serious; but I am not the less fond of you on that account. You have injured the position of a critic in this little undeveloped country excessively, and it was not an easy position before. You have done all you could to spread the idea that envy is his inspiration, and that he goes about with a belt of serpents round his waist. I do not consider that in your stories you have made any clear distinction between good and bad criticism. The critic is for you the reasoner,' the sterile and useless critic aster. But yet there exists both an historical and a philosophical æsthetic science, which cannot endure that so many scribblers and braggarts should boast of the favours of the Muse, although they have never loosed her girdle. The true inspiration of the aesthetic critic is the flexible sympathy with which he alternately identifies himself with the most contrary minds, and minds of the most contrary nations. By the power of this sympathy he attempts to

feel again all the feelings that have lain at the basis of works of literature. A critic is a person who understands how to read, and who teaches others to read. It is an emphatic statement of this fact which I miss in your works, otherwise so precious to me. You stand on a pedestal in literature from which every word makes a thousand echoes. That you yourself have suffered under an insipid, unjust, and sometimes even loutish criticism, I know well; 1 myself, who, Heaven knows, in no other respect compare myself with you, have suffered under a similar one, and my expressed opinion as a free-thinker has and will in future expose me to more attacks than you have or ever can be assailed by. But it appears to me that you, in bitterness at what you have personally endured, have done injustice to the cultivators of a whole science. Therefore it was that I wrote what I did write. I quite allow that you have made a difference between severe and kindly judgment, but it seems to me that you have not drawn the line correctly. There is only one line, that between true and false, earnest and malignant criticism, and this latter the public, especially when supported by a great authority, only too easily confounds with the former.

"But here is my hand; nothing is further from me than to bear ill-will against you, to whom I owe a true intellectual enrichment. I have tried to do my little part in making people see what it is that Denmark possesses in you. If I have succeeded, I am well content Once more, thank you! Thank you, especially, for your kind wishes for my future. I, who know my powers, know that it will neither be great nor brilliant; but I do hope that it may be of some use to our literature, and that I may not disappear entirely without leaving a mark behind me. Your attached GEORG BRANDES."

The earlier collection, from which this interesting etter is taken, contains a great many letters which throw interesting light on their authors, if scarcely on Andersen. The correspondence from Fredrika Bremer displays the sentimental sweetness, gentle wit, and delicate style of the great Swedish novelist in a striking way. Her Introduction to Andersen was very curious. On his first visit to Sweden, as he was standing on the deck of a steamer in the Göta Canal, he remarked to the captain that his dearest hope in coming to Sweden was to see Frekrika Bremer. He was told that he would do well to resign this hope at once, for the lady was on the Continent. At the next town at which the steamer stopped, however, a little shy personage got in, and the Captain, hurrying to Andersen, said: You're in luck for that's Miss Bremer who has just come on board." Andersen lost no time in presenting himself to her, but, unfortunately, she had never heard of him, and was only stiffly civil. Upon this, Andersen produced one of his own volumes, and presented it to her. She disappeared, and after an hour or two, came up on deck again with a very beaming face, and said: “I know you now!" The acquaintance, thus oddly made, ripened into a life-long friendship. Very much as Andersen in his youth came to Fredrika Bremer, the Norwegian novelist Björnsen came to Andersen in his old age. The letters from Björnsen which are here printed are very characteristic of that egotistical and turbulent man of genius. He pours his tributes at Andersen's feet without the least reticence, and responds with stormy affection to the old Danish poet's cordiality. He exclaims: "I love you! I love you!" He weeps as he reads Andersen's poems, and all this vivacity is mixed up, into the oddest and the most Björnsen-like way, with

domestic details about his wife and children, with political theories and denunciations of public men, and with schemes for all sorts of poetical production. The letters from people of distinction outside Scandinavia are not as numerous as the foreign reader would wish. Andersen corresponded with literary persons in every capital of Europe, and we can but suppose that the desire to make the books attractive to a home audience has prevented the editors from borrowing from this rich store. From Andersen's wide circle of eminent friends in Germany, some interesting letters from Robert Schumann about the composition of music to the poems called "Glücksblume" are alone given. In the English section Charles Dickens contributes several interesting letters, but no other Englishman, although a good deal of space is needlessly taken up by printing the letters written to Andersen by a little Scotch girl, whose correspondence is neither very amusing nor particularly pretty in tone. A series of very pleasant letters from Madame Goldschmidt remind us that her long stay in England has not destroyed the purity of Jenny Lind's Swedish style; and remind us, also, of that charming little story that Andersen was so fond of telling; how one Christmas Eve he found himself in a little country town in Germany, where he had no acquaintance but Jenny Lind, who happened to be passing through the town in the opposite direction; and how he and Jenny Lind and her maid set up a Christmas-tree together, and celebrated their Scandinavian yule by telling stories and talking of their friends at home.

On the whole, it cannot be said that these two collections of correspondence tend in any great measure to modify our conception of the poet's character. Andersen was a man of singularly transparent nature, and he scarcely laid pen to paper without naïvely revealing some one or other of his idiosyncracies; and, besides the revelations of himself which he made in his " Fairy Tales" and his novels, his dramas and his books of travel, he wrote "The Wonder-story of my Life," one of the most beautiful pieces of autobiography ever composed. Unfortunately, what new points are revealed in these letters are mostly weaknesses, none of them in any way serious indeed, but little tiresome vanities and jealousies, the proofs of which Andersen's own simplicity and candour prevented him from destroying. It is true that the editors deserve our thanks for giving us one amusing piece of self-analysis, which has, properly speaking, no place in their collection, but which we should be very sorry to miss. Among Andersen's papers was found a little leaf in his handwriting, but without date, giving a minute phrenological description of his person. According to this analysis, he discovered in himself a great deal of love for children, of attachment, of humour, and of the desire to please; very little amativeness, or destructiveness, or love of acquiring money; no sense of mechanism, a fair amount of self-esteem, and a very large share of

good nature. Justice and reverence were but moderately developed, while hope was large, and ideality very large. He found in himself a great sense for the marvellous, and a great sense for words and languages. Wit was very large, casualty large, locality tolerably large, sense of colour very small. Music in great excess was balanced by a mediocre feeling for form. The reader will smile at these nice distinctions, but they are evidently made with care and sincerity, and they are not without value in estimating the character of the great author. E. W. G., in Temple Bar.

THE MOON AND ITS FOLK-LORE.

AN interesting relic of a primeval superstition of the Aryan race survives in the fanciful conception that the lunar spots are not meaningless specks, but representations of human beings. Everyone, says Mr. Baring-Gould,* knows that the moon is inhabited by a man with a bundle of sticks on his back, who has been exiled thither for many centuries. and who is so far off that he is beyond the reach of death. Dante calls him Cain; Chaucer speaks of him as undergoing punishment up there for theft, and gives him a thorn bush to carry; whereas Shakespeare, whilst assigning to him the thorn-load, by way of compensation allows him a dog for his companion. From general account, however, his offence seems not to have been stealing, but Sabbath-breaking—an idea derived from the Old Testament. Like the man mentioned in the Book of Numbers, he was caught gathering sticks on a Sunday, and for this act of disobedience, and as an example to mankind, was condemned to reside for ever in the moon, with his bundle on his back. A further legend identifies him with the figure of Isaac in the act of carrying a bundle of sticks for his sacrifice; while the jews have a Talmudical story that Jacob is in the moon, and they believe that his face is occasionly visible. This belief in the moon-man is found in most countries, and under a variety of forms. Thus the Swedish peasantry explain the lunar spots as representing a boy and a girl bearing a a pail of water between them, whom the moon once kidnapped and carried up to heaven-a legend existing also in Icelandic mythology. According to one German tale, a man and a woman stand in the moon-the man, because he strewed brambles and thorns on the church path, so as to hinder people from attending mass on Sunday morning; the woman, because she made butter on that day. The woman carries her butter-tub, and the man his

Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 1877, 191.

+ Fiske's Myths and Myth-makers, 1873, 27. Midsummer Night's Dream, act V. sc. 1; Tempest, act ii. sc. 2.