There was something so peculiarly fascinating in that old belief, that ‘once upon a time’ the world was less practical in its facts than now, less commonplace and humdrum, less subject to the inexorable laws of gravitation, optics, and the like. What dramas it has yielded! What poems, what dreams, what delights! But since the knowledge of our maturer years destroys all that, it is with a degree of satisfaction we can turn to the consolations of the fairy mythology. The beloved tales of old are ‘not true’—but at least they are not mere idle nonsense, and they have a good and sufficient reason for being in the world; we may continue to respect them.