A further examination
of English nursery rhymes may result in some additions to our stock. I
reserve these for separate treatment in which I am especially
interested, owing to the relations which I surmise between the folk-tale
and the _cante-fable_.
Meanwhile the eighty-seven tales (representing some hundred and twenty
variants) in my two volumes must represent the English folk-tale as far
as my diligence has been able to preserve it at this end of the
nineteenth century. There is every indication that they form but a
scanty survival of the whole _corpus_ of such tales which must have
existed in this country. Of the seventy European story-radicles which I
have enumerated in the Folk-Lore Society's _Handbook_, pp. 117-35, only
forty are represented in our collection: I have little doubt that the
majority of the remaining thirty or so also existed in these isles, and
especially in England. If I had reckoned in the tales current in the
English pale of Ireland, as well as those in Lowland Scots, there would
have been even less missing.
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