The Hope of the Katzekopfs

Staffordshire!’ And who may he be? I

wedded, look you, to immortal verse. Doctor Corbet, Bishop of Norwich,—‘the wittie Bishop,’ as King James the First was wont to call him—conferred on me the title of Registrar-General to the Fairies. Have you never read his ‘Fairies’ Farewell’? They say, indeed, that his poems, like many better things, are little read now-a-days; but you will find it among the ballads collected by a congenial spirit (a prelate likewise), Bishop Percy o

have left o

trar th

eserve the

th wise

of their

hat I co

store; con t

am for t

Churne, of S

d and pr

eale, can me

s both ol

m all giv

ye for hi

he Fairie

if it we

h the Bishop-Poet spake of me. I warrant you,

your riddle. You would not have us believe, would you, that a man who was born in the sixteenth century, was story-telling in the nineteenth? I fear you must be

that you have a larger share of the unbelief of this dull, plodding, unimaginative, money-getting,

mitted yourself to be, carried you off some moonlight night, two hundred years ago, and

wever, I do not say but that it may be even as you suppose. Perhaps, while time and

fifty years old! Why, your face must be a wilderness of wrinkles! And your dress, how strange and antiquated

be the case, it is more than probable that I h

g us! What advances have been ma

is another question. However, of this I can assure you, gentle reader, that I would

y do you

es; whether they have yet patience to glean the xviilessons of wisdom, which lurk beneath the surface of legendary tales, and the chronicles of the wild and supernatural; whether their hearts can be moved to noble and chivalrous

nny Magazines, and such like stores of (so called) useful knowledge, will condescend to read a Fable and its moral, or to interest

is my

Thames, and they are talking of a canal across the

not th

retail those ‘hundred merry pranks’ of Fairy-land, of wh

der, when I know how far your patience has carried you thro