Between 1690 and 1790, there is little change in “The Pleasant History of Thomas Hickathrift”,[19] and not a trace in print of the “astonishing image” that Coleridge remembered: the “whole rookery that flew out of the giant’s beard, scared by the tremendous voice with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom Hickathrift”.[20] The nearest thing to it (in a chap-book of 1780) is the likening of the giant’s head, when it was off, to “the root of a mighty Oak.” But this image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child, recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that had not his giant; nor indeed is Jack’s fight with Blunderbore a more engrossing spectacle than Tom Thumb dancing a Galliard on the Queen’s left hand.[21]