These stories are all memories of childhood. As their more intimate title, “_Contes de ma Mère Loye_”, suggests, they were handed down for centuries, gathering new features by the way, till this boy of Perrault’s had them from his nurse. But no child could have written them as Perrault wrote. “Cinderella”—the “story of stories”: the boy could repeat it word for word; but if he had tried to set it down, he would have lost the thread at the point of transformation. Those dramatic strokes of the clock would have been forgotten in the music of the ball. This balance, this art of simplicity is the work of a man,—an academician, the writer who, in a French “Battle of the Books”, took up the cause of the Moderns against the Classics, and yet lived in the kindly reasonable humour that belongs to the Augustan Age.