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The apology offered for adding yet another book of Classical Stories to the endless existing versions, ancient and modern, in verse and in prose, is the plea that Vivien offers to Merlin for her "tender rhyme":

"It lives dispersedly in many hands,

And every minstrel sings it differently."

"You Greeks," said the Egyptian priest to Herodotus, "are always children," and Greece will never lose the secret of eternal youth. The tale of Troy divine, of Thebes and Pelops' line, the song of sweet Colonus, the most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby, Dido with a willow in her hand—these old stories of Homer and Sophocles, of Virgil and Ovid, have not lost their gloss and freshness. "The innocent brightness of a new-born day is lovely yet." They have been sung or said by Wace and Caxton, by Chaucer and Wordsworth, by Keats and William Morris; they have been adapted for young readers by Fénelon, by Niebuhr, by Kingsley, by Hawthorne, and yet the last word has not been said. Each new editor makes his own selection, chooses some new facet, or displays the jewel in a new light. As Sainte-Beuve remarks of "Don Quixote" and other world classics, "One can discover there something more than the author first of all tried to see there, and certainly more than he dreamed of putting there."

The present collection of Fifty Stories (there might well have been five hundred) makes no pretense either of completeness or of uniformity. Some of the contributors have followed closely the texts, others have given free play to their fancy, but in every case the myths have been treated simply as stories and no attempt has been made either to trace their origin or to indicate their religious or ethical significance. Most of the stories point their own moral, and need no more commentary than Jack the Giant-killer or the Sleeping Beauty. Young readers of to-day resent the sermons even of a Kingsley. From "Tanglewood Tales," a book that was the joy of our childhood, we have borrowed ten stories, and have taken the liberty of dividing into chapters and slightly abridging the longest of Hawthorne's Tales. All but one of the remaining forty are original versions.