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And here I would remark, as allied to this subject, that folklore is as yet far from being understood in all its fulness. In France, for example, no scholar seems to have got beyond the idea that it consists entirely of traditions populaires, necessarily ancient. In England we have advanced further, but we are still far from realizing that with every day there springs up and grows among the masses that which in days to come will be deeply interesting, as expressing the spirit of the age. This accretive folklore is just as valuable as any—or will be so—and it should be gathered and studied, no matter what its origin may be. So of this book of mine, I express the conviction that it contains many tales which have, since the days of Dante, and many perhaps very recently, been attached to the name of Virgil, yet do not consider them less interesting than those collected in the twelfth century by Gervais of Tilbury, Neckham, and others. In fact, these here given actually contain far more ancient and curious traditional matter, because they have not been abridged or filed down by literary mediæval Latinists into mere plots or anecdotes as contracted as the “variants” of a modern folklorist. The older writers, and many of the modern, regarded as ugly excrescence all that did not belong, firstly, to scholarship or “style”; secondly, to the fact or subject in hand. Thus, Lorenzo Selva gives a witch story with six incantations, which are far more interesting than all the washy poetry in his book, but is so ashamed of having done so, that he states in a marginal note that he has only preserved them to give an idea of “the silliness of all such iniquitous trash”—the “iniquitous trash” in question being evidently of Etrusco-Roman origin, to judge from form and similarity to other ancient spells. In these later Virgilian tales there has been no scruple, either as regards literary elegance or piety, to prevent the chronicler from giving them just as they were told, the “sinful and silly” incantations, when they occurred, being faithfully retained, with all that can give an idea of the true spirit of the whole. The mean fear of appearing to be vulgar, or credulous, or not literally “genteel,” has caused thousands of such writers to suppress traditions worth far more than all they ever penned.