A FAIRY TALE. BY SARA COLERIDGE. WITH AN INTRODUCTORY PREFACE BY LORD GOLERIDGE, LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS. HENRY S. KING & Co., 65 CORNHILL & 12 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON. 1874. 251. b. 168. PREFACE. PHANTASMION, the product of the enforced leisure on a sick bed of Sara Coleridge, was first given to the world in 1837; and although the book received warm and hearty commendation both privately and publicly from those who read it, the success which then attended it neither equalled in any degree its own singular merit, nor was what might have been expected, from the approbation the book met with at the hands of those best qualified to judge. I have always believed that this was in great measure owing to the mode of its publication. It was an expensive book, with no author's name, without a single illustration, and the edition was limited to two hundred and fifty copies. The publisher, Mr Pickering, doubted apparently the possibility of its being popular ; and except that he printed it with all the care and beauty which marked every book he put forth, he seems almost to have determined that, as far as depended upon him, it should have no chance of becoming so. A small edition of a long fairy tale, by an unnamed author, |