effected a forcible entry into the giant’s premises, robbed the amiable but stertorous Blunderbore of the most valuable of his effects. Here, then, is a case in point of a person of retiring habits being assaulted simply because he was of gigantic size and strength, and of the public condoning the assault on that account alone. It is contended, I know, that Jack was incited to his crimes by a cock-and-bull story about the giant’s castle having belonged to Jack’s father, told to the boy by an old woman whom he chanced to find loitering about his mother’s cottage, — with one eye, depend upon it, all the time on the linen spread out on the hedge. But it was just like the vagabond’s impudence to foist her nonsense on a mere child. For after all, how could Jack’s father have had a castle in the clouds, unless he had been a magician? — in which case Jack himself was little better, and his mother, by presumption, a witch; in which case they ought all to have been ducked in the horse-pond together.
Whether this Jack was the same person who, in afterlife, settled down to industrious habits, and, presumably unassisted, built a House for himself, chiefly remarkable for the zoological experiences in which it resulted, I am unable to determine. But looking to the antecedents of the Giant-killer, his laziness at home, and his unthrifty bargain in that matter of his mother’s cow, I should hesitate, even with the memory of Alcibiades’s conversion to Spartan austerity in my mind, to believe in such a reformation as this, of a young burglar turning into a middle-aged and respectable householder. In the mean time it is noteworthy that the Jack of the Beanstalk was a boy of forward and larcenous habits, that he committed an unprovoked series of outrages upon a
