Tales of the Fairies (1699)
Esdaile lists this book as Mme d'Aulnoy's and cites the Term
Catalogues, where one finds this notation: "trans. from the Fr. T.
Cockerill. 1699, 12°."[6] No
copies of this book are known, and Joseph Tucker has even assumed that
it was a bibliographical ghost.[7]
There are good reasons to believe, however, that the book did indeed exist
and that it contained four fairy tales, all in fact by Mme d'Aulnoy. When
the next collection of fairy tales appeared in England in Mme d'Aulnoy's
Diverting Works of 1707, the publisher said in the preface
that
there was already an edition of Mme d'Aulnoy's fairy tales ("first part") in
English but that it could not be obtained and was thus reprinted in the
Diverting Works, together with two other parts of her fairy
tales. He then placed symbols (daggers) in the table of contents by those
tales never before published in England. Four of the tales in this table stand
without such marking; these four tales come from Tome I of Mme
d'Aulnoy's French original, the 1697 Contes des fées.
The
omission of marks suggests that the four tales had already appeared in
English. It would appear, therefore, that the 1699 edition cited in the
Term Catalogues and by Esdaile was an actual book and not
a
ghost, and that it contained translations of the four tales of Tome I of Mme
d'Aulnoy's Contes des fées: Gracieuse et
Percinet, La Belle aux cheveux d'or, L'Oiseau
bleu, and Le Prince Lutin.