Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who make a science of folk-lore.

The mark of them is that they fail to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale, even when it is a fairy-tale.

Since the old devotional doctors and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger, it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been conscious of the contrast themselves.

I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I find very fatiguing.

I do not mind a man not believing a story, but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression) by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point of the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie.
And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design.
He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really _a mariage de convenance_; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but not without passion) is not the French for "a marriage of convenience," any more than _hors d'oeuvre_ is the French for "out of work"; but may be more rightly rendered in English as "a suitable match." But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maid conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have thought the story worth telling if it had been.