Fables and Fabulists: Ancient and Modern

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natural product of the times in which they were invented. In the early days, when free speech was a perilous exercise, and when to declaim against vice and folly was to court personal risk, the fable was invented, or resorted to, by the moralist as a circuitous method of achieving the end he desired to reach-the lesson he wished to enforce. The entertainment afforded

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wn conduct. In this way he is impressed and humbled without being affronted. When one, even though guilty, is openly and directly reproved for a misdeed, the stigma of

e instead of our own, we are still improved and amended, inasmuch as we have learned to despise some vice or folly which our unassisted judgment might have regarded more leniently.'[14] Dodsley, again, puts the matter finely when he says:[15] 'The reason why fable has been so much esteemed in all ages and in all countries, is perhaps owing to the polite manner in which its maxims are conveyed. The very article of giving instruction supposes at least a superiority of wisdom in the adviser-a circumstance by no means favourable to the ready admission of advice. 'Tis the peculiar excellence of fable to waive this air of superiority; it leaves the reader to collec

g grace. Without this it cannot be classed in the first order. Wanting in this quality, the fables of some writers who have attempted them are flat, st

at we are the counterpart or human representative of the fox with its low cunning, the loquacious jackdaw, the silly goose, the ungrateful viper, the crow to be cajoled by flattery, not to mention the egregious donkey? 'Satire,' says an acute writer,[16] 'is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.' Or, to parody a line of Young, 'All men think all men peccable but themselves.' To be sure, we might be willing, modestly perhaps, to admit that we who are singers can emulate the nightingale; that we even posses

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