Page:Buddhist Birth Stories, or, Jātaka Tales.djvu/43

Rh Jew, about 1250, made a translation of a slightly different recension of the 'Kalilah and Dimnah' into Hebrew; and a third, John of Capua, turned this Hebrew version into Latin between 1263 and 1278. At about the same time as the Hebrew version, another was made direct from the Arabic into Spanish, and a fifth into Latin; and from these five versions translations were afterwards made into German, Italian, French, and English.

The title of the second Latin version just mentioned is very striking — it is "Æsop the Old." To the translator, Baldo, it evidently seemed quite in order to ascribe these new stories to the traditional teller of similar stories in ancient times; just as witty sayings of more modern times have been collected into books ascribed to the once venerable Joe Miller. Baldo was neither sufficiently enlightened to consider a good story the worse for being an old one, nor sufficiently scrupulous to hesitate at giving his new book the advantage it would gain from its connexion with a well-known name.

Is it true, then, that the so-called Æsop's Fables — so popular still, in spite of many rivals, among our Western children — are merely adaptations from tales invented long ago to please and to instruct the child-like people of the East? I think I can give an answer, though not a complete answer, to the question.