Page:The fables of Aesop, as first printed by William Caxton in 1484, with those of Avian, Alfonso and Poggio. Vol 1.djvu/218

 I90 ^SOP IN ENGLAND.

^sop is one of the five if they reach to so many,* Merely regarded from the number of editions it went through,! Caxton's ^sop was his most popular production. But the popu- larity of such a book as ^sop is not to be judged by the number of reprints any particular version of it goes through. To take a modern instance, booksellers tell us that the only book of fairy tales that will take with the general public is "Grimm's Goblins." Yet there is no particular version of this that rules the book- market, and it is rather the number of versions that affords the strongest testimony to their popularity. So with iEsop ; it is the number of competing adaptations that speaks most clearly for its hold on the popular mind. It is of course impossible for me here to go through all these, and I must content myself with point-

Ji]sop (selections in reading-books) and Eobinson Crusoe are, so far as I can think, the only really j^opular books throughout Europe, i.e., which every European who can read has read. I would add The Pilgrims Progress, but fear that English prepossessions cause me to exaggerate its wide-spread popularity. (I doubt, e.g., whether it is much read in Russia.)
 * The Bible (i.e., Genesis, some Psalms and the Gospels),

t Six, the princeps (14S4), Tynson's (1500), Waley's (1570), Hebb'stwo (1634, 1647), and Roper's (1658),