Page:The fables of Aesop, as first printed by William Caxton in 1484, with those of Avian, Alfonso and Poggio. Vol 1.djvu/33

 Rh of the three. There is first the "Romulus" itself, consisting of eighty-three fables divided in the Vulgate edition rather irregularly in four books; the earliest MS. of this (the Burneian in the British Museum) dates from the tenth century. Then comes a recension represented in a MS. formerly at Wisseburg, now at Wolfenbüttel, containing eighty-two fables and known as the "Æsopus ad Rufum." Finally there is a collection of sixty-seven Romulean fables first published by Nilant in 1709, and known accordingly as the "Anonymus Nilanti," but now ascertained to have been compiled by the chronicler Ademar de Chabannes (988-1030), before his departure for the Holy Land in 1029. These three collections, "Romulus," "Æsopus ad Rufum," and the Æsop of Ademar, represent three stages