Page:Three hundred Aesop's fables (Townshend).djvu/15

Rh the characters of the animals, fictitiously introduced, are marked. While they are made to depict the motives and passions of men, they retain, in an eminent degree, their own special features of craft or counsel, of cowardice or courage, of generosity or rapacity.

These terms of praise, it must be confessed, cannot be bestowed on all the fables in this collection. Many of them lack that unity of design, that close connexion of the moral with the narrative, that wise choice in the introduction of the animals, which constitute the charm and excellency of true Æsopian fable. This inferiority of some to others is sufficiently accounted for in the history of the origin and descent of these fables. The great bulk of them are not the immediate work of Æsop. Many are obtained from ancient authors prior to the time in which he lived. Thus, the fable of the "Hawk and the Nightingale" is related by Hesiod; the "Eagle wounded by an Arrow winged with its own feathers," by Æschylus; the "Fox avenging his wrongs on the Eagle," by Archilochus. Many of them again are of later origin, and are to be traced to the monks of the middle ages: and yet this collection, though thus made up of fables both earlier and later than the era of Æsop, rightfully bears his name, because he composed