THE FABLES or BIDPAI BIBHOTHEdUE DE CARA.BAS Five hundred and fifty copies of this Edition have been printed, five hundred of which are for sale. Cables of 16t&pai. SEEN BY PRESERVATION SERVICES BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON a earliest (Engltsfj toton of tfje 3fable0 of Bifcpai, "The Moral! Philosophic of Dom" by Sir Thomas North, whilom of Peterhouse, Cambridge Now again edited and induced by Joseph Jacobs, late of St. John's College, Cambridge. LONDON. M.D.CCCLXXXVIIL PUBLISHED BY DAVID NUTT, IN THE STRAND. j MY DEAR WIFE. PREFACE. OF late years nearly all the Western versions of " " the Fables of Bidpai have been printed, either again or for the first time. The Greek, the He brew, the Old Spanish, the German, the Latin, the Croatian, and the Old Slavonic have been given afresh to the world, and it seemed fitting that the earliest English version, made by Sir Thomas North of Plutarch fame, should also be made to see the light of day again. On my suggesting this to Mr. Nutt, he readily consented " to add a reprint of the book to his Bibliotheque de Carabas," and the present volume is the result. The need of a reprint of North's version became, evident during the search for a copy of the ori ginal. Mr. Quaritch has been on the look-out for me for the last five years in vain. Of the first edition the British Museum, Cambridge viii PREFACE. University, Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Lambeth Libraries do not possess a copy, nor are the noble collections of the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Huth, or the late Mr. Dyce richer in this respect than the public libraries. The only com plete copy of the first edition that I have been able to trace is in the Bodleian, and the present volume has been printed from a transcript of this, though I have collated with an imperfect copy possessed by Dr. Williams' Library. There was a second edition in 1601, but this is even rarer, only the British Museum copy being known to me. The first edition received the license of the Stationers' Company sometime towards the end of 1569 or the beginning of 1570, as we learn from the entry in their books (Arber Transcript " i. fol. 184), Eecevyd of henry Denham for his lycense for pryntinge of a boke intituled phelo- phye (sic) of the Auincyant fFaythers xijd." It is a small quarto of 116 leaves, divided into four parts, of which the last two have separate title- pages, as in the Italian original : the last is dated 1570. We have exactly reproduced its typogra phical peculiarities for the first forty pages, after which the whole book was in gothic, for which PREFACE. ix we have substituted ordinary type, as less trying to the eyes. The book is illustrated with wood cuts imitated from the Italian. We have repro duced nine of the quaintest and most charac teristic. I believe I have opened a new chapter in the already voluminous Bidpai literature by show ing that the illustrations of the Fables were regarded as an integral part of the text, and were "translated," so to speak, along with it. We have therefore given an example of these traditional illustrations from the editio princeps of the Latin version of John of Capua (p. Ixiii.). From the other end of the world we give as a frontispiece to the volume one of the Indian designs which adorn the fine Persian MS. of the Fables preserved at the British Museum (Add. MS., 18,579). This was executed in 1610 for Tana Sahib, the last Kajah of Golconda (See Rieu, Cat. Pers. MSS. p. 756). The plate represents the first meeting of Dimna and Sen- esba, the two chief actors in the main story, and may be contrasted with the representation of the same personages given in the English text on p. 100. It remains to perform the pleasant task of x PREFACE. thanking those to whom this volume owes its external attractions or internal correctness. My best thanks are due to Mr. E. Burne-Jones for the beautiful design which forms the frontispiece to the book itself, and embodies the ideal of Oriental Tradition. The Duke of Devonshire was good enough to send his copy of the Italian original to the British Museum for comparison, and the Trustees of Dr. Williams' Library gave me faci of lities for collating with their precious copy the first edition. INTRODUCTION. " Pilpay, sage indien. Sa livre a 6te traduit dans toutes les langues. Les gens du pays le croient fort ancien et originel a I'fyard d'jfrsope si ce n'est Esope lui- me'me." LA FONTAINE, Avertissement au second recuiel, 1678. THE work I am to introduce to the reader is the earliest English representative of a cycle of stories which has passed into every civilised tongue, and into many not civilised. The bare description " " of the Morall Philosophic of Doni will suffice to indicate how wide a traveller it had been before it reached these shores. It is the English version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew trans lation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian original. And this enume ration only indicates one of many paths which these fables took to reach Europe. To trace these paths is a fascinating pursuit for the bibliographer xii INTRODUCTION. and for him alone. Luckily, bibliographical work, which is so necessary but so dry, needs only to be done once if done well, and the work in this case has been done admirably by the late Mr. Keith-Falconer in the introduction to his " translation of the later Syriac version of Bid- pai's Fables" (Cambridge, Pitt Press, 1885).* I have endeavoured to summarise the seventy erudite pages which he has taken to enumerate the various translations and editions in the accom panying genealogical table. From this I calcu late that the tales have been translated into thirty-eight languages, in 112 different versions, which have passed into about 180 editions. We must not, however, dismiss the earlier stages of the history of the Fables so summarily. In these days, research after paternity in such matters is encouraged rather than forbidden in the code of scholarship. In the present instance, * A less complete enumeration is given in Table II., attached to Mr. T. Rhys Davids' translation of the Jataka Tales (Triibner, 1880). Table I. deals with the - Indian variants with greater fulness than in Mr. Keith Falconer's work. I have included some of these, as well as a few unconsidered trifles that had escaped the notice of these two scholars in Schultens, Graesse, the British Museum Catalogue, and Landau, Quellen des Decamerone. THE INDIAN ORIGINAL. xiii the search is rendered peculiarly difficult, and therefore fascinating, by the fact that the Indian original has disappeared, and its features can only be guessed at by the family likeness shown in its earliest descendants. By combining the common features of the nearest of kin to the Sanskrit original the Old Syriac, the Arabic and the Tibetan versions Professor Benfey has pro duced a "composite portrait" of the original (Introduction to Kalilag, pp. vi.-x.) From this it appears that the source of this multifarious " literature was a Mirror for Princes," in thir teen books of tales and fables connected together by an ingenious framework, which brought the stories to bear upon the problems of conduct. An Indian sage named variously in the versions Vishnucarman, Bidpai, Pilpay, or Sendebar, tells them to his king to incite him to virtue. It is in this device of a framework to connect the stories that the literary significance of the book consists, and it is owing to this that it has managed to keep the component tales together through so many vicissitudes. Many of the tales occur in another connection, and enclosed in another "frame," in the Jataka Tales, or Buddhist Birth Stories, which may detain xiv INTRODUCTION. us a moment, as they serve to establish the date of the original Bidpai, and throw some light on the framework device. These Jatakas are tales supposed to have been told by the Buddha, and to be in each case experiences undergone by him or witnessed by him during one or other of his former manifestations on earth. This is obviously a very convenient form by which to connect a number of stories even about birds, beasts, and fishes, since the Bodisat (or Buddha) is thought to have appeared in animal shape. Thus the or eleventh, LaJckhana Jatdka (Rhys-Davids, p. 194), begins : "At that time the Bodisat came to life as a deer," and it has been calculated that, of the 550 Birth Stories, 108 relate to the appearances of the Buddha as a monkey, deer, lion, wild duck, snipe, elephant, cock, eagle, horse, bull, serpent, iguana, rat, jackal, &c. (I.e. Table is therefore YIL p. ci.) It probable that most of these Fables were first brought into connection with one another as Birth Stories of the Buddha, and some of them may actually have been com posed by him, as it was clearly his custom to inculcate moral truths by some such apologues. Benfey had already seen the Buddhistic tone of the whole collection (Pant, i p. xi), and Mr. THE JATAKAS. xv Khys-Davids has clinched the matter in his inter esting translation of a number of the Jatakas (Buddhist Birth Stories, vol. i., Triibner, 1880). These include two which have passed into North's version, and are reprinted at the end of the present Introduction.