if »?f^/^ *Mfll 1 " i 1 1 i ^Ut Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/fablesofaesopasf01aesouoft The Fables OP Aesop asibliotb^quc be Carabas Seriea. I. CUPID AND PSYCHE : The most Pleasant and Delect- able Tale of the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Done into English by William Addington, of University College in Oxford. With a Discourse on the Fable by Andrew Lang, late of Merton College in Oxford. Frontispiece by W. B. Richmond, and Verses by the Editor, May Kendall, J. W. Mackail, F. Locker-Lampson, and W. H. Pollock. (Ixxxvi. 65 pp.) 1887. Out ofprint. II. EUTERPE: The Second Book of the Famous History of Herodotus. Englished by B. R., 1584. Edited by Andrew- Lang, with Introductory Essays on the Religion and the Good Faith of Herodotus. Frontispiece by A. W. ToMSON ; and Verses by the Editor and Graham R. Tomson. (xlviii. 174 pp.) 1888. lo^f. Only a fezv copies left. III. THE FABLES OF BIDPAI : or, The MoraU Philo- sophie of Doni : Drawne out of the auncient writers, a work first compiled in the Indian tongue. Englished out of Italian by Thomas North, Brother to the Right Honorable Sir Roger North, Knight, Lord North of Kytheling, 1570. Now again edited and induced together with a Chronologico- Bibliographical Chart of the translations and adaptations of the Sanskrit original, and an Analytical Concordance of the Stories, by Joseph Jacobs, late of St. John's College in Cambridge. With a full-page Illustration by Edward BuRNE Jones, A.R.A., Frontispiece from a sixteenth cen- tury MS. of the Anvari Suhaili, and facsimiles of Woodcuts in the Italian Doni of 1532. (Ixxxii. 264pp.) 1888. i2.r. Zbc faMcB of ac5op, I. From the Bayeux Tapestry. Zbc jFa()lc6 of Hc0op as first printed by William Caxton in 14-84. with those of Avian, Alfonso and Poggio, now again edited and induced by Joseph Jacobs, I. History of the ^Esopic Fable. London. Published by David Nutt in THE Strand, m.d.ccclxxxix. TO MY BROTHERS SYDNEY, EDWIN, LOUIS TO WHOM I OWE ALL — Bsop. He sat among the woods, he heard The sylvan merriment ; he saw The pranks of butterfly and bird, Tlie humours of the ape, the daw. And in the Hon or the frog In all the life of moor and fen. In ass and peacock, stork and log, He read simiHtudes of men. " Of these, from those," he cried, " we come. Our hearts, our brains descend from these." And lo ! the Beasts no more were dumb, of brakes and trees But answered out ; " " ' Not ours," they cried ; Degenerate, If ours at all," they cried again, " Ye fools, who war with God and Fate, Who strive and toil : strange race of men, " For we are neither bond nor free, For we have neither slaves nor kings. But near to Nature's heart are we, And conscious of her secret things. " Content are we to fall asleep. And well content to wake no more, We do not laugh, we do not weep. Nor look behind us and before ; " But were there cause for moan or mirth, 'Tis zve, not you, should sigh or scorn. Oh, latest children of the Earth Most childish children Earth has borne." They spoke, but that misshapen Slave Told never of the thing he heard. And unto men their portraits gave, In likenesses of beast and bird I A. L. PREFACE. @^^^^e^©ESOP'S Fables are the first •^4^ ^>^ book one reads, or at least ^1^^ the first tales one hears. It » seems, therefore, appropriate ^ to reproduce them in the first form in which they appeared among English books, translated and printed by William Caxton 'at Westmynster in thabbey ' dur- ing the spring of 1484, eight years before the discovery of America. Richard Crook- back had just doffed Buckingham's head, and was passing through his first and only Parliament the most intelligent set of laws that any English King had added to the Statute Book. Among these was one which excepted foreign printers from the restric- tions that were put upon aliens (i Ric. III. xii PREFACE. c. 9). At that moment Caxton was justify- ing the exceptional favour by producing the book which was to form his most popular production^ and indeed one of the most popular books that have issued from the English press. The interest of this reprint is literary rather than typographical : we are con- cerned here with Caxton as an author, to whom scant justice has been done, rather than with Caxton as a printer, whose name can never be uttered without the Oriental wish, ' God cool his resting-place.' To illustrate the history of printing nothing other than a facsimile reprint would suf- fice the student, and facsimile reprints of Caxton's heavy and rude Gothic type are unreadable. We have, however, repro- duced his text with such fidelity as we could command, even to the extent of retain- ing his misprints. If we have occasionally added some of our own, we shall be for- given by those who know the exhausting work of collating Gothic and ordinary type ; PREFACE. xiii we have blazoned Caxton's carelessness and our own on p. 318 of vol. ii. On the few occasions where a letter had slipped or had been elevated above the line, we have re- produced the peculiarity of the original in our text, as on pp. yg, 324. On the typographical peculiarities of the orifiinal—how it is composed in the fourth fount used by Caxton, and so on—we need not dilate here. Are not these things writ- ten, once for all, in the Chronicles of Blades (W. Blades' Life and Work of Caxlon, ii. 157-60), one of the few final books written ' ' by an Englishman ? Caxton's Esope is distinguished in the history of English print- ing by being the first book to possess initial letters. A facsimile of the first of these, appropriately enough the letter A, is given at the beginning of this Preface. In the original every fable is accompanied by a woodcut : we give a few of these, reduced in size : they claim no merit but that of the grotesque. Our text was copied from the Bodleian xiv PREFACE. exemplar. There are but two others—one, the only perfect text, in the Queen's library, and the other at the British Museum : the rest of the copies have been thumbed out of existence. I have corrected proofs from the Museum copy, having had all facilities given me for the purpose by the courtesy of Mr. Bullen. In the original the Fables are preceded by the apocryphal Life of ^sop attributed to Planudes. This belongs to quite another genre of writing — the Noodle literature. To have included this would have extended the book, already stretching beyond the prescribed limits of the series in which it appears, by nearly lOO pages. I had there- fore to choose whether to omit this or to leave out the Fables of Avian, Alphonse and Poggio, which have closer connection with the Fables of -^sop. I have elected to begin with folio xxvj of the original, passing over the Life of ^sop, with the exception of its first sentence, out of which has been concocted a title-page to the text. PREFACE. XV In the Introduction I had first to give the latest word of literary science,—there is such a thing,—on the many intricate questions connected with the provenance and history of the ^Esopic Fable. I have endeavoured to bring within moderate com- pass the cardinal points of a whole literature of critical investigation which has not been brought within one survey since Edelestand du Meril made a premature attempt to do so in 1854. Since his time much has been cleared up which to him was obscure—not- ably by Benfey and Fausboll on the Oriental sources, by Crusius on Babrius, by Oesterley and Hervieux on the derivates of Phaedrus, and by Mall on Marie de France. Owing to their labours the time seemed to me ripe to make a bold stroke for it, and to give for the first time a history of the ^sopic Fable in the light of modern research. I could only do this by making an attempt to fill up the many gaps left by my predecessors, and to supply the missing links required to con- nect their investifrations. On almost all the — xvi PREFA CE. knotty points left undecided by them—the Hterary source of Phaedrus—who wrote ^sop —and why his name is connected with the Fables—the true nature of Libyan Fable, and the identity of its putative parent, Kybises the source of Tahnndic Fable and its crucial importance for the ancient history of the Fable—the Indian origin of the Proverbs of Agur (Prov. xxx.) —the conduit- pipe by which the Indian Jatakas reached the Hellenic world and the common source of the Jatakas and the Bidpai—the origin of the Morals of Fables—the determination of the Indian elements in Latin Fable—the exist- ence of a larger Arabic ^Esop^ and its re- lations to the collections of Marie de France and Berachyah ha-Nakdan, and to Ar- menian Fable—the identification of Marie's immediate source, Alfred—the date and domicile of Berachyah ha-Nakdan—the dis- tinction between Beast-Fable and Beast- Satire—on all these points I have been able to make suggestions more or less plausible, which will at the worst afford ob- PREFA CE. xvii jectives for further researchj and make the ^Esopic problem more definite henceforth.