delight which the rude child of nature takes in all animals,--in their slim
forms, their gleaming eyes, their fierceness, their nimbleness and cunning.
Such sagas would naturally have their origin in an age when the ideas of
shepherd and hunter occupied a great portion of the intellectual horizon of
the people; when the herdman saw in the ravenous bear one who was his
equal, and more than his equal, in force and adroitness, the champion of
the woods and wilds; when the hunter, in his lonely ramble through the
depths of the forest, beheld in the hoary wolf and red fox, as they stole
along,--hunters like himself,--mates, so to say, and companions, and whom
he therefore addressed as such.... So that originally this kind of poetry
was the exponent of a peculiar sort of feeling prevailing among the people,
and had nothing whatever to do with the didactic or satiric, although at a
later period satiric allusions began to be interwoven with it."

The story has been rewritten by many poets and prose writers. It has been
translated into almost every European language, and was remodeled from one
of the old mediaeval poems by Goethe, who has given it the form in which it
will doubtless henceforth be known. His poem "Reineke Fuchs" has been
commented upon by Carlyle and translated by Rogers, from whose version all
the following quotations have been extracted.

[Sidenote: The animals' assembly.] As was the custom among the Franks under
their old Merovingian rulers, the animals all assembled at Whitsuntide
around their king, Nobel the lion, who ruled over all the forest. This
assembly, like the Champ de Mars, its prototype, was convened not only for
the purpose of deciding upon the undertakings for the following year, but
also as a special tribunal, where all accusations were made, all complaints
heard, and justice meted out to all. The animals were all present, all
except Reynard the fox, who, it soon became apparent, was accused of many a
dark deed. Every beast present testified to some crime committed by him,