The _Hitopadesa_, the fountain of poetic fables, with its
innumerable translations and modifications, seems to have had the
greatest charms for the Orientals. As it passed down the stream of time,
version after version, the ornament and machinery outgrew the moral
instruction, till it gave birth, at last, to such works of mere amusement
as the "Thousand and One Nights."

Fable slept, with other things, in the dark ages of Europe. Abridgments
took the place of the large collections, and probably occasioned the
entire loss of some of them. As literature revived, fable was
resuscitated. The crusades had brought European mind in contact with the
Indian works which we have already described, in their Arabic dress.
Translations and imitations in the European tongues were speedily
multiplied. The "Romance of the Fox," the work of Perrot de Saint Cloud,
one of the most successful of these imitations, dates back to the
thirteenth century. It found its way into most of the northern languages,
and became a household book. It undoubtedly had great influence over the
taste of succeeding ages, shedding upon the severe and satirical wit of
the Greek and Roman literature the rich, mellow light of Asiatic poetry.
The poets of that age were not confined, however, to fables from the
Hindoo source. Marie de France, also, in the thirteenth century,
versified one hundred of the fables of Aesop, translating from an English
collection, which does not now appear to be extant. Her work is entitled
the _Ysopet_, or "Little Aesop." Other versions, with the same
title, were subsequently written. It was in 1447 that Planudes, already
referred to, wrote in Greek prose a collection of fables, prefacing it
with a life of Aesop, which, for a long time, passed for the veritable
work of that ancient. In the next century, Abstemius wrote two hundred
fables in Latin prose, partly of modern, but chiefly of ancient