characters march through all fables: tremblers and boasters; victims and
bullies; dupes and knaves; long-eared Neddies, giving themselves leonine
airs; Tartuffes wearing virtuous clothing; lovers and their trials, their
blindness, their folly and constancy. With the very first page of the
human story do not love and lies too begin? So the tales were told ages
before Aesop; and asses under lions' manes roared in Hebrew; and sly
foxes flattered in Etruscan; and wolves in sheep's clothing gnashed their
teeth in Sanskrit, no doubt. The sun shines to-day as he did when he
first began shining; and the birds in the tree overhead, while I am
writing, sing very much the same note they have sung ever since there
were finches. Nay, since last he besought good-natured friends to listen
once a month to his talking, a friend of the writer has seen the New
World, and found the (featherless) birds there exceedingly like their
brethren of Europe. There may be nothing new under and including the sun;
but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope,
scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet.
And then will wake Morrow and the eyes that look on it; and so da capo.

This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will
wear peacocks' feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks; in
which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves, the
splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks, and
the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the
absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert
squeaking; in which lions in love will have their claws pared by sly
virgins; in which rogues will sometimes triumph, and honest folks, let us
hope, come by their own; in which there will be black crape and white
favours; in which there will be tears under orange-flower wreaths, and
jokes in mourning-coaches; in which there will be dinners of herbs with
contentment and without, and banquets of stalled oxen where there is care