worn and washed out and moralized. He had also shown how the same
process went on till in Phaedrus nothing but the dry bones of the
traditions, with a drier moral, are served up to the reader; and he
has done justice on La Fontaine, who wrote with all the wanton
licentiousness of his day, and frittered away the whole nature of his
fables by the frivolity of his allusions to the artificial society of
his time. Nor has he spared Lessing, who, though he saw through the
poverty of Phaedrus as compared with Aesop, and was alive to the
weakness of La Fontaine, still wandered about in the classical mist
which hung heavy over the learning of the eighteenth century, and saw
in the Greek form the perfection of all fable, when in Aesop it
really appears in a state of degeneracy and decay. Here too, as in so
many other things, we have a proof that the world is older than we
think it. The Beast-Fables in the _Pantcha Tantra_ and the
_Hitopadesa_, the Indian parallels to Aesop, reveal, in the
connection in which they occur, and in the moral use to which they
are put, a state of society long past that simple early time in which
such fictions arise. They must have sprung up in the East in the very
dawn of time; and thence travelling in all directions, we find them
after many centuries in various shapes, which admit of no mistake as
to their first origin, at the very ends of the earth, in countries as
opposite as the Poles to each other; in New Zealand and Norway, in
Central Africa and Servia, in the West Indies and in Mongolia; all
separated by immense tracts of land or sea from their common centre.
To the earnest inquirer, to one who believes that many dark things
may yet be solved, it is very satisfactory to see that even Grimm, in
his _Reynard the Fox_, is at a loss to understand why the North,
properly so called, had none of the traditions which the Middle Age
moulded into that famous Beast-Epic. But since then the North, as the
Great Master himself confesses in his later works, has amply avenged