In the Escurial, near Madrid, the library of which is rich in ancient literary treasures, is a work by Ebn Arabscah, a collection of Arabian fables. Arabia may with truth be designated the very fountain-head of fabulous story. It was in that country that the venerable Locman flourished, during, it is believed, the reigns of the Jewish kings David and Solomon. Berington, in his essay on 'The Arabian or Saracenic Learning,' remarks that Locman is said to have been an Ethiopian or Nubian, extremely deformed in his person, but so famed for wisdom as to have acquired the appellation of the Sage. His fables and moral maxims, written for the instruction of mankind, were in the estimation of the Eastern people a gift from heaven, and they received them as its inspired dictates. 'Heretofore,' says the Divine being in the Koran, 'we gave wisdom to Locman.' The same writer suggests whether Locman and Æsop may not be the same person. 'The history of the two sages is so perfectly similar in their characters and the incidents of their lives, that one must have been borrowed from the other. But the chronological difficulties,' he adds, 'are sufficiently perplexing.' We have already seen that the alleged similarity in character and bodily appearance was due to the invention or misconception of Planudes, whose story of Æsop was written in the fourteenth century, and therefore the seeming identity of the sages falls to the ground. Moreover, the fables of Æsop have a mobility about them which we do not find in those of other fabulists; they are essentially Attic in their diction, exhibiting all the marks of that compressed wit and wisdom for which the ancient Greek mind was distinguished. Eastern fable, on the other hand, is ornate and florid, and wanting in the Grecian clear-cut directness and point. It is idle to assume that the ideas, if not the diction, may have been borrowed and clothed in a new dress, unless it can be shown that the substance or subject-matter of the fables of the two sages is alike or similar in character. Granted that a few--about a dozen in number[52]--of the Æsopian fables find their counterpart in the fables of a more remote antiquity and in more Eastern countries, this circumstance might be expected; ideas dating from the very advent of the human race are current amongst us in this day, but surely even we of the nineteenth century have a sufficient stock of original conceptions to justify our claims to be considered inventors, and so with Æsop and the race of fabulists in all ages. Mrs. Jameson says,[53] with great force and truth, that 'the fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do as much for us as the truths of science,' and she paraphrases from Sir William Jones's Persian Grammar a fable embodying one of those traditions of our Lord which are preserved in the East.