The 'Gesta' is a rich storehouse from which many poets, including Gower, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Parnell, and others, have borrowed. Shakespeare's 'Pericles' has its source in the 'Gesta'; so also Parnell's delightful poem, 'The Hermit,' and Dr. John Byrom's 'Three Black Crows' are from the same prolific treasure-house. FOOTNOTES: [50] In the whole range of literature there are no apter similes than these: the darkness and gloom of the fool's heart and the closeness of the miser's fist. [51] A nobleman of the East, famous for his hospitality. [52] 'About a dozen instances or so must stand for the present as representing the contribution of the Jātakas to the question of the origin of Æsop's fables.'--Jacobs: 'History of Fable.' [53] In her 'Commonplace Book,' Longmans, 1854, pp. 142, 143. CHAPTER XII. MODERN FABULISTS: LA FONTAINE, GAY. 'Lie gently on their ashes, gentle earth.' BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. It is a remarkable circumstance in connection with the literature of fable, that those who have excelled in it are comparatively few. The principal names that occur to us are Æsop, La Fontaine, Gay, Lessing, Krilof; 'the rest are all but leather or prunello,' if we except a few rare examples from Northcote and Cowper. The composition of fables seems to call for the exercise of a talent which is peculiar and rare. La Fontaine says[54] that the writing of apologues is a gift sent down from the immortals. Not even those who have practised the art have always succeeded in it to perfection. Gay, who is esteemed the best of the English fabulists, is often prolix and lacking in point. La Fontaine, sprightly as are his renderings of the ancient fables which he found ready to his hand, is weak and commonplace in his attempts at originality. Dodsley is too didactic and goody-goody; Northcote is stilted, and often unnatural. Even Krilof, admirable as he generally is, is sometimes darkly obscure, and his moral difficult to find. Lessing comes nearest to the terseness and concentration of the Æsopian model, but many of his so-called fables are better described as epigrams and witticisms. True, all these writers have sometimes, like the Phrygian, 'hit the mark,' but oftener they have missed not only the bull's-eye, but the target itself; and the arrows of their satire are frequently lost in the mazes of verbiage. Æsop alone is in the fable what Shakespeare is in the drama, a paragon without a peer, and all competitors with either of these master minds must be content to take a lower place--to stand on a lower plane. Excellent as many modern fables fare, full of instruction and entertainment, it is but few of them that spontaneously recur to us in connection with the affairs of daily life.