'_The Bee and the Spider._--On the leaves and flowers of the same shrub, a spider and a bee pursued their several occupations, the one covering her thighs with honey, the other distending his bag with poison. The spider, as he glanced his eye obliquely at the bee, was ruminating with spleen on the superiority of her productions. "And how happens it," said he, in a peevish tone, "that I am able to collect nothing but poison from the selfsame plant that supplies thee with honey? My pains and industry are not less than thine; in those respects we are each indefatigable." "It proceeds only," replied the bee, "from the different disposition of our nature; mine gives a pleasing flavour to everything I touch, whereas thine converts to poison what by a different process had been the purest honey."' James Northcote, R.A., the indefatigable painter, who, when a youth, enjoyed the friendship of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was occasionally one of the company at his hospitable table, along with Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, Garrick and Boswell, published two volumes of original and selected fables in 1828-33, when he was eighty-two years of age. When a boy, living at Plymouth, where he was born on October 22, 1746, he took pleasure in copying the pictures from an edition of Æsop's fables. The memory of these clung to him through life, and, as occasion offered, he occupied himself in composing apologues in imitation of those with which he was familiar in his early years. The diction of Northcote's fables is admirable. They are in the choicest phraseology, both in their verse and prose, for he practised both forms of composition, though chiefly the latter. Neither crisp nor brilliant, they are now and again lighted up with scintillations of humour. His applications are delivered with grave solemnity befitting a judge or a philosopher--not to say a bore; and in many instances they extend to three or four times the length of the fable itself. Northcote died in London at the ripe age of eighty-five, and was buried beneath the New Church of St. Marylebone. Perhaps his best fables are _The Jay and the Owl_, _Echo and the Parrot_, _Stone Broth_, and _The Trooper and his Armour_. None of Northcote's fables have become popular with the multitude, though many of them are good examples of this class of composition. We give the last-named piece as a specimen of his work as a fabulist. The application is well conceived, but it is scarcely indicated in the fable: 'A trooper, in the time of battle, picked up the shoe of a horse that lay in his way, and quickly by a cord suspended it from his neck. Soon after, in a skirmish with the enemy, a shot struck exactly on the said horseshoe and saved his life,[61] as it fell harmless to the ground. "Well done," said the trooper, "I see that a very little armour is sufficient when it is well placed."