The value of fables, as instruments of instruction, is attested by Addison, in the following words. “They were,” says he, “the first pieces of wit that made their appearance in the world; and have been still highly valued, not only in times of the greatest simplicity, but among the most polite ages of mankind. Jotham’s fable of the Trees is the oldest that is extant, and as beautiful as any which have been made since that time. Nathan’s fable of the Poor Man and his Lamb is likewise more ancient than any that is extant, excepting the above mentioned, and had so good an effect as to convey instruction to the ear of a king, without offending it, and to bring the ‘man after God’s own heart’ to a right sense of his guilt and his duty. We find Æsop in the most distant ages of Greece. And, if we look into the very beginning of the commonwealth of Rome, we see a mutiny among the common people appeased by the fable of the Belly and the Members; which was indeed very proper to gain the attention of an incensed rabble, at a time when perhaps they would have torn to pieces any man who had preached the same doctrine to them in an open and direct manner. As fables took their birth in the very infancy of learning, they never flourished more than when learning was at its greatest height. To justify this assertion, I shall put my reader in mind of Horace, the greatest wit and critic in the Augustan age; and of Boileau, the most correct poet among the moderns; not to mention La Fontaine, who, by this way of writing, is come more into vogue than any other author of our times.” “Reading is to the mind,” continues the writer, “what exercise is to the body: as, by the one, health is preserved, strengthened, and invigorated, by the other, virtue, (which is the health of the mind,) is kept alive, cherished and confirmed. But, as exercise becomes tedious and painful when we make use of it only as the means of health, so reading is too apt to grow uneasy and burdensome, when we apply ourselves to it only for our improvement in virtue. For this reason, the virtue which we gather from a fable or an allegory, is like the health we get by hunting, as we are engaged in an agreeable pursuit that draws us on with pleasure, and makes us insensible of the fatigues that accompany it.”