the inculcation of lessons, as, for example, in the well-known instance of the Wolf and the Lamb. The author of a fable puts his own human nature into the humbler creatures whom he dramatizes, with a deliberate conscious thought, a creative exercise of the reflective faculty at the second remove, quite unlike the instinctive and half-believing action of the child who straddles a stick pretending that it is a horse. He has a clear didactic purpose in addition to the sportive impulse of fancy. This picturing of human nature and its experiences in the living framework of the lower world yields the keenest pleasure to all who have not outgrown it; and no one ought ever to outgrow it. He outgrows it only by the gradual hardening of his heart and fancy, the immovable stolidity of his faculties in their fixed ruts and crusts. It is the favorite literature of the childhood of the world. It is filled with quaint wisdom, raciness, and droll burlesque, as is abundantly to be seen in the traditions of the Hottentots, the Esquimaux, the Africans, and other barbaric nations. And in the classic compositions of Pilpai the Persian, Lokman the Arab, Æsop the Greek, Phædrus the Roman, La Fontaine the Frenchman, and other masters, it constitutes, with its innocent gayety, its malicious mischief, its delicious wit and humor, its cutting satire and caricature, one of the most exquisite portions of cosmopolitan literature. Hardly any other conception has given the people so much pleasure as that Beast-Epic, or picture of human life in the vizards and scenery of animal life, which, under the title of "Reynard the Fox," circulated through Europe for centuries,--a sort of secular and democratic Bible, read in palaces, quoted in universities, thumbed by toilsmen, delighted in by all, old and young, high and low, learned and illiterate. There the society and life of the Middle Age are reflected with grotesque truth and mirth, grim irony, sardonic grins, comic insight, laughter and tragedy, not without many touches of poetry and prophecy. There are Noble the Lion, Isegrim the Wolf, Reynard the Fox, Chanticleer the Cock, Bruin the Bear, Lampe the Hare, Hinze the Cat, and the rest, each one representing enigmatically some class or order in the human life of the romantic but cruel Feudal World. The poet, with a sly joy, unfolds his pictures of wolves tonsured as monks, foxes travelling as pilgrims to shrines and to Rome, cocks pleading as lawyers at the judgment-bar. He asserts the moral standard of the plebeian instincts against the conventional ecclesiastic and civil codes, and rectifies his own wrongs as without rank, power, or wealth, but gifted with genius and spirit, against the kings, barons, priests, and soldiers, by portraying the uniform final success of the reckless, good-for-nothing, but inexhaustibly bright, shifty, and fascinating Reynard. The representative types of the strong, cruel, stupid men of prerogative