SIMILITUDES and, in cases not a few, identities have often been detected between the popular tales of widely distant nations, intimating either a common origin, or a common inventive power to work out like results. Fables have ever been a floating literature,—borne hither and thither on the current of Time,—used by any one, and properly belonging to no one. How they have circulated from land to land, and from age to age, we cannot tell; whence they first arose it is impossible to divine. There exist, we are told, fables collected by Bidpai in Sanscrit, by Lokman in Arabic, by Æsop in Greek, and by Phædrus in Latin; and they seem to have been interchanged and borrowed one from the other as if they were the property of the world,—handed down from the ancestorial times of a remote antiquity. Shakespeare’s general estimation of fables, and of those of Æsop in particular, may be gathered from certain expressions in two of the plays,—in the _Midsummer Night’s Dream_ (act v. sc. 1, l. 1, vol. ii. p. 258) and in _3 Henry VI_. (act v. sc. 5, l. 25, vol. v. p. 329). In the _former_ the speakers are Hippolyta and Theseus,— “_Hip._ ’Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of. _The._ More strange than true: I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends.” In the _latter_ Queen Margaret’s son in reproof of Gloucester, declares,— “Let Æsop fable in a winter’s night; His currish riddles sort not with this place.” The year of Shakespeare’s birth, 1564, saw the publication, at Rome, of the Latin Fables of Gabriel Faerni; they had been written at the request of Pope Pius IV., and possess a high degree of excellence, both for their correct Latinity and for the power of invention which they display. Roscoe, in his _Life of Leo X._ (Bohn’s ed. ii. p. 172), even avers that they “are written with such classical purity, as to have given rise to an opinion that he had discovered and fraudulently availed himself of some of the unpublished works of Phædrus.” This opinion, however, is without any foundation.