There have always been men who wrote of their own times original satires in the form of fables, exposing vice and folly. Phædrus, a freedman of Augustus, wrote five such books in the reign of Tiberius. Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Poggio knew and used the type. The greatest name in modern literature in connection with the fable is that of the Frenchman Jean de la Fontaine, who lived at the court of Louis Fourteenth. He expressed in exquisite verse-narrative very high social maxims. Many of our finest well-known fables are paraphrases of his lines. His own favorite was the "Oak and the Reed." He is supposed to have drawn his inspirations from Phædrus. Our own English writers, Gay and Pope, Addison and Prior, Steele and Dodsley, Moore, Goldsmith, Cowper, and others, wrote fables both in prose and verse. Indeed, worthy old Henryson, of "Robin and Makyne" fame, wrote in the fifteenth century a book of "Morall Fables of Esope the Phrygian" in Chaucerian stanzas. One of these poems he calls the "Uplondish Mous and the Berger Mous." Kriloff, the Russian fabulist, who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, disputes the highest place with La Fontaine in the minds of many critics, especially for his originality. A twentieth century humorous set of rational apologues is George Ade's "Fables in Slang." The popular "Uncle Remus" stories are negro animal-myths rather than fables. Though Kipling's first "Jungle Book" narratives are in effect _sui generis_, they belong with fable typically if anywhere, as the unnatural very natural beast philosophy evinces. "His Majesty's Servant," the last of the volume, is easily classified. Some of the later tales are animal-myths, however--to wit, "How Fear Came" and "How the Camel Got His Hump;" and some, like "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat," are legends; but the talk and actions of the animals in all are fable-wise. The French, it seems, have lately pushed the type the farthest, though in a logical direction. They have retained the animal talk and the satire, but have cast away the narrative. Under the patronage of Rostand, Sir Chanticler has come before the footlights. This play happens to be an anomalous union of the two old distinct meanings of the word "fable"--one, the undelying story of a drama; the other, a symbolic, usually satiric, didactic tale. [Working definition]