As a parable, still united to a wholly practical end, we may view the means of persuasion used by Cyrus to induce the Persians to rebel (Herod., I, cap. 126). His letter to the Persians advised them to betake themselves to a certain spot provided with sickles. When there he set them all on the first day to clear with hard labour a certain field overgrown with thistles. On the following day, however, after they had rested and bathed, he conducted them to a meadow and supplied them with ample cheer in the shape of food and wine. Finally, at the close of the feast, he asked of them which of the two days had proved the most enjoyable. All voted naturally for to-day rather than yesterday; the former had brought them only good things, while the latter had been a day of weariness and toil. On this Cyrus exclaimed: "Follow me, and many will be the good days such as the present has brought you. Refuse to follow me, and countless labours are in store quite a match for those of yesterday." Of a type akin to the above, though of profoundest interest and the widest range considered relatively to their significance, are the parables we meet with in the Gospels. Take, for example, that of the sower, a narrative which as such possesses the most unimportant subject-matter, and whose significance centres throughout in the comparison it supplies to the preaching of the kingdom of heaven. The significance in these parables is wholly a religious gospel, to which the human occurrences, wherein such is imaginatively presented, stand in a relation similar to that between the animal and human world in the fables of Aesop, where the former elicits the meaning of the latter. Of a like breadth of content is the famous story of Boccaccio, which Lessing converted in his "Natham" into the parable of the three rings. The substance of the narrative is also in this case taken by itself nothing remarkable; the extraordinarily wide, reach of its content arises wholly from the way the differences between and the relative validity of the three religions, namely, the Jewish, the Mohammedan, and the Christian, are suggested by it. The same thing may be said of the latest novelties in this type of art, the parables of Goethe for example. Take that of the "cat-pasty." In this a famous _chef_, in order to prove himself hunter no less than cook, went out hunting, but shot a tom-cat instead of a hare, which he then served up to the company sauced with his most consummate art. This is no doubt a reference to the Light theory of Newton. We have here under the guise of the hare-pie which the cook tried in vain to elaborate out of a cat a reflection of that abortive type of physical science which the mathematician will assume to be something better than it is. These parables of Goethe frequently have a strong touch of drollery about them, an aspect which they share with his fables by the help of which he was wont to shed himself of life's disappointments. (_b_) _The Proverb_