CLASS I. MAMMALIA: ORDER 1. RODENTIA. 



439 



it is introduced as a character in some of the ancient Grecian fables, and in the Batrachomyo- 

 machia, or "Battle of the Frogs and Mice," which is usually ascribed to Homer, and which is 

 one of the best, burlesque satires on wars and heroes that ever was written, we find them 

 named after the different kinds of stores and provisions upon which they levied their contri- 

 butions. In the original strife of these mighty combatants, the folly of the mice in being per- 

 suaded to go into the pond, for which nature had not fitted them, might forcibly bring to our 

 mind the invasion of Russia by Xapoleon, and the fatal consequences of his temerity." There is also 

 something at once ludicrous and significant in the final destruction of the mice by the crabs, 

 which are aquatic animals, and of the frogs by the storks, which are land ones. The fable of 

 the Lion and the Mouse,* in which the monarch of the forest is compelled to beg of this little ani- 



THE LIOX AND MOUSE — FEOM GEAXDVILLE. 



mal to release him from the net of the hunter, is also full of point. Thus the ancients, if they 

 were inferior to the moderns as zoologists, so far studied and understood the manners of animals 

 as to draw from them useful moral lessons. The fables in which birds and beasts talked like men, 

 have unfortunately fallen into disrepute in modern times, having given place to a coarse taste for 

 caricature : but Grandville in France, and Landseer in England, have furnished the world with en- 

 gravmgs ot various animals — doers and horses, wolves, foxes, bears, and tigers — in a manner to 

 satirize the follies and vices of men throug*h the similitudes of brutes, with even more humor than 

 the written fables of Lafontaine, and quite as much effect. 



The mouse is no less honored in Roman literature, for the poet Horace, in one of his .most 



* Lafontaine has modified the ancient Greek fable : he represents the royal lion as gping forth, when a giddy 

 mouse is near being trampled to death beneath his feet. The mouse pleads for its life, and the lion grants it. After- 

 ward the lion, being caught in a net, is set at liberty by the mouse. The double moral is conveyed that we often 

 need the assistance of those whose position is beneath our own, and that patient industry will often do more than 

 ' me.'e strength. 



