and fii'ty taken from Dodsley and others, familiar to all 

 from Bewick's admirable wood-cuts. Criticism has done 

 its best to throw a mythical haze over the names of botJi 

 Horaer and K&op. Still, gcfod work postulates a good 

 workman, and good storieR a good Btor5'-teller, so the palm 

 for fables long since waa given to E&op. 



The stcjry that Estr.p was a dark-sklnne-d hunchbackexi 

 buffoon may be taken as a legend; and possibly we must, 

 though regretfully, read as fiction Landor's "conTersation,". 

 sketching from a few lines in Herodotrvs, as; only Lander 

 could eketch, his perfect picture of Esop'a worth and 

 Ehodopi's beauty when they lived as fellow-slaves together 

 in the house of Jadmon, Esop's master. But if much must 

 be given up, this much remains: such a man as Esop, of 

 Phrygian birth, lived about six centmies before Christ; 

 that around his name Grecian folk-stories clustered which 

 Socrates in pri^ion began to put intO' verse, that Pliny makee 

 reference to him, and that in the third century' of the 

 Christian era, one Babrius made a collection of the fables 

 then ascribe-d to him. 



In the story-telling branch of imaginative literature, as 

 in other spheres of human aetivit}', the Greeks attained 

 high excellence. What they did was not only good in itself, 

 but became the cause of excellence in others. Longus 

 wrote in the sixth century the pretty story of Daphniis and 

 Chloe; and in due course had scores of imitatore who wrote 

 pastoral poetry in all parts of Eiuope. A thousand years 

 aftenvards that story was faintly reflected in the "Gentle 

 Shepherd" of Allan Pia.msay, as it had been earlier in 

 Fletcher's "Faithful Shepherd cgs," and in parts of Milton's 

 "Comus." None bettor knew than the Greeks did the 

 art of teaching abstract truths by fables and by represent- 

 ing to the mind material things. Plato wishing to show the' 

 proneness of all men, to eiror, pictures a ca^'e whose in- 

 mates from childhood are chained, and can see nothing but 

 shadows thrown by light from a;bove on the wall in front of 

 them. The ca,ve is the world, the chained men its inhabit-. 



