Aesop: Aesop's Fables

2. FOOTNOTES (continued)

8 Plato in Ph2done.

9 Apologos en! misit tibi    
   Ab usque Rheni limite  
   Ausonius nomen Italum  
   Praeceptor Augusti tui     
   Aesopiam trimetriam;   
   Quam vertit exili stylo    
   Pedestre concinnans opus   
   Fandi Titianus artifex.  
         Ausonii Epistola, xvi.  75-80.

10 Both these publications are in the British Museum, and are placed in the library in cases under glass, for the inspection of the curious.

ll Fables may possibly have been not entirely unknown to the mediaeval scholars. There are two celebrated works which might by some be classed amongst works of this description. The one is the "Speculum Sapientiae," attributed to St. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem, but of a considerably later origin, and existing only in Latin. It is divided into four books, and consists of long conversations conducted by fictitious characters under the figures the beasts of the field and forest, and aimed at the rebuke of particular classes of men, the boastful, the proud, the luxurious, the wrathful, &c. None of the stories are precisely those of Aesop, and none have the concinnity, terseness, and unmistakable deduction of the lesson intended to be taught by the fable, so conspicuous in the great Greek fabulist. The exact title of the book is this: "Speculum Sapientiae, B. Cyrilli Episcopi: alias quadripartitus apologeticus vocatus, in cujus quidem proverbiis omnis et totius sapientiae speculum claret et feliciter incipit." The other is a larger work in two volumes, published in the fourteenth century by Caesar Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk, under the title of "Dialogus Miraculorum," reprinted in 1851. This work consists of conversations in which many stories are interwoven on all kinds of subjects. It has no correspondence with the pure Aesopian fable.

12 Post-medieval Preachers, by S. Baring-Gould. Rivingtons, 1865.

13 For an account of this work see the Life of Poggio Bracciolini, by the Rev. William Shepherd. Liverpool. 1801.

14 Professor Theodore Bergh. See Classical Museum, No. viii. July, 1849.

15 Vavassor's treatise, entitled "De Ludicra Dictione" was written A.D. 1658, at the request of the celebrated M. Balzac (though published after his death), for the purpose of showing that the burlesque style of writing adopted by Scarron and D'Assouci, and at that time so popular in France, had no sanction from the ancient classic writers. Francisci Vavassoris opera omnia. Amsterdam. 1709.