Literary Fables of Yriarte

I do not flatter myself that it will make any conspicuous addition to the worthy achievements that have already graced our roll with names that rank high in the lists of Science, Philosophy and Literature. But it is pleasant to me to connect this translation of a college text-book—used by us all, long ago, within the walls of old Harvard—with the memory of youthful pursuits that have never lost their charm for the mind, and early associations that retain, with all their original freshness and geniality, their hold upon the heart.
The Fable has always been a popular mode of conveying certain kinds of instruction. The brief and simple illustrations it affords give additional weight and point to moral apothegms or sententious criticisms. Like the feather on the shaft, they serve to increase the force and direct the aim more certainly to the mark. A pertinent fact or an apt fiction breathes, even into a dry and curt axiom, a living and practical interest which opens to it hearts and heads that would otherwise pass it by with indifference, or revolt from it with impatience. Many of these unpretending allegories have been familiar to us all, in childhood, in a great variety of dresses, and have long formed a standard part of our literature —congenial alike to nursery days and to mature age.
The fables contained in the little collection here translated are not, with one or two exceptions, found among the widely popular and familiar fables to which we have alluded. They were written in a foreign tongue, less generally understood, among us, than some other of the European languages; and they are designed for a special and somewhat abstruse purpose. Both these circumstances tend to narrow their sphere of circulation; and we presume that they form a book little known to most English readers.
If we do not err in our estimate of them, the Literary Fables of Don Thomas De Yriarte are well worthy of perusal. They are aptly and ingeniously adapted to the truths they seek to inculcate; and they are remarkable for a terse simplicity of form and style, well suited to the objects and character of such productions. The maxims and criticisms they enforce must approve themselves to the mind, both of the professed scholar and the general reader.