The great excellency of Æsop’s manner of writing is, that he blends the pleasing and the instructive so well as to instruct and please at once. Horace is much indebted to him for a plan of writing, and has formed a rule from this famous Fabulist:
Omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit utile dulci;
Lectorem delectando, pariterque monendo.
—De Arte Poet. ver. 343.
I wish I could conceal the exit of this great Fabulist and Moral Writer. He was accused by the Delphians of sacrilege, and convicted by an act of the greatest villany that ever was invented. They concealed among his baggage, at his departure, some golden vessels consecrated to Apollo, and then dispatched messengers to search his baggage. Upon this he was accused of theft and sacrilege, condemned, and precipitated over a rock. Thus ended the famous Æsop, whose Fables have immortalised his memory, and will hand down his name to the latest posterity.
AN ESSAY UPON FABLE.
Fable is the method of conveying truth under the form of an Allegory. The sense of a Fable is entirely different from the literal meaning of the words that are used to compose it; and yet the real intention thereof is visible and manifest, otherwise the Fable is not well composed. The sense of a Fable of the moral kind ought always to be obvious at first view, that the instruction intended to be given may have as early an effect as possible.
The chief thing to be considered in a Fable is the action, which conveys the moral or truth designed for instruction. There ought only to be one action in a Fable, which must appear through the whole; otherwise it will be liable to admit of different interpretations, and be the same as a riddle, and have no effect. Clearness, Unity, and Probability, are incidents essentially necessary in a moral Fable. If a Fable be not so plain as to point out the sense of the writer clearly, but admit of different interpretations, it does not answer the true design thereof. If the incidents tend to convey different ideas, then the reader will be at a loss to understand the chief intention of the author. All the various incidents ought manifestly to unite in one design, and point out one clear and perspicuous truth. Many of the modern Fables labour under this defect; the incidents do not manifestly tend to point out the moral. Fontaine’s Fable of the two pigeons, and Croxall’s story of the coach-wheel, are of this sort.