Gent. Why, fool?
Fool. We’ll set thee to school to an ant to teach thee there’s no labouring in the winter.”
That school we have presented to us in Freitag’s engraving (see woodcut on next page), and in the stanzas of Whitney, p. 159. There are the ne’er-do-well grasshopper and the sage schoolmaster of an ant, propounding, we may suppose, the wise saying, Dum ætatis ver agitur: consule brumæ,—“While the spring of life is passing, consult for winter,”—and the poet moralizes thus:
“In winter coulde, when tree, and bushe, was bare,
And frost had nip’d the rootes of tender grasse:
The antes, with ioye did feede vpon their fare,
Which they had stor’de, while sommers season was:
To whome, for foode the grashopper did crie,
And said she staru’d, if they did helpe denie.
Whereat, an ante, with longe experience wise?