In point of effectiveness in showing human experiences and weaknesses by means of animal action, the classic fable has never been equalled by any other form of literature.
The animal fable is easiest to start with, and children like it best as a rule.
I took good care not to change the circumstances much; and, by the uniformity of the narrative, I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my hearers.
Nor is the interest less, but enhanced rather by the interfusion of fable into the personal history, the charm of a subtle idealism being thus given it, relating him thereby to the sacred names of all times.
The great hero of the animal fablein Europe has always been the fox, whose cunning, greed, and duplicity are immortalized in the finest fable the world's literature possesses.
That was no doubt a fable which Carpini heard in the camp of the Great Kaan, that in one of the Mongol sieges in Cathay, when the army was without food, one man in ten of their own force was sacrificed to feed the remainder.
But I cannot tell when the fable arose that asbestos was a substance derived from the animal.
Had the old fable of Pygmalion a truth in it, then?
Footnote 70: Concerning this gross but alluring doctrine of the Edda, see Fable xx.
But it was the misfortune of the former to live in an enlightened age, and their actions were too faithfully recorded to admit of such a mixture of fable and mystery, as the devotion of the vulgar requires.
The fable of Time devouring his children, and then reproducing them, evidently means the vicissitudes of customs and the departure and return of fashions.
An unschooled Fancy deemed the work her own, While mystic meaning through each fable shone.
Now first read the fable in French, and then let me hear you translate it.
The prince first read the fable with fluency and a correct pronunciation in the original language, and then rendered it with the same fluency and correctness in the German.
By accident I opened the book at the same fable I had been translating yesterday and the day before with my instructor, and of course it was easily done the second time.
Religion, then, is "a fable invented by the ancients," worthless except to those unscrupulous persons who prey upon human folly and superstition.
He gathered the story-tellers round him and took from them the best of what they knew and were able to tell, and he chose out of the fable and story-books whatever pleased him.
Norden says: "There is a fable of one Peter Fabell that lyeth in the same church also, who is saide to have beguiled the Devill by pollicie for Money.
The fable of the hare and the tortoise seems expressly intended for travellers over wide and unknown tracts.
The fable of Joseph shows a state of affairs known at that time to be a usual occurrence, of the rise of a slave to the position of an all powerful minister of state.
This entire fable has been explained by the commentators, in all its details, as a poetic embodiment of the natural phenomena of the seasons.
Mr. Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whom Perseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the very act and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death is such a power.
Man's life is the true fable of that beautiful youth, Narcissus, who had a twin sister of remarkable loveliness, strongly resembling himself, and to whom he was most tenderly attached.
Milton's beautiful allusion to this fable is familiar to most persons.
My friend the priest suggested that possibly he might have been fool enough to expect payment beforehand, and that he had concocted this fable on the strength of it.
I was amused at the word "conscience" from the lips of a man like Antonio, and the old fable of "the pot calling the kettle black" flashed across my mind.
There is no more truth in the fablethat Harriett Grove wrote some of the chapters of Zastrozzi, than there is in the fable that she was the Harriett of the Dedicatory Prelude to Queen Mab.
It is a curious commentary on the fable of the man and his ass that even Kate Greenaway’s tender and humane designs could not escape fault-finding on ethical grounds from a hypercritical admirer of her art.
Illustration: THE FABLE OF THE GIRL AND HER MILK PAIL.
Hunt, who had powers to make the Story of Rimini as perfect as a fable of Dryden, has thought fit to sacrifice his genius to some unintelligible notion of Wordsworth, which I defy him to explain.
Both had a great love for Chaucer, for Oriental fable and for Chivalric romance, and an unusual knowledge of Greek myth.
