gives him the preference over all other mythologists. His
'Mountain delivered of a Mouse,' produces the moral of his fable
in ridicule of pompous pretenders; and his Crow, when she drops
her cheese, lets fall, as it were by accident, the strongest
admonition against the power of flattery. There is no need of a
separate sentence to explain it; no possibility of impressing it
deeper, by that load we too often see of accumulated
reflections."[3] An equal amount of praise is due for the
consistency with which the characters of the animals,
fictitiously introduced, are marked. While they are made to
depict the motives and passions of men, they retain, in an
eminent degree, their own special features of craft or counsel,
of cowardice or courage, of generosity or rapacity.

These terms of praise, it must be confessed, cannot be bestowed
on all the fables in this collection. Many of them lack that
unity of design, that close connection of the moral with the
narrative, that wise choice in the introduction of the animals,
which constitute the charm and excellency of true Aesopian fable.
This inferiority of some to others is sufficiently accounted for
in the history of the origin and descent of these fables. The
great bulk of them are not the immediate work of Aesop. Many are
obtained from ancient authors prior to the time in which he
lived. Thus, the fable of the "Hawk and the Nightingale" is
related by Hesiod;[4] the "Eagle wounded by an Arrow, winged with
its own Feathers," by Aeschylus;[5] the "Fox avenging his wrongs
on the Eagle," by Archilochus.[6] Many of them again are of later
origin, and are to be traced to the monks of the middle ages: and
yet this collection, though thus made up of fables both earlier
and later than the era of Aesop, rightfully bears his name,