is an abundance of unanswerable
internal evidence to prove that he had an acquaintance with the
veritable fables of Aesop, although the versions he had access to
were probably corrupt, as contained in the various translations and
disquisitional exercises of the rhetoricians and philosophers. His
collection is interesting and important, not only as the parent source
or foundation of the earlier printed versions of Aesop, but as the
direct channel of attracting to these fables the attention of the
learned.

The eventual re-introduction, however, of these Fables of Aesop to their
high place in the general literature of Christendom, is to be looked for
in the West rather than in the East. The calamities gradually thickening
round the Eastern Empire, and the fall of Constantinople, 1453 A.D.
combined with other events to promote the rapid restoration of learning
in Italy; and with that recovery of learning the revival of an interest
in the Fables of Aesop is closely identified. These fables, indeed,
were among the first writings of an earlier antiquity that attracted
attention. They took their place beside the Holy Scriptures and the
ancient classic authors, in the minds of the great students of that day.
Lorenzo Valla, one of the most famous promoters of Italian learning,
not only translated into Latin the Iliad of Homer and the Histories of
Herodotus and Thucydides, but also the Fables of Aesop.

These fables, again, were among the books brought into an extended
circulation by the agency of the printing press. Bonus Accursius, as
early as 1475-1480, printed the collection of these fables, made by
Planudes, which, within five years afterwards, Caxton translated into
English, and printed at his press in West-minster Abbey, 1485.[10] It
must be mentioned also that the learning of this age has left
permanent traces of its influence on these fables,[11] by causing the
interpolation with them of some of those amusing stories which were so
frequently introduced into the public discourses of the great preachers
of those days, and of which specimens are yet to be found in the
extant sermons of Jean Raulin, Meffreth, and Gabriel Barlette.[12] The
publication of this era which most probably has influenced these fables,
is the "Liber Facetiarum,"[13] a book consisting of a hundred jests and
stories, by the celebrated Poggio Bracciolini, published A.D. 1471, from
which the two fables of the "Miller, his Son, and the Ass," and the "Fo