btly poetical in the whole of Russian
literature.

Krylov's fables, like La Fontaine's, deal with animals, birds, fishes
and men; the Russian peasant plays a large part in them; often they
are satirical; nearly always they are bubbling with humour. A writer
of fables is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is sometimes to
convey pregnant sense, keen mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled
manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human foibles, or to express
wisdom in the form of wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. But
Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in remaining a poet. It has been
said that his images are conventional and outworn--that is to say, he
uses the machinery of Zephyrs, Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,--and that
his conceptions are antiquated. But what splendid use he makes of this
machinery! When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is a Zephyr blowing,
for instance, as when the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze.
Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse he conveys a picture, and
more than a picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and the Mole, in the
first lines of which he makes you see and hear the eagle and his mate
sweeping to the dreaming wood, and swooping down on to the oak-tree.
Or again, in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, he gives in a
few words the sense of height and space, as if you were looking down
from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over the mountains of the
Caucasus, sees the end of the earth, the rivers meandering in the
plains, the woods, the meadows in all their spring glory, and the
angry Caspian Sea, darkling like the wing of a raven in the distance.
But his greatest triumph, in this respect, is the fable of the Ass and
the Nightingale, in which the verse echoes the very trills of the
nightingale, and renders the stillness and the delighted awe of the
listeners,--the lovers and the shepherd. Again a convention, if you
like, but what a felicitous convention!

The fables are discursive like La Fontaine's, and not brief like
AEsop's; but like La Fontaine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a
situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect by the sudden evocation
of a whole picture in a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable
of the Peasants and the River: the peasants go to complain to the
river of the conduct of the streams which are continually overflowing
and destroying their goods, but when they reach the river, they see
half their goods floating on it. "They looke