" as he called
them. Think of Socrates conning these fables
in prison four hundred years before Christ, and
then think of a more familiar picture in our own
day--a gaunt, dark-faced, black-haired boy
poring over a book as he lay by the fireside in a
little Western farmhouse; for you remember that
Abraham Lincoln's literary models were "Aesop's
Fables," "The Pilgrim's Progress" and the
Bible. Perhaps he read the fable of the Fig
Tree, Olive, Vine, and Bramble from the ninth
chapter of Judges, or that of the Thistle and
Cedar from the fourteenth chapter of II Kings
and noted that teaching by story-telling was
still well in vogue six hundred years after Aesop.

In later times the fables that had been carried
from mouth to mouth for centuries began to
be written down: by Phaedrus in Latin and
Babrius in Greek; also, in the fourteenth century,
by a Greek monk named Planudes. But do
not suppose they had their birth or flourished
in Greece alone. At the very time that Aesop
was telling them at the court of Croesus, or in
Delphi, Corinth, or Athens,--far, far away in
India the Buddhist priests were telling fables in
the Sanskrit language to the common people, the
blind, the ignorant and the outcast. Sanskrit,
you know, is the eldest brother of all the family
of languages to which our English belongs. When
the Buddhist religion declined, the Brahmins
took up the priceless inheritance of fable and
used it for educational purposes. Their ancient
Indian sages and philosophers compiled a treatise
for the education of princes which was supposed
to contain a system of good counsel for right
training in all the chief affairs of life. In it they
inserted the choicest treasures of their wisdom
and the best rules for governing a people, and the
Rajahs kept the book with great secrecy and care.
Then a Persian king heard of its existence and
sent a learned physician to India, where he spent
several years in copying and translating the
precious manuscript, finally bringing it hack to
the court, where he declined to accept all reward
but a dress of honour. In much the same way
it was rendered into Arabic and gradually,
century by century, crept into the literature of all
Europe.

We give you some of these very fables in
the "Hitopadesa," which means "Friendly
Instruction" or "Amicable Advice" for the
original hooks contained many maxims, like the
following:

"He who is not possessed of such a book as will dispel