pped the cheese out of his mouth, and
took to wing. When the fox saw the cheese drop, he immediately made a
jump at it (for he knew the donkey's voice, and that his asinine bray
was not a bit like his royal master's roar), and making for the cheese,
fell into a steel trap, which snapped off his tail; without which he
was obliged to go into the world, pretending, forsooth, that it was the
fashion not to wear tails any more; and that the fox-party were better
without 'em.

Meanwhile, a boy with a stick came up, and belaboured Master Donkey
until he roared louder than ever. The wolf, with the sheep's clothing
draggling about his legs, could not run fast, and was detected and shot
by one of the men. The blind old owl, whirring out of the hollow tree,
quite amazed at the disturbance, flounced into the face of a ploughboy,
who knocked her down with a pitchfork. The butcher came and quietly led
off the ox and the lamb; and the farmer, finding the fox's brush in the
trap, hung it up over his mantelpiece, and always bragged that he had
been in at his death.

"What a farrago of old fables is this! What a dressing up in old
clothes!" says the critic. (I think I see such a one--a Solomon that
sits in judgment over us authors and chops up our children.) "As sure
as I am just and wise, modest, learned, and religious, so surely I have
read something very like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and
foxes before. That wolf in sheep's clothing?--do I not know him? That
fox discoursing with the crow?--have I not previously heard of him? Yes,
in Lafontaine's fables: let us get the Dictionary and the Fable and the
Biographie Universelle, article Lafontaine, and confound the impostor."

"Then in what a contemptuous way," may Solomon go on to remark,
"does this author speak of human nature! There is scarce one of these
characters he represents but is a villain. The fox is a flatterer; the
frog is an emblem of impotence and envy; the wolf in sheep's clothing
a bloodthirsty hypocrite, wearing the garb of innocence; the ass in the
lion's skin a quack trying to terrify, by assuming the appearance of
a forest monarch (does the writer, writhing under merited castigation,
mean to sneer at critics in this character? We laugh at the impertinent
comparison); the ox, a stupid commonplace; the only innocent being in
the writer's (stolen) apologue is a fool--the idiotic lamb, who does not
know his own mother!" And then the critic, if in a virtuous