On the Migration of Fables

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, ON FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 1870. Scanned, proofed and formatted by John Bruno Hare at sacred-texts.com, December 2009. This text is in the public domain in the US because it was published prior to 1923. “COUNT not your chickens before they be hatched,” is a well-known proverb in English, and most people, if asked what was its origin, would probably appeal to La Fontaine’s delightful fable, La Laitiere et le Pot au Lait. [*1] We all know Perrette, lightly stepping along from her village to the town, carrying the milk-pail on her head, and in her day-dreams selling her milk for a good sum, then buying a hundred eggs, then selling the chickens, then buying a pig, fattening it, selling it again, and buying a cow with a calf. The calf frolics about, and kicks up his legs—so does Perrette, and, alas! the pail falls down, the milk is spilt, her riches gone, and she only hopes when she comes home that she may escape a flogging from her husband. Did La Fontaine invent this fable? or did he merely follow the example of Sokrates, who, as we know from the Phaedon, [*2] occupied himself in prison, during the last days of his life, with turning into verse some of the fables, or, as he calls them, the myths of Aesop. La Fontaine published the first six books of his fables in 1668, [*1] and it is well known that the subjects of most of these early fables were taken from Aesop, Phaedrus, Horace, and Other classical fabulists, if we may adopt this word “fabuliste,” which La Fontaine was the first to introduce into French