Page:Three hundred Aesop's fables (Townshend).djvu/22

The greatest advance, however, towards a re-Introduction of the Fables of Æsop to a place in the literature of the world, was made in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the year 1610, a learned Swiss, Isaac Nicholas Nevelet, sent forth the third printed edition of these fables, in a work entitled "Mythologia Æsopica." This was a noble effort to do honour to the great fabulist, and was the most perfect collection of Æsopian fables ever yet published. It consisted, in addition to the collection of fables given by Planudes and reprinted in the various earlier editions, of one hundred and thirty-six new fables (never before published) from MSS. in the Library of the Vatican, of forty fables attributed to Aphthonius, and of forty-three from Babrias. It also contained the Latin versions of the same fables by Phædrus, Avienus, and other authors. This volume of Nevelet forms a complete "Corpus Fabularum Æsopicarum;" and to his labours Æsop owes his restoration to universal favour as one of the wise moralists and great teachers of mankind During the interval of three centuries which has elapsed since the publication of this volume of Nevelet's, no book, with the exception of the Holy Scriptures, has had a wider circulation than Æsop's Fables. They have been translated into the greater number of the languages both of Europe and of the East, and have been read, and will be read, for generations, alike by Jew, Heathen, Mahommedan, and Christian. They are, at the present time, not only engrafted into the literature of the civilized world, but are familiar as house-