But when the villagers knew the creature to be an ass, they beat him till his bones broke; and, carrying off the lion's skin, went away. Then the hawker came; and seeing the ass fallen into so bad a plight, pronounced the Second Stanza:
"Long might the ass.
Clad in a lion's skin.
Have fed on the barley green.
But he brayed!
And that moment he came to ruin."
And even whilst he was yet speaking the ass died on the spot!
This story will doubtless sound familiar enough to English ears; for a similar tale is found in our modern collections of so-called 'Æsop's Fables.'[1] Professor Benfey has further traced it in mediæval French, German, Turkish, and Indian literature.[2] But it may have been much older than any of these books; for the fable possibly gave rise to a proverb of which we find traces among the Greeks as early as the time of Plato.[3] Lucian gives the fable in full, localizing it
- ↑ James's 'Æsop's Fables' (London, Murray, 1852), p. 111; La Fontaine, Book v. No. 21; Æsop (in Greek text, ed. Furia, 141, 262; ed. Coriæ, 113); Babrius (Lewis, vol. ii. p. 43).
- ↑ Benfey's Pancha Tantra, Book iv., No. 7, in the note on which, at vol. i. p. 462, he refers to Halm, p. 333; Robert, in the 'Fables inédites du Moyen Age, vol. i. p. 360; and the Turkish Tūtī-nāmah (Rosen, vol. ii. p. 149). In India it is found also in the Northern Buddhist Collection called Kathā Sarit Sāgāra, by Somadeva; and in Hitopadesa (iii. 2, Max Müller, p. 110).
- ↑ Kratylos, 411 (ed. Tauchnitz, ii. 275).
