Fables and Legends of Many Countries Rendered in Rhyme

Title

en_US Fables and Legends of Many Countries Rendered in Rhyme

Description

en_US This is a hardbound book (hard cover)

en_US By John Godfrey Saxe

Creator

en_US Saxe, John Godfrey

Date

2016-01-25T19:50:37Z

en_US 2004-11

en_US 1872

Date Available

2016-01-25T19:50:37Z

Date Issued

en_US 1872

Abstract

en_US I first became acquainted with Saxe through the two versions I found of his The Blind Men and the Elephant. Here Saxe labels each work by its genre. This collection contains ten stories labeled fables or apologues. The Wind and the Rose (10) is new to me and a good fable: the wind keeps trying to make things better for the poor rose, who has been doing quite well on her own. The wind ends up uprooting the rose and reducing her to a paltry stem. The Brahmin's Air-Castle (23) is like MM and even refers to it in the moral. Reason and Vanity (26) urges using vanity as motivation when reason fails to move a person. A bee stings the vain Chloe on the lip. He is caught and about to be killed when he pleads--successfully--that he had mistaken her lip for a rose. How It Happened (32) makes sense at last for me of the traditional fable about human ages taken from animals. Ass, dog, and ape appear before Dame Nature. Each asks for a reduction in the natural span of years, and each receives it. Man asks for more than his allotted thirty years and receives their reduced allotment besides. So man lives first his natural thirty years. Then he works for eighteen years like an ass. For the next twelve he lives like the dog, the jest of every scorner. Finally he lives out the ape's years, a chattering imbecile and a theme for childish laughter. The Merchant (62) dramatizes the human tendency to impute our blessings to ourselves but our blunders to Fate. The Force of Example (66) is the traditional fable of the mother crab and daughter going sideways, but the characters are transposed into lobsters going backwards. The Two Wallets (70) is well done. The Spell of Circe (105) follows La Fontaine's The Companions of Ulysses. King Pyrrhus and his Counsellor (112) pictures Pyrrhus laying out his dreams of one conquest after another, to climax finally in a leisurely life of pleasure. The counsellor then recommends that Pyrrhus skip straight to the last phase: seize the passing joy, unvext/With anxious care about the next! The Farmer Who Made His Own Weather (115) follows La Fontaine in urging that we take the weather that God gives us. I realized as I finished the book that The Blind Men and the Elephant is not here! Originally sold by W.B. Clarke & Carruth in Boston.

Identifier

en_US 6117 (Access ID)

uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10504/81524

Language

en_US eng

Publisher

en_US James R. Osgood and Company

en_US Boston, MA

Subject

en_US PZ8.2.S273 Fa 1872

en_US Collection

en_US Title Page Scanned

Type

en_US Book, Whole