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Updated: April 30, 2025
He had been born far back in the seventeenth century, so far back that, incredible as it sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had supplied Vanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his comedy of Aesop. But after trying many forms of life, and weary of his own affluence, he came to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb.
All the Queen's attendants now used it, and though others of lower rank did the same, she permitted it, though her ready wit would have supplied her tongue with a retort sharp enough to respond to any word which displeased her. But she knew the life and fables of AEsop, who had also once been a slave, and deemed it an honour to be compared with him.
And so home and with my wife and Ashwell into the garden walking a great while, discoursing what this pretty wench should be by her garb and deportment; with respect to Mrs. Pen she may be her woman, but only that she sat in the pew with her, which I believe he would not let her do. So home, and read to my wife a fable or two in Ogleby's AEsop, and so to supper, and then to prayers and to bed.
Every day lessened the burthen of my moveables, like Aesop and his basket of bread; for I paid them for my lodgings to the Dutch as I travelled on. When I came to Louvain, I was resolved not to go sneaking to the lower professors, but openly tendered my talents to the principal himself.
One day Aesop and two other men were put up at auction. Xanthus, a wealthy man, wanted a slave, and he said to the men: "What can you do?" The two men bragged large about the things they could do, for both wanted a rich master like Xanthus. "But what can you do?" said Xanthus, turning to Aesop. "The others can do so much and so well," said Aesop, "that there's nothing left for me to do."
It seems as if at times he did not see his drift himself. To this fault is akin the constant moralising tone which reflects rather than paints, enforces rather than elicits its lesson. He is himself a small sage, and all his animals are small sages too. They have not the life-like reality of those of Aesop; they are mere lay figures.
The Conte Leandro Lombardoni, lady-killer, Don Juan, and poet, whose fortunes and misfortunes in these characters had made him the butt of the entire society, and had perhaps contributed, together with his well- known extraordinarily pronounced propensity for cramming himself with pastry, to give him the pale, puffed, pasty face, swelling around a pair of pale fish-like eyes, that distinguished him, the Conte Leandro Lombardoni; indeed, had gone to the Castelmare palace as "Apollo," in a costume which young Ludovico Castelmare, the Marchese Lamberto's nephew, would insist on mistaking for that of Aesop; and had now, according to a programme perfectly well known previously throughout the city, come to the Circolo as "Dante."
There's bluebells blowing in the dingles, and cuckoo-buds no end. And while ye are all grinding at your old Aesop I shall be roaming over the hills wherever I please." As he spoke he thought of the dark, wainscoted walls of the school-room with their narrow little windows overhead, of the foul-smelling floors of the tannery in Southam's lane, and his heart gave a great, rebellious leap.
Ignorant of physical causes, unpractised in their mode of action, unaccustomed to their effects, whenever he experienced any serious misfortune, whenever he was afflicted with any grievous sensation, he was at a loss how to account for it; he therefore attributed it to his household gods, to whom he made an immediate supplication for assistance, or rather for forbearance of further affliction: this disposition in man has been finely pourtrayed by Aesop in his fable of "the Waggoner and Hercules."
Nothing would have more amazed Mr. Lincoln than to hear himself called a man of letters; but this age has produced few greater writers. Emerson ranks him with Aesop; Montalembert commends his style as a model for the imitation of princes. It is true that in his writings the range of subjects is not great.
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