The story has long been popular, and often been applauded, but, as it seems to me, without sufficient judgment. What else could the lioness have expected to produce but a lion? Such was only to be anticipated.
Now if her cub had been a camel or a rhinoceros her pride would have been justified by the exceptional character of her performance; or if her offspring had been a hippopotamus or a giraffe, we might have accepted such complacency as not unnatural under the circumstances. But what are the facts of the case? Or if again it had been even a lion rampant, with its tongue out, or a green lion, or a spotted one, we might have understood the tawny mother’s exultation. As it was, her hauteur was surely misplaced. A lioness gives birth to a cub and it turns out a lion — voilà tout! Yet she was pleased on this account to snub the prolific insect who addressed her, as if she herself had done something out of the common, rare and worth talking about. As a matter of fact, after all, it was only an ordinary, every-day lion. Moreover, it would have been quite within the grasshopper’s right to retort, “A lion? Nonsense. It is only a cat — a kitten. I can hear it mewing.” For the baby lion is faintly brindled, like the most ordinary of pussies, and mews precisely like the kitten in the nursery.
Nevertheless, the artificial (or supernatural) lion differs in many valuable respects from the natural animal. It is magnanimous, as witness that story of the mouse that released the lion from a net and was dismissed by the lion with thanks. Now in a wild state the lion would have eaten the mouse, for it has the usual cat’s taste for mice and rats; and though, if the truth must be told, only an indifferent mouser, might no doubt be
