Take Æsop alone, and translate his fables by this light. The lion and the boar fight, and the match is an equal one — king against the people; but seeing the vultures, a foreign enemy, on the lookout for the corpse of the vanquished, whichever it might happen to be, they make up their quarrel. … A lion (the king) saw three bulls (his turbulent barons) pasturing together, and he made them quarrel and separate, when he ate them up one after the other. … A lion (the king’s army) made an alliance with a dolphin (the king’s navy) in order to have everything their own way, and then the lion tried to oppress a wild bull (his people) and got the worst of it, and the navy could not help him a bit. … Two kings, a lion and a bear, fall to fighting over a kid, and are at length so exhausted with the combat that a passing fox carries off the kid. … A lion, an ass, and a fox went a-hunting, and on their return the king ordered the ass to apportion the spoil. The ass divided it carefully into three equal portions, which so enraged the lion that he devoured him on the spot, and ordered the fox to make a fresh partition. The fox put everything into one great heap as the king’s half, and kept only an accidental fragment of offal for himself, upon which the lion commended his art in division, and asked him where he had learned it. “From the ass,” replied the sycophant. … A great king, a lion, asked a humble neighbor for a favor, which was granted on condition that the lion would dismiss his armed followers — have his teeth drawn, in fact; and as soon as he had consented, the humble neighbor whipped the king off his premises. … The lion is represented as afraid of the crowing of the cock — the awaking of the people; as putting himself to great trouble to catch
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