Presidential Address. 17
humour of the people. Their range of transmission is extraordinary ; and we are not surprised to find a tale of Brer Rabbit and several of Aesop's fables amongst them. One of the first to be identified was the Ass in the Lions Skin.^ I need hardly remind you that he is a home in Asia, where lions once must have been plentiful, although it is true that they were sometimes found in Europe long after Aesop's day. The Fox and the Crow, on the other hand, has lost its point in the eastern version,^ where the crow, flattered by the fox's comphment-which is put in the form of poetry of course-simply shakes a branch and causes some of'the fruit to drop for him by way of reward. Aesop's Wolf and Crane is told of a woodpecker and a lion -3 this has a parallel also in a Tibetan tale, the Ungrateful L lon^ The fable of the Wolf and the Lamb, that tear- ful favourite of our childhood, has a parallel which embodies the same moral, which may be less familiar to you.^
Nor is this the only point of connexion with modern literature. The Parrot and the Faithless Wife^ reappears Dotn in the Gesta Romanorum and in the Book of the Knight de la Tour Landry. In a Greek variant of the same tale,c the wife succeeds in hoodwinking her husband as also she does in the English, which I give here.
I WOLLE TELLE YOU AN ENSAUMPLE OF A WOMAN THAT ETE THE GOOD MORSELLE IN THE ABSENCE OF HER HUSBONDE.
J^'ll 71 " """T '^"' ^'^ ' P" ^" " ^^S^' *^^ ^P-'^- and wolde telle
alys that she saw do. And so it happed that her husbonde made kepe
a gret ele ,n a htelle ponde in his gardin, to that entent to yeue t sun'
of his frende^ wolde come to see hym ; but the wyff, Ihanne he"
'/at. ii. 76. V«A ii. 299. ^/at. iii. 17; Tibetan Tales, No. 37 /at. m. 285, read in full at Meeting, together with several others
(c±t. E. T. 8.7^22) '^"^^' ""* ^"' ""'■ '^' ^'- ^' ^' '^- ""■ ^Fabtilae Romanenses (Teutones), p. 15.
B
