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In his retelling of the story, Lydgate had drawn the lesson that the one "Who all coveteth, oft he loseth all", [18] He stated as well that this was "an olde proverb" [19] which, indeed, in the form "All covet, all lose", was later to be quoted as the fable's moral by Roger L'Estrange. [20]
Anthropomorphic cat guarding geese, Egypt, c. 1120 BCE. Fable is a literary genre defined as a succinct fictional story, in prose or verse, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are anthropomorphized, and that illustrates or leads to a particular moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be added explicitly as a concise maxim or ...
They were told with the didactic intent of drawing moral lessons which could be either secular or spiritual. Many different versions of the stories were created but writers frequently followed understood conventions. One such convention was the inclusion of the didactic moral lesson in a moralitas (plural moralitates) inserted after the fable ...
The moral lesson taught by these stories is summed up by the English proverb 'Once bitten, twice shy'. The episode of the rats holding a council is similar to the fable of The Mice in Council who suggested hanging a bell on the cat, but that only developed during the Middle Ages and has a completely different moral.
The moral drawn in Mediaeval Latin retellings of the fable such as those of Adémar de Chabannes and Romulus Anglicus [7] was that one should learn from the misfortunes of others, but it was also given a political slant by the additional comment that "it is easier to enter the house of a great lord than to get out of it", as William Caxton expressed it in his English version. [8]
The story of the tortoise and the birds appears in a section illustrating the sentiment that 'a man hath no greater enemy than himself'. The French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine also found the story in an early digest of Bidpai's work and added it to his fables as La Tortue et les deux Canards (X.3). For him the story illustrates human vanity ...
The Greek version of the story tells of a woodcutter who accidentally dropped his axe into a river and, because this was his only means of livelihood, sat down and wept. . Taking pity on him, the god Hermes (also known as Mercury) dived into the water and returned with a golden
1907 book cover of fable retold by Félicité Lefèvre & illustrated by Tony Sarg 1925 book cover of fable retold by Watty Piper & illustrated by Eulalie Minfred Banks. The Cock, the Mouse and the Little Red Hen is a European fable first collected by Félicité Lefèvre and published in illustrated form by Grant Richards in 1907.