Fables, of Æsop and other Eminent Mythologists: with Morals and Reflexions.

The Volume is in Very Good Condition bound in blind ruled English calf, with a eighteenth century re-backed spine, in pale speckled calf, divided into six gilt-stamped compartments by five gilt and raised bands, with a red morocco letter-piece in the second compartment from the top, with the leaf edges red-speckled. Externally the boards are lightly scuffed in general, with the corners bumped, and the spine is lightly scuffed with the letter-piece chipped a bit. Internally the leaves are generally clean and well margined, with mild foxing throughout the volume, with some small marginal tears and wormholes.

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Of L’Estrange’s Fables

Roger L’Estrange was a master polemicist and staunch royalist during the Civil War and Restoration. The Glorious Revolution saw the author pull back from political discourse as his favour declined. L’Estrange now turned to writing again, and published translations of Seneca the Younger’s Morals and Cicero’s Offices, besides his master-work of this period, Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists, first published in a small folio in 1692. This notably included nearly all of the Hecatomythium of Laurentius Abstemius, among several other fabulists. The style is racily idiomatic and each fable is accompanied by a short moral and a longer reflection, which set the format for fable collections for the next century. He describes his motivations for the collection:

“This rhapsody of Fables is a book universally read and taught in all our schools; but almost at such a rate as we teach pyes and parrots that pronounce words without so much as guessing the meaning of them; or to take it another way, the boys break their teeth upon the shells, without ever coming near the kernel. They learn the Fables by lessons, and the moral is the least part of our care in a child’s instructions … To supply this defect now, we have several English paraphrases and Essays upon Aesop and divers of his followers both in prose and verse; the latter have perchance ventured a little too far from the precise scope of the author upon the privilege of a poetical license; and for the others of ancient date, the morals are so insipid and flat, and the style and diction of the Fables so coarse and uncouth that they are rather dangerous than profitable”

From Kemp C10: “ One of L’Estrange’s most enduring literary contributions, selections from his translated tales still found in print today. Although known as ‘Aesop’s Fables,’ and on the prefaced by a life drawn from Jean Baudouin’s French translation of Aesop, only the first third of the 468 folio pages of moralising stories is devoted to that storyteller, subsequent sections having fables of Barlandus, Avianus, Abstemeous, Poggius and others. Its assumed audience was children, who L’Estrange noted were ‘ Blank Paper, ready Indifferently for any Impression … and it is much in the Power of the first Comer, to Write Saint, or Devil upon’t’. Among the impressions he hoped to leave was that suggested later in the preface: ‘There’s no Meddling with Princes, either by Text or by Argument.’ A note acknowledges that ‘the Printing of This Book in several Houses hath Occasion’d some Disorder in the Pages’.