FA'BLE. a fictitious narration, or spe cies of didactic allegory, which may be described as a method of inculcating practicable rules of worldly prudence or wisdom, by imaginary representations drawn from the physical or external world. It consists, properly, of two parts: symbolical representation, and the appli cation of the instruction intended to be deduced from it, which latter is called the moral of the tale, and must be apparent in the fable itself, in order to render it poetical. The satisfaction which we de rive from Wiles does not lie wholly in the pleasure that we receive from the sym bolical representation, but it lies deeper, in the feeling that the order of nature is the same in the spiritual and material world; and the fabulist, whose object is not merely to render a truth perceptible by means of a fictitious action, chooses his characters from the brute creation.— Some fables are founded upon irony ; some arc pathetic; and some oven aspire to the sublime; but, generally speaking, a fable should possess unity, that the whole tenor of it may he easily seen ; and dignity, since the subject has a cer tain degree of importance.—We find that
fables have been highly valued, not only in times of the greatest simplicity, but :tmong the most polite ages of the world. dothatu's fable of the trees is the oldest that. is extant, and as beautiful as any that have been made since. Nathan's fable of the poor man is next in ;intiqui • ty, and had so good an effect as to convey instruction to the ear of a king. We find iEsop in the most distant ages of Greece; and in the early days of the Roman com monwealth, we read of a mutiny appeased by the fable of the belly and the mem bers. To which we may add that although fables had their rise in the very infancy of learning, they never flourished more than when learning was at its greatest height.—Pable is also used for the plot of an epic or dramatic poem, and is, ac cording to Aristotle, the principal part, and, as it were, the soul of a poem. In this sense the fable is defined to be a dis course invented with art, to form the manners by instruction, disguised under the allegory of an action.