ave
drawn him in the worst shapes and features that fancy could
invent. 'Twas an old tradition among the Greeks that Aesop
revived again and lived a second life. Should he revive once
more and see the picture before the book that carries his
name, could he think it drawn for himself?--or for the
monkey, or some strange beast introduced in the 'Fables'? But
what revelation had this monk about Aesop's deformity? For he
must have it by dream or vision, and not by ordinary methods
of knowledge. He lived about two thousand years after him,
and in all that tract of time there's not a single author
that has given the least hint that Aesop was ugly."

Thus Bentley; but to return to Babrius. Tyrwhitt, in 1776, followed this
calculation of Bentley by collecting the remains of Babrius. A
publication in 1809 of fables from a Florentine manuscript foreran the
collection (1832) of all the fables which could be entirely restored. In
1835 a German scholar, Knoch, published whatever had up to that time
been written on Babrius, or as far as then known by him. So much had
been accomplished by modern scholarship. The calculation was not unlike
the mathematical computation that a star should, from an apparent
disturbance, be in a certain quarter of the heavens at a certain time.
The manuscript of Babrius, it became clear, must have existed. In 1842
M. Mynas, a Greek, who had already discovered the 'Philosophoumena' of
Hippolytus, came upon the parchment in the convent of St. Lama on Mount
Athos. He was employed by the French government, and the duty of giving
the new ancient to the world fell to French scholars. The date of the
manuscript they referred to the tenth century. There were contained in
it one hundred and twenty-three of the supposed one hundred and sixty
fables, the arrangement being alphabetical and ending with the letter O.
Again, in 1857 M. Mynas announced another discovery. Ninety-four fables
and a prooemium were still in a convent at Mount Athos; but the monks,
who made difficulty about parting with the first parchment, refused to
let the second go abroad. M. Mynas forwarded a transcript which he sold
to the British Museum. It was after examination pronounced to be the
work of a forger, and not even what it purported to be--the tinkering of
a writer who had turned the original of Babrius into barbarous Greek
and halting metre. Suggestions were made that the forger was M