d at each other, and
shaking their heads," says Krylov, "went home." The two words "went
home" in Russian (_poshli domoi_) express their hopelessness more
than pages of rhetoric. This is just one of those terse effects such
as La Fontaine delights in.

Krylov in his youth lived much among the poor, and his language is
peculiarly native, racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the
language of the people and of the peasants, and it abounds in humorous
turns. He is, moreover, always dramatic, and his fables are for this
reason most effective when read aloud or recited. He is dramatic not
only in that part of the fable which is narrative, but in the
prologue, epilogue, or moral--the author's commentary; he adapts
himself to the tone of every separate fable, and becomes himself one
of the _dramatis personae_. Sometimes his fables deal with political
events--the French Revolution, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the
Congress of Vienna; the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, in the
well-known fable of the Lion who sends his son to be educated by the
Eagle, of whom he consequently learns how to make nests. Sometimes
they deal with internal evils and abuses: the administration of
justice, in fables such as that of the peasant who brings a case
against the sheep and is found guilty by the fox; the censorship is
aimed at in the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing in the cat's
claws; the futility of bureaucratic regulations in the fable of the
sheep who are devoured by their superfluous watchdogs, or in that of
the sheep who are told solemnly and pompously to drag any offending
wolf before the nearest magistrate; or, again, in that of the high
dignitary who is admitted immediately into paradise because on earth
he left his work to be done by his secretaries--for being obviously a
fool, had he done his work himself, the result would have been
disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they deal merely with human
follies and affairs, and the idiosyncrasies of men.

Krylov's fables have that special quality which only permanent
classics possess of appealing to different generations, to people of
every age, kind and class, for different reasons; so that children can
read them simply for the story, and grown-up people for their
philosophy; their style pleases the unlettered by its simplicity, and
is the envy and despair of the artist in its supreme art. Pushkin
calls him "le plus national et le plus populaire de nos poetes" (this