pleasant vehicle
for some moral doctrine or to convey some useful lesson. One of the best
known is that of Jotham in the Book of Judges (ix. 7-15); others are
"The City Rat and Field Rat," by Horace, "The Belly and its Members," by
the patrician Menenius Agrippa in the second book of Livy, and perhaps
most famous of all, those of Aesop. The term is applied more
particularly to a story in which the actors or speakers are taken from
the brute creation or inanimate nature. An apologue is distinguished
from a fable in that there is always some moral sense present, which
there need not be in a fable. It is generally dramatic, and has been
defined as "a satire in action." It differs from a parable in several
respects. A parable is equally an ingenious tale intended to correct
manners, but it can be _true_, while an apologue, with its introduction
of animals and plants, to which it lends our ideas and language and
emotions, is necessarily devoid of real truth, and even of all
probability. The parable reaches heights to which the apologue cannot
aspire, for the points in which brutes and inanimate nature present
analogies to man are principally those of his lower nature, and the
lessons taught by the apologue seldom therefore reach beyond prudential
morality, whereas the parable aims at representing the relations between
man and God. It finds its framework in the world of nature as it
actually is, and not in any grotesque parody of it, and it exhibits real
and not fanciful analogies. The apologue seizes on that which man has in
common with creatures below him, and the parable on that which he has in
common with God. Still, in spite of the difference of moral level,
Martin Luther thought so highly of apologues as counsellors of virtue
that he edited and revised Aesop and wrote a characteristic preface to
the volume. The origin of the apologue is extremely ancient and comes
from the East, which is the natural fatherland of everything connected
with allegory, metaphor and imagination. Veiled truth was often
necessary in the East, particularly with the slaves, who dared not
reveal their minds too openly. It is noteworthy that the two fathers of
apologue in the West were slaves, namely Aesop and Phaedrus. La Fontaine
in France; Gay and Dodsley in England; Gellert, Lessing and Hagedorn in
Germany; Tomas de Iriarte in Spain, and Krilov in Russia, are leading
modern writers of apologues. Length is not an essential matter in the
definiti