SOURCE: Welcher, Jeanne K., and Dircks, Richard. Introduction to An Essay on Fable, by Robert Dodsley, pp. i-viii. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1965.

In the following essay, Welcher and Dircks discuss the warm critical attention Dodsley received for his Select Fables and the originality and scholarship of “An Essay on Fable.”

When Robert Dodsley published his Select Fables of Aesop and other Fabulists in 1761, he prefixed to it a study of the fable genre entitled “An Essay on Fable.” In undertaking a comprehensive study of the subject for the first time in English and in the method of organizing his material, Dodsley shows significant marks of originality. The thought of the essay, however, owes much to that of the French fabulist La Motte, whose importance William Shenstone early indicated to Dodsley.¹

Dodsley's interest in fables can be seen in his first publication, The Muse in Livery...