Babrius, also referred to as Babrias and Gabrias, was the writer of that metrical version of the folk-fables, commonly referred to Aesop, which delights our childhood.  Until the time of Richard Bentley he was commonly thought of merely as a fabulist whose remains had been preserved by a few grammarians.  Bentley, in the first draft (1697) of the part of his famous ‘Dissertation’ treating of the fables of Aesop, speaks thus of Babrius, and goes not far out of his way to give a rap at Planudes, a late Greek, who turned works of Ovid, Cato, and Caesar into Greek:—­

“... came one Babrius, that gave a new turn of the fables into choliambics.  Nobody that I know of mentions him but Suidas, Avienus, and Tzetzes.  There’s one Gabrias, indeed, yet extant, that has comprised each fable in four sorry iambics.  But our Babrius is a writer of another size and quality; and were his book now extant, it might justly be opposed, if not preferred, to the Latin of Phaedrus.  There’s a whole fable of his yet preserved at the end of Gabrias, of ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale.’  Suidas brings many citations out of him, all which show him an excellent poet....  There are two parcels of the present fables; the one, which are the more ancient, one hundred and thirty-six in number, were first published out of the Heidelberg Library by Neveletus, 1610.  The editor himself well observed that they were falsely ascribed to Aesop, because they mention holy monks.  To which I will add another remark,—­that there is a sentence out of Job....  Thus I have proved one-half of the fables now extant that carry the name of Aesop to be above a thousand years more recent than he.  And the other half, that were public before Neveletus, will be found yet more modern, and the latest of all....  This collection, therefore, is more recent than that other; and, coming first abroad with Aesop’s ‘Life,’ written by Planudes, ’tis justly believed to be owing to the same writer.  That idiot of a monk has given us a book which he calls ‘The Life of Aesop,’ that perhaps cannot be matched in any language for ignorance and nonsense.  He had picked up two or three true stories,—­that Aesop was a slave to a Xanthus, carried a burthen of bread, conversed with Croesus, and was put to death at Delphi; but the circumstances of these and all his other tales are pure invention....  But of all his injuries to Aesop, that which can least be forgiven him is the making such a monster of him for ugliness,—­an abuse that has found credit so universally that all the modern painters since the time of Planudes have 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