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 Mynas himself.  And there were scholars who accounted the manuscript as genuine.

The discovery of the first part added substantially to the remains which we have of the poetry of ancient Greece.  The terseness, simplicity, and humor of the poems belong to the popular classic all the world over, in whatever tongue it appears; and the purity of the Greek shows that Babrius lived at a time when the influence of the classical age was still vital.  He is placed at various times.  Bergk fixes him so far back as B.C. 250, while others place him at the same number of years in our own era.  Both French and German criticism has claimed that he was a Roman.  There is no trace of his fables earlier than the Emperor Julian, and no metrical version of the Aesopean fables existed before the writing of Babrius.  Socrates tried his hand at a version or two.  But when such Greek writers as Xenophon and Aristotle refer to old folk-tales and legends, it is always in their own words.  His fables are written in choliambic verse; that is, imperfect iambic which has a spondee in the last foot and is fitted for the satire for which it was originally used.