in Lord Lytton’s conscious and highly-coloured style.  It may be bad taste, but sometimes we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.  So that it is not among those fables that conform most nearly to the old model, but one had nearly said among those that most widely differ from it, that we find the most satisfactory examples of the author’s manner.

In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he who raised the wind; or that of the grocer’s balance (’Cogito ergo sum’) who considered himself endowed with free-will, reason, and an infallible practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police made a descent upon the shop, and find the weights false and the scales unequal; and the whole thing is broken up for old iron.  Capital fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are ‘Prometheus Unbound,’ the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-cork, and ‘Teleology,’ where a nettle justifies the ways of God to nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of luck, promptly changes its divinity.

In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will, although, even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is another group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look in vain for any such playful liberties with Nature.  Thus we have ‘Conservation of Force’; where a musician, thinking of a certain picture, improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter, under the influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus lineally descended from the first.  This is fiction, but not what we have been used to call fable.  We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at his readers.  And still more so is this the case with others.  ’The Horse and the Fly’ states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic and straightforward way.  A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed.  The horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running over an only child; and there is some little pathetic detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the reader’s indignation very white-hot against some one.  It remains to be seen who that some one is to be:  the fly?  Nay, but on closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated by maternal instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs:  is maternal instinct, then, ‘sole author of these mischiefs all’?  ’Who’s in the Right?’ one of the best fables in the book, is somewhat in the same vein.  After a battle has been won, a group of officers assemble inside a battery, and debate together who should have the honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff, the cavalry, the engineer who posted