Note 1 — XII.—LEGENDS OF LOCALITY, HOUSEHOLD TALES, &c.

The use of fables to convey some homely truth or enforce the point of some moral apothegm, to those who might turn from abstract argument with indifference, is as familiar to the household world of China as to that of the West. Strangely enough, however, it does not appear that the Chinese possess (with two exceptions to be presently mentioned) any collections of fables properly so called, though their literature abounds with them as isolated tales. The literati indeed affect to rather despise them in the abstract, as fit only for the perusal of women and children, though they do not disdain to employ them at times with considerable effect. One cause of the supercilious attitude thus assumed is, very probably, that the only known collections in the language (forming the exceptions above noted) are translations from Sanscrit Buddhistic sources, and hence exotic to Chinese thought. Your true Confucianist—the believer in the dry bones of a system (if system it be) which, its worldly ethics aside, is the least satisfying of all known beliefs—scorns Buddhistic fables as he scorns Buddhistic prayers. Few of the better-read natives will own to any but the most distant acquaintance with the two works which form almost the sole repositories of Indo-Chinese fable—the Fa-yuan-chu-lin1 and the Yu-lin, which are avowedly adopted from the Pali. But besides this, the officials of the Empire have a wholesome dread of the satire which a fable may point, and it is more than probable that any popular collection of the sort would bring its authors and publishers into trouble. In 1837–38 the late Mr. R. Thom translated eighty-one of Æsop’s fables into Chinese. We give the result in his own words:—