Aesop, in Rhyme

More than a hundred of the fables long attributed to Aesop appear here recast as short rhymed poems by Marmaduke Park, in the edition C. G. Henderson & Co. of Philadelphia issued in 1852. The familiar cast is present: the hare who naps while the tortoise plods on, the dog who loses his stolen dinner to his own reflection in a stream, the milkmaid whose daydreams spill with her pail, the cock who turns up a jewel and would rather have had a barley-corn. Most run only a page or two, each opening with a woodcut and closing with a moral set under its own heading. Verse was the standard schoolroom dress for Aesop in nineteenth-century America, on the theory that rhyme made a lesson stick, and Park’s book shows how thoroughly the old Greek stories had settled into American childhood.