Childrens Classics PDF EPUB

Aesop, in Rhyme

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1852
Pages: 332

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

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.

About the author

Marmaduke Park

Aesop is the name traditionally attached to a body of Greek fables that circulated orally from roughly the sixth century BCE. Ancient sources describe him as an enslaved storyteller of great wit, though nothing written by him survives and the collections bearing his name were assembled by later hands.

Open the author page