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FABLES OF JOHN GAY
(SOMEWHAT ALTERED).
[Illustration]
FABLES OF JOHN GAY
(SOMEWHAT ALTERED).
AFFECTIONATELY PRESENTED TO
MARGARET ROSE,
BY HER UNCLE
JOHN BENSON ROSE.
[_FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION._]
LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES & SONS, STAMFORD STREET,
AND CHARING CROSS.
1871.
DEDICATION.
Si doulce la Margarite.
When I first saw you--never mind the year--you could speak no English,
and when next I saw you, after a lapse of two years, you _would_
prattle no French; when again we met, you were the nymph with bright
and flowing hair, which frightened his Highness Prince James out of
his feline senses, when, as you came in by the door, he made his bolt
by the window. It was then that you entreated me, with "most
petitionary vehemence," to write you a book--a big book--thick, and
all for yourself--
"Apollo heard, and granting half the prayer,
Shuffled to winds the rest and tossed in air."
I have not written the book, nor is it thick: but I have printed you a
book, and it is thin. And I take the occasion to note that old Geoffry
Chaucer, our father poet, must have had you in his mind's eye, by
prescience or precognition, or he could hardly else have written two
poems, one on the daisy and one on the rose. They are poems too long
for modern days, nor are we equal in patience to our fore-fathers, who
read 'The Faërie Queen,' 'Gondibert,' and the 'Polyolbion,' annually,
as they cheeringly averred, _through and out_. Photography, steam, and
electricity make us otherwise, and Patience has fled to the spheres;
therefore, if feasible, shall "brevity be the soul of wit," and we
will eschew "tediousness and outward flourishes" in compressing 'The
Flower and the Leaf' into little:--