Reynard the Fox

The story of Reynard the Fox is the triumph of craft and hypocrisy: and, though mankind must naturally repine at finding themselves overcome by such weapons, they are content to take the only revenge that remains in their power,—that of exposing and satirising the deceiver. Hence the evergreen popularity of this apologue through successive centuries —an apologue which, though Grimm claimed it to be of German or Flemish origin, has been traced to that fertile source of fictitious story, the ...