in literature, a term applied originally to every imaginative tale, but confined in modern use to short stories, either in prose or verse, in which animals and sometimes inanimate things are made to act and speak with human interests and passions, for the purpose of pointing a moral. The fable consists properly of two parts--the symbolical representation, and the application, or moral, which must be apparent in the fable itself. The oldest fables are supposed to be the Oriental, and among these the Indian fables of Pilpai, or Bidpai, and the fables of the Arabian Lokman, are celebrated. Among the Greeks Aesop was the master of a simple but very effective style of fable. The fables of Phaedrus are a second-rate Latin version of those of Aesop. In modern times Gellert and Lessing among the Germans, Gay among the English and Kryloff among the Russians are celebrated; but the first place among modern fabulists belongs to the French writer La Fontaine.