AESOP/FAERNO. - Fables in English and French Verse. Translated from the original Latin of Gabriele Faerno. With hundred Copper-plates.London, for Claude du Bosci, and sold by C. Davis, 1741. 8vo. With engraved frontispiece by Claude Du Bosc (Aesop communicating with the animals), 100 engraved illustrating the 100 Fables (ca. 96 x 110), inspired by the fable illustrations by Marcus Gheeraerts, numerous head- and tailpieces by Henry Woodfall. Full calf over boards.

[2], XVI, 190, [2], VI, 3-191 pp.First edition of this lovely printed collection of the famous ‘100 (Aesop) fables’ , originally translated in elegant Latin verses by Gabriel Faerno (1563), and now translated into English and French verses by Claude Du Bosc and Charles Perrault.Pope Pius IV, convinced that reading the fables of Aesop was of great use in forming the morals of young children, commissioned Gabriel Faerno, whom he knew as an excellent poet as well as a man with a taste for elegant and beautiful Latinity, to versify these fables so that children might learn, at the same time and from the same book, both moral and linguistic purity. Faerno (1510-1561), a scrupulous scholar and Latin poet from Cremona, has been called a second Phaedrus, by reason of the excellent style of his Fables, though he never saw Phaedrus, who did not come to our knowledge till above thirty years after his death.The French translation by Perrault had been published in 1699 for the first time.With ownership’s entries in ink of Charlotte Biddulph, one dated 1819. Hinges weak, corners bumped, slightly stained.l Bodemann, 119.1; cf. 33.1 not in Fabula docet.

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