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 ownerships entries in ink of Charlotte Biddulph, one dated 1819. Hinges weak, corners bumped, slightly stained. Bodemann, 119.1; cf. 33.1 not in Fabula docet.