THE PREPONDERANCE OF DIDACTIC LITERATURE
As a matter of fact, this evidence coincides remarkably with the inferences that literary historians have drawn from other data. The fables which pass under the name of “Æsop,”〖H. C., xxxix, 17ff.〗 to begin with what is probably the most ancient of the works he issued, had been popular for many centuries, and the tangle of the relationships of the endless mediæval collections in various languages is one of the most puzzling problems left for the modern scholar to solve. Their value Caxton seems to take for granted, largely, we may presume, because the didactic purpose which he always looks for first lies upon the surface and did not need to be pointed out. Indeed, more than half of the publications of Caxton, the Prologues and Epilogues of which are printed in The Harvard Classics, are confessedly of that improving kind for which the Middle Ages had so insatiable an appetite. The “Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers”〖H. C., xxxix, 9.〗 and the “Distichs”〖H. C., xxxix, 15.〗 of Cato were collections of aphoristic wisdom, the appeal of which is apparent, not merely from the number of copies made, but also from the frequency with which we find them quoted by all kinds of mediæval writers.