The Frog and the Fox

At the start of the 19th century a recension of the fables in Greek and Latin provided another moral that highlights the weakness of the frog's self-promotion: Iactantia refutat seipsam (boasting disproves itself).^[8] Croxall had also underlined the questionable nature of the frog's discourse that, being "uttered in a parcel of hard, cramp words which nobody understood, made the beasts admire his learning and give credit to everything he said." All, that is, except the fox, who saw through the frog's pretence. Illustrations of the fable have consequently depicted the gullible audience surrounding the frog as it takes its stance on the edge of the marsh, generally with the fox sitting off to one side. In Heinrich Steinhöwel's edition (1476) the listeners include nothing more exotic than a rat, a rabbit and a hedgehog,^[9] but Henry Walker Herrick (1869)^[10] and Ernest Griset (1874)^[11] furnish a more varied menagerie. Francis Barlow concentrates largely on an audience of domestic animals but places a squirrel and a monkey in the overhanging branches of a tree,^[12] where Samuel Croxall's illustrator^[13] and Thomas Bewick (1818)^[14] confine themselves to deer and farm beasts. The frog addresses these from the bank or, in the case of Samuel Howitt (1810, see above), from a marshy tussock. Later artists portray the frog as a huckster performing in front of a cluster of bystanders, as in the case of J. M. Condé (1905),^[15] Arthur Rackham (1912),^[16] John Vernon Lord (1989)^[17] and Arlene Graston (2016).^[18] These change the focus to the title given the story by George Fyler Townsend (1887), "The Quack Frog".^[19]

• Illustrations from books between the 15th–20th centuries