THE NURSE AND THE WOLF.
A Nurse, who was endeavouring to quiet a froward child, among other things threatened to throw it out of doors to the Wolf, if it did not leave off crying. A Wolf, who chanced to be prowling near the door just at the time, heard the expression, and believing the woman to be in earnest, waited a long while about the house, in expectation of having her words made good. But at last the child, wearied with its own perverseness, fell asleep, and the Wolf was forced to return back into the woods, empty and supperless. The Fox meeting him, and surprized to see him going home so thin and disconsolate, asked him what the matter was, and how he came to speed no better that night? Ah! do not ask me, says he, I was so silly as to believe what the Nurse said, and have been disappointed.
APPLICATION.
Many of the old moralists have interpreted this Fable as a caution never to trust a woman: a barbarous inference, which neither the obvious sense of the apologue, nor the disposition of the softer sex will warrant. For though some women may be fickle and unstable, yet the generality exceed their calumniators in truth and constancy, and have more frequently to complain of being the victims, than to be arraigned as the authors of broken vows. To us this Fable appears to mean little more than merely to shew how easily inclined we are, in all our various expectations through life, to delude ourselves into a belief of any thing which we desire to be true. The lover interprets every smile of his mistress in his own favour, and is then perhaps neglected. The beauty believes all mankind are dying for her, and is then deserted by her train of admirers. The followers of the great reckon a smile or a nod very auspicious omens, and deceive themselves with groundless hopes of employment or promotion, in expectation of which, they, like the Wolf at the Nurse’s door, dangle away the time that might be usefully employed elsewhere, and at last are obliged to retire disappointed and hungry, crying out perhaps against the perfidy of those in power, instead of blaming their own sanguine credulity.