The Animals Sick of the Plague

[9] A slightly expanded English version of La Fontaine's fable appeared a quarter century later in Bernard de Mandeville's misleadingly titled Aesop Dress’d (1704).

It keeps La Fontaine's title of "The Plague among the Beasts", however, and the socio-economic focus of his moral: "The Fable shews you poor Folk's fate/ Whilst Laws can never reach the Great".

[11] In this the animals, meeting in a general assembly, appoint the fox as father confessor "and the lion with great generosity condescended to be the first in making public confession", followed by "the Tyger, the Leopard, the Bear and the Wolf".

Brooke Boothby condenses it in the second volume of his Fables and Satires (1809);[12] George Linley the Younger also gives an abridged version in his Old Saws Newly Set (1864), but at the end draws out the social moral to some length: In judging great and small transgressor, We laud the large, condemn the lesser… Stern Justice, blinking giant vices, The petty culprit sacrifices.

[18] There the Lion demands that all the beasts confess their sins to a priest, but as they do so each pleads underlying virtues: the wolf his basic harmlessness; the ass his wit and sweet voice; though the pig admits pride, it is in its moderate appetite; the ape argues its strict morality, the goat its chastity.

Swift then compares this to the denial of their common reputations by lawyers, political and clerical place-seekers, doctors, statesmen and gamesters, concluding his satire by condemning fabulists for unrealistically endowing innocent animals with human characteristics.

The start of Ivan Krylov's plague fable differs less widely from La Fontaine's, but at the end wolves are added to the Tiger and Bear as joining in confession.

Grandville's print takes up the fable's satirical undercurrent of a corrupted society swayed by the powerful, in which the lion sits at ease in the court and the wolf is dressed in a prosecutor's robes, with a blind mole swinging a priestly censer at his side.

Salvador Dali's lithograph of about 1974 takes its departure from another common theme of previous illustrators based on the fable's opening, with the animals collapsed on the ground, exhausted by the plague's attack, and here sprayed by a skeletal elephant.