The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
But their rich feast is interrupted by a cat which forces the rodent cousins to abandon their meal and retreat back into their mouse hole for safety.
[5] Horace included it as part of one of his satires (II.6), ending on this story in a poem comparing town living unfavorably to life in the country.
His Latin version[8] (or that of Odo of Cheriton) has been credited as the source of the fable that appeared in the Spanish Libro de Buen Amor of Juan Ruiz in the first half of the 14th century.
[12] The one in the country envies her sister's rich living and pays her a visit, only to be chased by a cat and return home, contented with her own lot.
Four final stanzas (lines 190–221) draw out the moral that it is better to limit one's ambition and one's appetites, warning those who make the belly their god that "The cat cummis and to the mous hes ee".
Henryson attributes the story to Esope, myne author where Sir Thomas Wyatt makes it a song sung by "My mothers maydes when they did sowe and spynne" in the second of his satires.
[13] This is more in accord with Horace's description of it as "an old wives' tale" but Wyatt's retelling otherwise echoes Henryson's: an impoverished country mouse visits her sister in town but is caught by the cat.
The reference is direct in The hind and the panther transvers'd to the story of the country-mouse and the city mouse, written by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax and Matthew Prior in 1687.
[15] This was a satire directed against a piece of pro-Stuart propaganda and portrays the poet John Dryden (under the name of Bayes) proposing to elevate Horace's "dry naked History" into a religious allegory (pp.
Part of the fun there is that in reality the Horatian retelling is far more sophisticated than the "plain simple thing" that Bayes pretends it is, especially in its depiction of Roman town-life at the height of its power.
It allows him to adapt the comforts of the imperial city described by Horace to those of Restoration London, with references to contemporary high cuisine and luxury furnishings such as Mortlake Tapestries.
[17] The point of the piece is once again to make a witty transposition of the Classical scene into present-day circumstances as an extension of the poem's anachronistic fun.
[23] In 1980, the fable was whimsically adapted by Evelyn Lambart for the National Film Board of Canada using paper figures and brightly coloured backgrounds.
[26] It features William Boot, a country mouse bored with rural life at his grandmother's house, who is visited by his city cousin and learns that he has inherited Tallyhoe Lodge in London.
