The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse - British Variations

British Variations

British poetical treatments of the story vary widely. The Scottish Henryson's The Taill of the Uponlandis Mous and the Burges Mous makes the two mice sisters. 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. 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. In the second half of the poem (lines 70–112) Wyatt addresses his interlocutor John Poynz on the vanity of human wishes. Horace, on the other hand, had discussed his own theme at great length before closing on the story.

By contrast, the adaptation in La Fontaine's Fables, Le rat de ville et le rat des champs (I.9), is simply told. There it is the town rat that invites the country rat home, only to have the meal disturbed by dogs (as in Horace); the country rat then departs, reflecting, as in Aesop, that peace is preferable to fearful plenty.

Adaptations dating from Britain's 'Augustan Age' concentrate upon the Horatian version of the fable. 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. 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 (page 4ff).

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 is this aspect of Horace's writing that is underlined by the two adaptations of his satire made by other Augustan authors. The first was a joint work by the friends Thomas Sprat and Abraham Cowley written in 1666. Horace has the story told by a garrulous countryman, a guise that Cowley takes on with delicate self-irony. 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. Cowley's portion appeared separately under the title of The Country Mouse in his volume of essays.

In the following century the friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope combined in a similar imitation of Horace's Satire, with Pope playing the part of the story-teller and attributing the tale to contemporary fabulist Matthew Prior. 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. On the other hand, it can be argued that emphasising the urban in this way, for all the fable's championing of country life, is fully in the spirit of the Horatian original.

In all versions of the original fable, much is made of the poor fare upon which the country mouse subsists. Dried (grey) peas and bacon are frequently mentioned and it is these two that the early 19th century author Richard Scrafton Sharpe uses in a repetitive refrain to his lyrical treatment of "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse". He was the author of Old friends in a new dress - or Familiar fables in verse, which went through different editions from 1807 onwards. The stories are told in song measures rather than narrative, and it was in a later edition that this retelling appeared.