'Fish in a Frying Pan'

'Fish in a Frying Pan', an illustration by John Vernon Lord 

in Aesop's Fables, Jonathan Cape, 1989, page 40.

The text:

The Fish and the Frying Pan

A Cook to please her master’s taste.

Some Fish in frying pan had plac’d;

Which both begin in plaintive tone,

Their sad disaster to bemoan.

Says one to ’tothers, let us fly,

Nor stay in this hot fat to fry;

So to escape the Cook’s dread ire,

They leapt, and fell into the fire.

Thus ignorant and blind to ruin,

We change full oft to our undoing.

Moral: It is advisable to consider the advantages of one’s present situation, however uneasy it may be, only to exchange it for something else that could be much worse.

Text: adapted from T. Ticklepitcher's version p81 (1788).

Selected parallels: Abstemius 20. L’Estrange 1/273. Perry 725.