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countable and uncountable, plural apologues
A short story with a moral, often involving talking animals or objects; a fable. quotations examples
"Still I must bear my hard lot as well as I can—at least, I shall be amongst gentlefolks, and not with vulgar city people": and she fell to thinking of her Russell Square friends with that very same philosophical bitterness with which, in a certain apologue, the fox is represented as speaking of the grapes.
1847 January – 1848 July, William Makepeace Thackeray, chapter 7, in Vanity Fair […], London: Bradbury and Evans […], published 1848
[…] but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader's mind.
1891, Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, page 409
(rhetoric) The use of fable to persuade the audience. examples