Lord of the Flies musical choir under an established leader. With the exception of Sam and Eric and the choirboys, they appear never to have encountered each other before. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves on a paradisiacal island, far from modern civilization, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state. Golding wrote his book as a counterpoint to R.M. Ballantyne's youth novel "The Coral Island" (1858), and included specific references to it, such as the rescuing naval officer's description of the children's initial attempts at civilised cooperation as "a jolly good show, like the Coral Island". Golding's three central
The Fox, the Flies and the Hedgehog in the neo-Latin verse of Gabriele Faerno’s fable collection (1563), which closes on the sentiment Aristotle’s version of the fable is also followed by Samuel Croxall in his prose collection of "The Fables of Æsop" (1722). The story in La Fontaine's Fables (1694) is more or less the same, except that the fox has been wounded in the chase. La Fontaine too mentions Aristotle and the political lesson that he draws, while the circumstances are repeated in Brooke Boothby’s very short poetic version. William Somervile adapted the fable more long-windedly into “The wounded man and the swarm of flies”, taking