surface one finds the frailties, the follies, the virtues and the vices
of humanity. And yet it is not quite that. The creatures of La
Fontaine's fantasy are not simply animals with the minds of human
beings: they are something more complicated and amusing; they are
animals with the minds which human beings would certainly have, if one
could suppose them transformed into animals. When the young and foolish
rat sees a cat for the first time and observes to his mother--

Je le crois fort sympathisant
Avec messieurs les rats: car il a des oreilles
En figure aux nôtres pareilles;

this excellent reason is obviously not a rat's reason; nor is it a human
being's reason; the fun lies in its being just the reason which, no
doubt, a silly young creature of the human species would give in the
circumstances if, somehow or other, he were metamorphosed into a rat.

It is this world of shifting lights, of queer, elusive, delightful
absurdities, that La Fontaine has made the scene of the greater number
of his stories. The stories themselves are for the most part exceedingly
slight; what gives them immortality is the way they are told. Under the
guise of an ingenuous, old-world manner, La Fontaine makes use of an
immense range of technical powers. He was an absolute master of the
resources of metre; and his rhythms, far looser and more varied than
those of his contemporaries, are marvellously expressive, while yet they
never depart from a secret and controlling sense of form. His vocabulary
is very rich--stocked chiefly with old-fashioned words, racy,
colloquial, smacking of the soil, and put together with the light
elliptical constructions of the common people. Nicknames he is
particularly fond of: the cat is Raminagrobis, or Grippeminaud, or