NEW YORK: E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY




PREFACE


If deep wisdom, gentle satire, polite cynicism, and, above all,
irresistible humour are qualities which make a book attractive then La
Fontaine's _Fables_ should be in the hands of all. Their charm is
two-fold; for whilst they induce pleasurable reflection in the reader
they delight him by the gaiety of their subject matter.

Notwithstanding the fact that the spell of La Fontaine's verse
necessarily disappears when another tongue is employed, his English
translators, both Elizur Wright and Walter Thornbury, have courageously
attempted to do him justice in prosody. In this little book no such
effort has been made, chiefly for the reason that, for any but the
unusually gifted, to snatch at rhythm and rhyme is often to let drop the
apt and ready word as Æsop's mastiff dropped his dinner. But there is a
further excuse for the present writer. Verse has little attraction for
children unless it jingles merrily, and that is a thing as impossible as
it is undesirable where the claims of a philosophic original make
restrictions. Since the spirit is more likely to survive if the letter
is not exacting, it is difficult to see why custom looks askance upon
prose versions of poetry. But this little book may escape such censure
on the ground of its being but a selection from the complete _Fables_ of
La Fontaine. It presents only those of which the great fabulist was
himself the originator. A selection of some sort being imperative there