invention, and has given his verse a flow worthy of his master, Pope, has
yet fallen far behind La Fontaine in the general management of his
materials. His fables are all beautiful poems, but few of them are
beautiful fables. His animal speakers do not sufficiently preserve their
animal characters. It is quite otherwise with La Fontaine. His beasts are
made most nicely to observe all the proprieties not only of the scene in
which they are called to speak, but of the great drama into which they
are from time to time introduced. His work constitutes an harmonious
whole. To those who read it in the original, it is one of the few which
never cloy the appetite. As in the poetry of Burns, you are apt to think
the last verse you read of him the best.

But the main object of this Preface was to give a few traces of the life
and literary career of our poet. A remarkable poet cannot but have been a
remarkable man. Suppose we take a man with native benevolence amounting
almost to folly; but little cunning, caution, or veneration; good
perceptive, but better reflective faculties; and a dominant love of the
beautiful;--and toss him into the focus of civilization in the age of
Louis XIV. It is an interesting problem to find out what will become of
him. Such is the problem worked out in the life of JEAN DE LA FONTAINE,
born on the eighth of July, 1621, at Chateau-Thierry. His father, a man
of some substance and station, committed two blunders in disposing of his
son. First, he encouraged him to seek an education for ecclesiastical
life, which was evidently unsuited to his disposition. Second, he brought
about his marriage with a woman who was unfitted to secure his
affections, or to manage his domestic affairs. In one other point he was
not so much mistaken: he laboured unremittingly to make his son a poet.
Jean was a backward boy, and showed not the least spark of poetical
genius till his twenty-second year. His poetical genius did not ripen
till long after that time. But his father lived to see him all, and more