nt du Midi;" but he may
be said to have recreated the species. From an apologue, tending to
an express moral, he converted the fable into a _conte_, in which
narrative, description, observation, satire, dialogue have an
independent value, and the moral is little more than an accident.
This is especially true of the midmost portion of the collection--Books
vii.-ix.--which appeared ten years after the earliest group. He does
not impose new and great ideas on the reader; he does not interpret the
deepest passions; he takes life as he sees it, as an entertaining
comedy, touched at times with serious thought, with pathos, even with
melancholy, but in the main a comedy, which teaches us to smile at the
vanities, the follies, the egoisms of mankind, and teaches us at the
same time something of tenderness and pity for all that is gentle or
weak. His morality is amiable and somewhat epicurean, a morality of
indulgence, of moderation, of good sense. His eye for what is
characteristic and picturesque in animal life is infallible; but his
humanised wild creatures are also a playful, humorous, ironical
presentation of mankind and of the society of his own day, from the
grand monarch to the bourgeois or the lackey.

La Fontaine's language escapes from the limitations of the classical
school of the seventeenth century; his manifold reading in elder
French literature enriched his vocabulary; he seems to light by
instinct upon the most exact and happiest word. Yet we know that the
perfection of his art was attained only as the result of untiring
diligence; indolent and careless as he was in worldly affairs, he
was an indefatigable craftsman in poetry. His verse is as free as
it is fine; it can accomplish whatever it intends; now it is light
and swift, but when needful it can be grave and even magnificent:

"_Aurait-il imprime sur le front des etoiles
Ce que la nuit des temps enferme dans ses voiles?_"

It is verse which depends on no mechanical rules imposed from without;
its life and movement come from within, and the lines vary, like a
breeze straying among blossoms, with every stress or relaxation of
the writer's mood. While La Fontaine derives much from antiquity,
he may be regarded as incarnating more than any other writer of his
century the genius of France, exquisite in the proportion of his
feeling and the expression of feeling to its source and cause. If
we do not name him, with some of his admirers, "the French Homer