igious meditation, and to abandon the
art which he had practised with such success. He was not yet forty, his
genius was apparently still developing, but his great career was at an
end. Towards the close of his life he produced two more plays--_Esther_,
a short idyllic piece of great beauty, and _Athalie_, a tragedy which,
so far from showing that his powers had declined during his long
retreat, has been pronounced by some critics to be the finest of his
works. He wrote no more for the stage, and he died eight years later, at
the age of sixty. It is difficult to imagine the loss sustained by
literature during those twenty years of silence. They might have given
us a dozen tragedies, approaching, or even surpassing, the merit of
_Phedre_. And Racine must have known this. One is tempted to see in his
mysterious mortification an instance of that strain of disillusionment
which runs like a dark thread through the brilliant texture of the
literature of the _Grand Siecle_. Racine had known to the full the uses
of this world, and he had found them flat, stale, and unprofitable; he
had found that even the triumphs of his art were all compact of
worldliness; and he had turned away, in an agony of renunciation, to
lose himself in the vision of the Saints.

The influence and the character of that remarkable age appear nowhere
more clearly than in the case of its other great poet--LA FONTAINE. In
the Middle Ages, La Fontaine would have been a mendicant friar, or a
sainted hermit, or a monk, surreptitiously illuminating the margins of
his manuscripts with the images of birds and beasts. In the nineteenth
century, one can imagine him drifting among Paris cafes, pouring out his
soul in a random lyric or two, and dying before his time. The age of
Louis XIV took this dreamer, this idler, this feckless, fugitive,
spiritual creature, kept him alive by means of patrons in high society,
and eventually turned him--not simply into a poet, for he was a poet by
nature, but into one of the most subtle, deliberate, patient, and
exquisite craftsmen who have ever written in verse. The process was a
long one; La Fontaine was in his fifties when he wrote the greater
number of his _Fables_--where his genius found its true expression for
the first time. But the process was also complete. Among all the
wonderful and beautiful examples of masterly craftsmanship in the
poetry of France, the _Fables_ of La Fontaine stand out as _the_ models
of what perfect