1], the second in 1667, the third in 1671,
but the author added pieces in successive editions. The first part of
the _Fables_ appeared in 1668, dedicated to the Dauphin, the second in
1679, dedicated to Madame de Montespan, the third in 1693, dedicated to
the Duc de Bourgogne, who is said to have been taught by Fenelon to
delight in La Fontaine, and to have sent him just before his death all
the money he had. The two books are complementary to each other, and La
Fontaine's genius cannot be judged by either alone. It has been remarked
that he was a diligent though apparently a very desultory reader. He
read the Italians, and, apparently with still more relish and profit,
the works of the old French writers, to whom the Italians owed so much.
The spirit of the Fabliaux had been dead, or at any rate dormant, since
Marot and Rabelais; La Fontaine revived it. Even purists, like his
friend Boileau, admitted a certain archaism in lighter poetry, and La
Fontaine would in all probability have troubled himself very little if
they had not. His language is, therefore, more supple, varied, and racy
than even that of Moliere, and this is his first excellence. His second
is a faculty of easy narration in verse, which is absolutely unequalled
except perhaps in Pulci and Ariosto, while it is certainly unsurpassed
anywhere. His third distinguishing point is his power of insinuating, it
may be a satirical point, it may be a moral reflection, which is also
hardly equalled and as certainly unsurpassed. In the authors whom La
Fontaine followed, either deliberately or unconsciously, the models of
his tales and his fables were indiscriminately mingled; but he separated
them by so rigid a line that, while there is hardly a phrase in his
_Fables_ which is not suited _virginibus puerisque_, the _Contes_ are
not exactly a book for youth. In the latter the author has taken
subjects, always amusing but not unfrequently loose, from the old
fabulists, from Boccaccio, from the French prose tale-tellers of the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ and similar collections, from Rabelais, from
a few Italian writers of the Renaissance, and has dressed them up in the
incomparable narrative of which he alone has the secret. Where he treads
in the steps of the greatest writers he is almost always best. 'Joconde'
supplies the opportunity of a remarkable comparison with Ariosto; 'La
Fiancee du Roi de Garbe' of a still more remarkable comparison with
Boccaccio. In this latte