mind is that, for twentieth
century readers, the best Fables are not merely the best
ones ever written, but the best ones re-written. In other
words, the Fable was for centuries an old story in a rough
state, and the writers who have made it most interesting
are the writers who told it over again in a manner that
makes it Art. A Greek named Babrius, of whom almost
nothing is known, is remembered because he collected
and versified some of the so-called Fables of Aesop. A
Roman slave named Phaedrus also put these Fables
into Latin verse; and his work to-day is a text book in
our colleges.

Among modern writers, it was reserved for La Fontaine to
take these ancient themes and make them his own--just
as Moliere, "taking his own wherever he found it," borrowed
freely from the classics for his greatest plays; just as
Shakespeare re-formed forgotten tales with the glow and
splendor of surpassing genius, so La Fontaine turned to
India, Greece, Italy, and furnishing the old Fables and
facetious tales, refreshed them with his originality. Some
of them were his own inventions, but for the most part
they were "Aesop" and Phaedrus, made over by poetic
art and vivified with a wit and humor characteristically
French.

But if La Fontaine's fame endures, it is not alone that he
was the greatest lyric poet of a great literary period.
Apart from the wit and fancy of his creations--apart from
the philosophy, wisdom, and knowledge of human nature
that so delighted Moliere, Boileau and Racine--his Fables
disclose the goodness and simplicity of one who lived
much with Nature, and cared nothing for the false
splendors of the court. Living most of his life in the
country, the woods, and streams and fields had been a
constant source of inspiration. He saw animals through
the eyes of a naturalist and poet; and when he came to
make them talk, the little fishes "talked like little
fishes--not like whales". With Shakespeare's banished
Frenchman in the Forest of Arden, he
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

An anecdote often told of him aptly illustrates his habit
of mind. He was late in coming to a fashionable dinner,
and his excuse was this:
"I hope you will pardon me," he said. "I was detained at
the funeral of an ant, and I could not come until the
ceremony was over."

This was not a pleasantry, but the truth. He had been
watching an ant-hill, and was so absorbed in obser