_Le Lutrin_ (completed in 1683) is not a burlesque which degrades a noble theme, but, like Pope's far more admirable _Rape of the Lock_, a heroi-comic poem humorously exalting humble matter of the day. It tells of the combats of ecclesiastics respecting the position of a lectern, combats in which the books of a neighbouring publisher serve as formidable projectiles. The scene is in the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice. Boileau's gift for the vivid presentation of visible detail, and his skill in versification, served him here better than did his choice of a subject. On the whole, we think of him less as a poet than as the classical guardian and legislator of poetry. He was an emancipator by directing art towards reason and truth; when larger interpretations of truth and reason than his became possible, his influence acted unfavourably as a constraint. All that Boileau lacked as a poet was possessed by the most easy and natural of the singers of his time--one whose art is like nature in its freedom, while yet it never wrongs the delicate bounds of art. JEAN DE LA FONTAINE was born in 1621 at Chateau-Thierry, in Champagne, son of the "maitre des eaux et forets." His education was less of a scholastic kind than an education derived from books read for his own pleasure, and especially from observation or reverie among the woods and fields, with their population of bird, beast, and insect, so dear to his heart and his imagination. Slipping away from theology and law, he passed ten years, from twenty-three to thirty-three, in seeming indolence, a "bon garcon," irreclaimably wayward as regards worldly affairs, but already drawing in to himself all that fed his genius, all sights and sounds of nature, all the lore of old poets, story-tellers, translators, and already practising his art of verse. Nothing that was not natural to him, and wholly to his liking, would he or could he do; but happily he was born to write perfect verses, and the labour of the artist was with him an instinct and a delight. He allowed himself to be married to a pretty girl of fifteen, and presently forgot that he had a wife and child, drifted away, and agreed in 1659 to a division of goods; but his carelessness and egoism were without a touch of malignity, those of an overgrown child rather than of a man.