Of the many differences between La Fontaine and Mandeville, those noticed up to this point may be blamed on the latter's incapacity. Some of the other changes may be partially justified on the grounds that through them Mandeville was deliberately trying to alter the tone of the poem, to give it an earthiness of spirit congruent with his temperament. La Fontaine's "Le Lion malade et le Renard" begins with hushed dignity: De par le roi des animaux, Qui dans son antre était malade, Fut fait savoir à ses vassaux Que chaque espèce en ambassade Envoyat gens le visiter.... Mandeville's translation begins: The king of Brutes sent all about, He was afflicted with the gout....[17] The gout is a standard comic disease which Mandeville gives to his lion to make him comically undignified. La Fontaine's lion remains dignified and restrained throughout. (The two versions of this fable are also instances of the relative capabilities of the French and the English four-stress lines.) In another fable, a tonal difference appears in some lines describing the meeting of a haggard wolf and a well-fed dog: Le Loup donc l'aborde humblement, Entre en propos, et lui fait compliment Sur son embonpoint, qu'il admire. And therefore in a humble way He gives the Dog the time o' th' Day; Talks mighty complaisant, and vents A Waggon Load of Compliments Upon his being in such a Case, His brawny Flank and jolly Face.[18] The tone of polite gravity is gone; what remains is less succinct, but more specific, and in its way effective. When Mandeville's invention is working well, as it does in "The Wolf and Dog," it provides, in its colloquial heartiness, an adequate substitute for La Fontaine's refinement of tone and subtlety of detail. On the whole, his fables are close to their originals, especially when compared to those of Dennis, even though "the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine" is something that, despite his professions, Mandeville fails to reproduce. Only two years intervened between Mandeville's translations from La Fontaine (1703) and _The Grumbling Hive_ (1705), the 433-line fable that, through the years, would grow into that great repository of social, political, and economic nonconformity, _The Fable of the Bees_. It is not surprising that many of the fables which Mandeville chose to translate anticipate the themes of his great work. Among these are "The Milk Woman," on the self-flatery of the egoistic dream; "The Frogs asking for a King," on the instability of human desires; "The Wolves and the Sheep," on political self-deception; "Hands, Feet, and Belly," on social interdependence; and "The Lyon grown Old," on the ultimate blow to pride.[19]