Folk-lore stretches into the Valhalla of the past; our heritage consists of an assemblage of the heroic through all ages. A history of distinctive books for children must enter into minute traceries of the golden thread of legend, fable, and belief, of romance and adventure; it must tell of the wanderings of rhyme and marvel, under varied disguises, from mouth to mouth, from country to country, naught of richness being taken away from them, much of new glory being added. But for our immediate purposes, we imagine all this to be so; we take it for granted that courtier and peasant have had their fancies. The tales told to warriors are told to children, and in turn by nurses to these children’s children. The knight makes his story by his own action in the dark forest, or in the king’s palace; he appears before the hut of the serf, and his horse is encircled by a magic light. The immortal hero is kept immortal by what is heroic in ourselves. Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) was a product of court life; and the fable was the literary form introduced to amuse the corsaged ladies of Versailles. La Fontaine was the cynic in an age of hypocrisy and favouritism, and one cannot estimate his work fully, apart from the social conditions fostering it. He was steeped in French lore, and in a knowledge of the popular tales of the Middle Ages. He was licentious in some of his writing, and wild in his living; he was a friend of Fouquet, and he knew Molière, Racine, and Boileau. He was a brilliant, unpractical satirist, who had to be supported by his friends, and who was elected to the Academy because his monarch announced publicly that he had promised to behave. Toward the end of his life he atoned for his misdemeanours by a formal confession. There was much of the child heart in La Fontaine, and this characteristic, together with the spleen which develops in every courtier, aided him in his composition of the Fables. Unclean his tales may be, likened to Boccaccio, but the true poet in him produced incomparable verses which have been saved for the present and will live far into the future because of the universality of their moral. The wolf and dog, the grasshopper and ant, all moved in silks and satins at the court of Louis XIV, and bowed for social rank, some trailing their pride in the dust, others raised to high position through the fortune of unworthy favour. So successfully did La Fontaine paint his pictures that the veiled allusions became lost in time beneath the distinct individuality of the courtiers’ animal prototypes. The universal in La Fontaine is like the universal in Molière and Shakespeare, but it has a wider appeal, for children relish it as their own.