A trait or two more and there will have been enough of the man La Fontaine. It is said that when, on the death of Madame de la Sabliere, La Fontaine was homeless, he was met on the street by a friend, who exclaimed, "I was looking for you; come to my house, and live with me!" "I was on the way there," La Fontaine characteristically replied. At seventy, La Fontaine went through a process of "conversion," so called, in which he professed repentance of his sins. On the genuineness of this inward experience of La Fontaine, it is not for a fellow-creature of his, especially at this distance of time, to pronounce. When he died, at seventy-three, Fenelon could say of him (in Latin), "La Fontaine is no more! He is no more; and with him have gone the playful jokes, the merry laugh, the artless graces, and the sweet Muses!" La Fontaine's earliest works were "Contes," so styled; that is, tales, or romances. These are in character such that the subsequent happy change in manners, if not in morals, has made them unreadable, for their indecency. We need concern ourselves only with the Fables, for it is on these that La Fontaine's fame securely rests. The basis of story in them was not generally original with La Fontaine. He took whatever fittest came to his hand. With much modesty he attributed all to AEsop and Phaedrus. But invention of his own is not altogether wanting to his books of fables. Still, it is chiefly the consummate artful artlessness of the form that constitutes the individual merit of La Fontaine's productions. With something, too, of the air of real poetry, he has undoubtedly invested his verse.