"When thus he began: 'Ah! sir Ralph, a good morning: How charming you look! _how tasteful your dress!_ Those bright glossy plumes, your _fine person adorning_, _Produce an effect which I cannot express._ _Colours glaring and gaudy were never my choice_; When I view them _disgust is my only sensation_; If you join to that plumage a mellow-toned voice, You're the phœnix, I vow, of the feathered creation.'" This citation is made, not to censure the English version, but to prove the unattainable charm of La Fontaine's manner,--that manner or style which he invented; his close adherence to truth and nature; the art with which he veils the wildest improbabilities under a probable, consistent, or humorous air; his power of combining levity of tone with depth of observation, and the utmost simplicity with the utmost finesse. It is known that La Fontaine observed the characters, habits, attitudes, and expression of the brute creation with a view to his fables. Whilst he endows his brute heroes with speech and thought, one never loses the image of their kind;--whilst the flatterer gulls his dupe, and even when he concludes with giving him the moral by way of compensation, one never loses sight of the fox and raven: but under the touch of the translator, and indeed of all other fabulists but La Fontaine, they receive the human form with the human attributes. La Fontaine's fables are reputed perfect in every sense, poetical and moral. Two faults are imputed to his tales; the one venial and even questionable, the other most serious, and past all doubt. His narration, it is said, is sometimes careless and diffuse. This has offended the fastidious technical taste of some of his countrymen; but to others his easy, indolent, copious, rambling effusion is an additional charm. The second fault of his tales, their licentiousness, is unpardonable. He imbibed it, most probably, from the perusal and imitation of Rabelais, Clement Marot, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and confounded it with their gaiety. But, in adopting the freedom of their pleasantries, he has discarded their grossness. His indecorous allusions are conveyed with infinite finesse and ingenuity of expression, and he must be acquitted of all intention to corrupt--of the consciousness even of a corrupting tendency. No inference unfavourable to him is to be drawn from their condemnation and prohibition at the request of the sorbonne. The sin of his tales, and that which he was called on to expiate, was not their immorality, but the liberties which, like his models, he took occasionally with monks, nuns, and confessors. It is but justice to him to state his own vindication. He urged the example of the ancients; and the necessity of a certain tone of gaiety and freedom in familiar tales, without which they would want their essential grace and charm. "He who would reduce," says he, "Ariosto and Boccaccio to the modesty of Virgil