would assuredly not be thanked for his pains--(_ne ferait assurément rien qui vaille_)." An enervating tender melancholy is, he says, much more injurious. His only object, he protests, was to procure the reader a passing smile; and, for his part, he could not comprehend how the reading of his tales should have a bad effect upon others when the composition had none upon him." But can it be true, or possible, that this enchanting fabulist was not merely subject to absences and musings, but the dullest of mortals in conversation;--his thoughts and expressions alike clumsy and confused? Two, the most positive testimonies, will suffice, out of many. The daughter of Racine, who had seen him frequently at her father's table, described him as "slovenly, stupid, and talking of nothing but Plato." La Bruyère obviously meant the following character for him:--"A man appears--clumsy, heavy, stupid. He cannot talk, or even tell what he has just seen. If he sits down to write, he produces the model of tales. He endows with speech brutes, trees, stones,--all to which nature has denied speech; and all is levity, elegance, beauty, nature, in his works."[52] These testimonies, though so positive, are far from conclusive. The lady had no taste for Plato, and La Bruyère's style of portraiture, always overcharged, seems particularly so in this instance, where his object was contrast and effect. La Fontaine may have fallen into reveries and solecisms in the company of his friends; he may have been silent and dull at the table of a financier, where he was among strangers to be stared at; but his society would not have been sought and prized, not only by the Molières, Boileaus, and Racines, but by the Condés, Contis, and Villars, and in the distinguished circles of mesdames de Bouillon, Mazarin, and La Sablière were the charm of his writings wholly wanting in his conversation. His writings would have been admired, and their author neglected, as in the case of Corneille, were his conversation equally common-place and uninteresting. La Fontaine probably was dull to those who neither understood nor were understood by him. He was La Fontaine, the charming fabulist, only when the subjects and the society interested him; and those around him could, by mutual intelligence, bring his genius into play. Goldsmith, in the same manner, was depreciated by persons who did not understand him. Topham Beauclerk, a man of wit and fashion about town, thought his conversation absurd and dull; but Edmund Burke found in it the poet and observer of mankind. The admiration of Horace and Varus, and the society of Mæcenas and Augustus, did not protect Virgil's simplicity of character from being sneered at by the court satirists and _petits-maîtres_ of his time. The well-known description of him by Horace is not without resemblance to La Fontaine's character.