If deep wisdom, gentle satire, polite cynicism, and, above all, irresistible humour are qualities which make a book attractive then La Fontaine's _Fables_ should be in the hands of all. Their charm is two-fold; for whilst they induce pleasurable reflection in the reader they delight him by the gaiety of their subject matter. Notwithstanding the fact that the spell of La Fontaine's verse necessarily disappears when another tongue is employed, his English translators, both Elizur Wright and Walter Thornbury, have courageously attempted to do him justice in prosody. In this little book no such effort has been made, chiefly for the reason that, for any but the unusually gifted, to snatch at rhy…
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