ABSTRACT
The life of over all celebrated fabulist is marked by fewer incidents than the generality even of literary lives. Unambitious, indolent, “simple,” it has been said, “as the heroes of his own fables,” and subject to the most whimsical lapses of thought and memory, his habitual state was a sort of abstracted ruminating quietism, roused from which or delighted by his inspirations. The father did not abandon his cherished hopes until he beheld his son arrived at the age of nineteen, when, disappointed of making him a poet, he took the more feasible resolution of making him a priest. La Fontaine’s modern reading was hitherto confined to Malherbe, – his education, to just as much or as little Latin as was requisite for his admission to a religious order. Pintrel recommended to him the abandonment of Malherbe and verse-making for a time, and the studious perusal of Virgil, Horace, Terence, Livy, and Quintilian.
