1.792. anecdo tes of Tontaine. Z'] 



CHARACTER ISTICAL ANECDOTES OF LA FONTAINE. 



It is natural for those who read the works of men of ge- 

 nius, to think that the writers of these excellent perfor- 

 mances ftiouid be endowed with talents, in every respect 

 superior to the common run -cf mankind : Nothing can be 

 more delusive than such expectations. P.lan is an imper- 

 fect creature, and though heaven sometimes confers upon 

 individuals, talents of a certain kind, in a super-eminent de- ' 

 gtee, it is seldom that any one man pofsefses a great vari- 

 ety ef talents in unusual perfection. It oftener hap- 

 pens that men who arc endowed with the singular faculty 

 of excelling in one kind of composition, are remarkably 

 d«iicient in other respect;. It would seem that when a 

 man's mind is so totally engrofsed with one object, as to 

 enable him to carry that particular object of pursuit to an 

 extraordinary degree of perfection, it was necefsarily ab- 

 stracted from others ; «a that it often happens that the 

 faculty called common sense, which is that of deliberately 

 ccmparing v.ith one another the objects that occur in 

 common life, and drawing j-ust inferences from them, for 

 regulating the ordinary transactions cf life, seems to be 

 entirely obliterated in these men. 



La "^Fontaine, the celebrated fabulist in France, affords 

 anemarkable illiistration cf the truth of this remark. E- 

 very person in tlie least versar.t in French literature is ac- 

 quainted with the writings of this author, which pofsef'--, 

 in an -unequalled degree, an ease, an elegance, a natural un- 

 afFected simplicity, both in thought and exprefsion, that 

 other writers have in vain attempted to imitate. Yet 

 this man, though endowed with the singular faculty of 

 writing in a manner that no other person has lyet been 

 able to attain, was so remarkably deficient in the article 



