Excerpt from La Fontaine: And Other French Fabulists This story of Apollonius, or whoever was the inventor of it, describes the origin of Fable very gracefully, and perhaps with as near an approach to truth as has been attained by more learned speculations while it seems to assign to this kind of literature its true place in the scale of intellectual creation. It can rank neither with philosophy nor with poetry of the highesfkind; it has not the pretensions of rhetoric or of etoquence yet, _ in its finished form, it contains much of the philosophei's ethics, it enlists in its service some of the most graceful of the poet's gifts, and carries in its application a terse and pointed force of which the orator and the rhetorician have often been glad to avail themselves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.