W. Francis, Hon. Peter A. Jay, Hon. Luther Bradish, and Prof. J. Molinard, have special claims to my gratitude....

   The work--as it is, not as it ought to be--I commit to your kindness. I do not claim to have succeeded in translating "the inimitable La Fontaine,"--perhaps I have not even a right to say in his own language--

   However this may be, I am, gratefully,

   Your obedient servant,

   Elizur Wright, Jr.

   Dorchester,

    September

   , 1841.

    on

    Fable, The Fabulists, And La Fontaine.

    By The Translator.

   Human nature, when fresh from the hand of God, was full of poetry. Its sociality could not be pent within the bounds of the actual. To the lower inhabitants of air, earth, and water,--and even to those elements themselves, in all their parts and forms,--it gave speech and reason. The skies it peopled with beings, on the noblest model of which it could have any conception--to wit, its own. The intercourse of these beings, thus created and endowed,--from the deity kindled into immortality by the imagination, to the clod personified for the moment,--gratified one of its strongest propensities; for man may well enough be defined as the historical animal. The faculty which, in after ages, was to chronicle the realities developed by time, had at first no employment but to place on record the productions of the imagination. Hence, fable blossomed and ripened in the remotest antiquity. We see it mingling itself with the primeval history of all nations. It is not improbable that many of the narratives which have been preserved for us, by the bark or parchment of the first rude histories, as serious matters of fact, were originally apologues, or parables, invented to give power and wings to moral lessons, and afterwards modified, in their passage from mouth to mouth, by the well-known magic of credulity. The most 

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