The Fables of La Fontaine | Page 4

as a writer in yet another
field, publishing several works, one as lately as 1877, on life-assurance.
London, 1881.

ADVERTISEMENT
To The First Edition Of This Translation.
[Boston, U.S.A., 1841.]
Four years ago, I dropped into Charles de Behr's repository of foreign
books, in Broadway, New York, and there, for the first time, saw La
Fontaine's Fables. It was a cheap copy, adorned with some two hundred
woodcuts, which, by their worn appearance, betokened an extensive
manufacture. I became a purchaser, and gave the book to my little boy,
then just beginning to feel the intellectual magnetism of pictures. In the
course of the next year, he frequently tasked my imperfect knowledge
of French for the story which belonged to some favourite vignette. This
led me to inquire whether any English version existed; and, not finding
any, I resolved, though quite unused to literary exercises of the sort, to
cheat sleep of an hour every morning till there should be one. The
result is before you. If in this I have wronged La Fontaine, I hope the
best-natured of poets, as well as yourselves, will forgive me, and lay
the blame on the better qualified, who have so long neglected the task.
Cowper should have done it. The author of "John Gilpin," and the
"Retired Cat," would have put La Fontaine into every chimney-corner
which resounds with the Anglo-Saxon tongue.... To you who have so
generously enabled me to publish this work with so great advantages,
and without selling the copyright for the promise of a song, I return my
heartfelt thanks. A hatchet-faced, spectacled, threadbare stranger
knocked at your doors, with a prospectus, unbacked by "the trade,"
soliciting your subscription to a costly edition of a mere translation. It
is a most inglorious, unsatisfactory species of literature. The slightest
preponderance of that worldly wisdom which never buys a

pig-in-a-poke would have sent him and his translation packing. But a
kind faith in your species got the better in your case. You not only gave
the hungry-looking stranger your good wishes, but your good names. A
list of those names it would delight me to insert; and I should certainly
do it if I felt authorized. As it is, I hope to be pardoned for mentioning
some of the individuals, who have not only given their names, but
expressed an interest in my enterprise which has assisted me in its
accomplishment. Rev. John Pierpont, Prof. George Ticknor, Prof.
Henry W. Longfellow, William H. Prescott, Esq., Hon. Theodore
Lyman, Prof. Silliman, Prof. Denison Olmsted, Chancellor Kent,
William C. Bryant, Esq., Dr. J. 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--
"J'ai du moins ouvert le chemin."
However this may be, I am, gratefully,
Your obedient servant,
Elizur Wright, Jr.
Dorchester, September, 1841.

A PREFACE,
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 ancient poets graced
their productions with apologues. Hesiod's fable of the Hawk and the
Nightingale is an instance. The fable or parable was anciently, as it is
even now, a favourite weapon of the most successful orators. When
Jotham would show the Shechemites the folly of their ingratitude, he
uttered the fable of the Fig-Tree, the