upon the stage, and he occupied himself with obserying them. The dreamer, La Fontaine, lived, too, in a world of his own creation. His friend, Madame de Ja Sabliére, paid to him this antranslatable compliment: "En vérité, mon cher La Fontaine, vous seriez bien béte, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit." 'These unseasonable reveries brought him, it may be imagined, into many whimsical adventures. 'The great Corneille, too, was distinguished by the same apathy, A gentleman dined at the same teble with him for six months without suspecting the author of the "Cid."
The literary reputation of Moliére, and his amiable personal endowments, naturally led him into an intimacy with the most eminent wits of the golden age in which he lived, but especially with Boileau, La Fontaine, and Racine; and the confidential intercourse of these great minds, and their frequent 7éunions for the purposes of social pleasure, bring to mind the similar associations at the Mermaid's, Will's Coffee-house, and Button's, which form so pleasing a picture in the annals of English literature. It was common on these occasions to have a volume of the unfortunate Chapelain's epic, then in popular repute, lie open upon the table, and if one of the party fell into a grammatical blunder, to impose upon him the reading of some fifteen or twenty verses of it: "a whole page," says Louis Racine, "was sentence of death." La Fontaine, in his Psyché, has painted his reminiscences of these happy meetings in the colouring of fond regret; where, "freely discussing such
