 La Motte, writing at a time when this species of literature was universally admired, attributes its popularity to the fact that it manages and flatters amour-propre by inculcating virtue in an amusing manner without seeming to dictate or insist.This was the ordinary 18th-century view of the matter, but Rousseau contested the educational value of instruction given in this indirect form.A work by P. Soullé, "La Fontaine et ses devanciers" (1866), is a history of the apologue from the earliest times until its final triumph in France.