Although written for children, The Wind in the Willows is really a book about humans. Almost everything they do is human activity. 

They are mostly males, and mostly upper class ones who have a private income and don't have to work for a living. Lads larking about, very much in the world of Bertie Wooster and his chums. 

I didn't read it until adult age, either,  but the dressed animal stories I read as a younger child lived very human lives too.

I had picked up that there are definite similarities between Ratty and Mole's encounter with Pan and the children's encounter with Aslan in LWW, so I was wondering if Lewis was familiar with Kenneth Grahame's story and deliberately drawing on it. Not a bit surprising that he was! And I now realise I have read Lewis's own comments on the improbabilities of WITW (how does Badger make a living, where does Mole get his beer from, and so on) quoted somewhere before, but I forget where.

I wasn't sure whether or not Lewis actually liked Grahame's creation, though, given the oddities and anomalies (and occasional absurdities) in WITW, so it's nice to discover that it was definitely a favourite of his.

I think my own reluctance, for a long time, to read WITW all the way through (I tried it several more times as an adult and only succeeded in finishing it about 3 or 4 years ago) had something to do with what A.A. Milne says in the introduction to his stage adaptation, quoted in the essay you linked to:

In reading the book, it is necessary to think of Mole, for instance, sometimes as an actual mole, sometimes as such a mole in human clothes, sometimes as a mole grown to human size, sometimes as walking on two legs, sometimes on four. He is a mole, he isn’t a mole. What is he? I don’t know. And, not being a matter of fact person, I don’t mind. At least I do know, and still I don’t mind. 

That aspect of WITW does do my head in a bit, to this day, and I think I had problems with it even as a kid, although I didn't get very far into the book then. Sometimes the animal characters are living semi-naturalistic lives by the river and in the woods, sometimes they're totally human-like, and they interact with human beings on near-equal terms, too. Toad is able to disguise himself in a human washer-woman's clothes while escaping from prison (where he's been put for his reckless driving of motor cars that he bought from humans), and yet at another point somebody picks him up by the leg and throws him, as a human could do with an ordinary toad-sized toad. It's fun and indulgent as fantasy, but you REALLY have to set aside a lot of adult-level disbelief. I honestly feel that both Beatrix Potter and C.S. Lewis handled their anthropomorphic animals much more convincingly, although they have occasional oddities as well. (And I also very much prefer Aslan to Pan, but that's just me.) 

I'm tempted to go with the library cake myself {ym}:wink:  

Did Lewis like Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows?

From "On Stories":

Does anyone believe that Kenneth Grahame made an arbitrary choice when he gave his principal character the form of a toad, or that a stag, a pigeon, a lion would have done as well? The choice is based on the fact that the real toad's face has a grotesque resemblance to a certain kind of human face--a rather apoplectic face with a fatuous grin on it. This is, no doubt, an accident in the sense that all the lines which suggest the resemblance are really there for quite different biological reasons. The ludicrous quasi-human expression is therefore changeless: the toad cannot stop grinning because its 'grin' is not really a grin at all. Looking at the creature we thus see, isolated and fixed, an aspect of human vanity in its funniest and most pardonable form; following that hint Grahame creates Mr. Toad--an ultra-Jonsonian 'humour'. And we bring back the wealth of the Indies; we have henceforward more amusement in, and kindness towards, a certain kind of vanity in real life.

But why should the characters be disguised as animals at all? The disguise is very thin, so thin that Grahame makes Mr. Toad on one occasion 'comb the dry leaves out of hishair'. Yet it is quite indispensable. If you try to rewrite the book with all the characters humanized you are faced at the outset with a dilemma. Are they to be adults or children? You will find that they can be neither. They are like children in so far as they have no responsibilities, no struggle for existence, no domestic cares. Meals turn up; one does not even ask who cooked them. In Mr. Badger's kitchen 'plates on the dresser grinned at pots on the shelf'. Who kept them clean? Where were they bought? How were they delivered in the Wild Wood? Mole is very snug in his subterranean home, but what was he livingon? If he is arentierwhere is the bank, what are his investments? The tables in his forecourt were 'marked with rings that hinted at beer mugs'. But where did he get the beer? In that way the life of all the characters is that of children for whom everything is provided and who take everything for granted. But in other ways it is the life of adults. They go where they like and do what they please, they arrange their own lives.

To that extent the book is a specimen of the most scandalous escapism: it paints a happiness under incompatible conditions--the sort of freedom we can have only in childhood and the sort we can have only in maturity--and conceals the contradiction by the further pretence that the characters are not human beings at all. The one absurdity helps to hide the other. It might be expected that such a book would unfit us for the harshness of reality and send us back to our daily lives unsettled and discontented. I do not find that it does so. The happiness which it presents to us is in fact full of the simplest and most attainable things--food, sleep, exercise, friendship, the face of nature, even (in a sense) religion. That 'simple but sustaining meal' of 'bacon and broad beans and a macaroni pudding' which Rat gave to his friends has, I doubt not, helped down many a real nursery dinner. And in the same way the whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.

Sorry, long quote - but clearly C.S. Lewis was familiar with The Wind in the Willows.  (He also quoted it in "The problem of Pain" when he talks about 'numinous' fear - fear of the super-natural.)

There is a paper online which also goes into detail about C. S. Lewis's love of "The Wind in the Willows": C.S. Lewis and The Wind in the Willows

So, though Lewis may have disliked having animals in human's clothing, he did very much appreciate the Wind in the WIllows. 🙂 

@narnian78 I can't say Yes or No, but he did dislike what he called 'dressed animals'.

Mildly ironically, since the stories he wrote as a child were all about "dressed animals" behaving in ways that were far more human-like than animal-like! I get the impression that in later life he saw those tales as a bit silly — though of course he and his brother had lots of fun collaborating on them as children — and he deliberately wanted to make the Narnian Talking Beasts less anthropomorphic. 

I remember lots of such characters in the children's magazines I grew up reading (early 60s), and plenty of English children's classics of the earlier 20th century had animal characters living somewhat human lives. (best known are Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, and the Beatrix Potter books).

Lewis definitely read and loved Beatrix Potter's books, though — his particular favourite was The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, with the beautiful atmosphere of Autumn all through it. It makes me feel slightly awed to think he was reading her books, as a child, right at the time they were first published, and Edith Nesbit's books too, long before anyone knew they would become absolute classics still in print over 120 years later!! (And long before Lewis knew that he himself would write a children's series that would achieve the same status.) 

Compared to this, most Narnian talking beasts don't wear clothes, and are likely to live in traditional animal ways, except for little details here and there.  

Yes, as I said, he seems to have made that decision early on. The Beavers in LWW live in a rather human-like house with all kinds of furnishings, and they wear snowshoes, but I don't think we're told about them wearing any other clothes, much though Mrs Beaver is devoted to her sewing machine! They don't have clothes, other than the snowshoes, in the illustrations by Pauline Baynes, or in any of the screen adaptations. In the later Narnia books, I get the impression he was even more determined not to humanise the Talking Beasts too much. We don't hear of any other animals living in a furnished house like the Beavers do, and the only other one I can think of who wears anything approaching clothing is Reepicheep, who has a belt for his sword (necessary) and a gold circlet on his head with a feather in it (purely decorative, but it suits his character). Other than that, I can't imagine most Narnian animals finding clothes at all useful or necessary. 

Compared to this, most Narnian talking beasts don't wear clothes, and are likely to live in traditional animal ways, except for little details here and there.