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what he calls the impending struggle between capital and labour will be fought out more intelligently and adjusted more speedily and satisfactorily in the United States than in England or the continent of Europe.'

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Mr. Firth is himself an ardent colonist and a strong protectionist, but he looks forward with prophetic enthusiasm to the possibility of a confederation of the English-speaking race all over the world, based on what he terms' community ' of interest.' We wish we could believe with him that the common interests of the empire and its dependencies would in the end prevail over the separate interests of its component parts. But, as far as our experience goes, the present current of opinion flows in the opposite direction, and every fraction of the empire thinks much more of its own paltry interests than of the common welfare. Not without an effort an insane attempt to disintegrate the United Kingdom has been defeated, and there are those who tell us that Ireland, Scotland, and Wales are, or ought to be, independent provinces under the Crown. Lord Rosebery says that the federation of the empire is a cause for which a man may be proud to live, or even to die. We hope he may live to perfect the work. But we are ourselves of opinion that those vast colonial territories and scattered isles will, for the most part, work out their own diverse conditions of government and society; and we are content that England, the mother of them all, should have given birth to this great progeny, and that she should retain their gratitude and loyal allegiance by interfering as little as possible in their internal affairs.

A book like this of Mr. Firth's is of value, because it brings before us the fresh and original opinions of a cultivated citizen of these colonies on political questions affecting many other countries, and we therefore recommend it to our readers. But the inferences he draws from what he saw in America are singularly unlike those which Mr. Bryce has arrived at in his great work, recently published, on the American Commonwealth, and we shall endeavour in our next number to enter more fully on the subject.

ART. V.-1. Les Grandes et Inestimables Chronicqs; du grant et enorme geant Gargantua; contenant sa genealogie, la gradeur et force de son corps; Aussi les marveilleux faictz darmes qu'il fist pour le Roy Artus come verrez cy apres. Imprime nouellemēt. MDXXXII.

2. Pantagruel || Les horribles et epouētables faictz et prouesses du tresrenome Pantagruel Roy des Dipsodes filz du grand geat Gargantua, Coposez nouellemēt par Maistre Alcofrybas Nasier. On les vend a Lyon en la maison de Claude Nourry, dict le Prince, pres nostre dame de Confort. (No date.)

3. Gargantua. AгAOH

ΑΓΑΘΗ ΤΥΧΗ. La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel, jadis coposée par L'abstracteur de quite essèce, liure plein de pantagruelisme. MDXXXV. On les vend a Lyon, chés Fracoys Juste deuat nostre Dame de Confort.

4. Tiers liure des faictz et dictz heroïques du noble Pantagruel, cōposez par M. Franc. Rabelais, docteur en medicine et callover* des Isles Hières. A Paris par Chrestien Weichsel, a lescu de Basle. 1546.

5. Le Quart liure des faicts et dicts Heroïques du bon Pantagruel. Composé par M. François Rabelais, docteur en medicine. A Paris de l'imprimerie de Michel Fezendat. 1552.

6. L'Isle sonnante par Maistre François Rabelais. Imprimé Nouuellement. MDLXII.

7. Le Cinquiesme et dernier liure des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel, composé par M. François Rabelais, Docteur en Medicine. Nouuellement mis en lumière. MDLXIIII.

8. Rabelais et son Euvre. Par JEAN FLEURY. 2 vols. Paris: 1876.

THE tide of the popularity of François Rabelais has alter

nately ebbed and flowed. His immediate fame is attested by the sixty editions through which Pantagruel' passed in the sixteenth century. Montaigne places Rabelais in the same rank as Boccaccio, second to Ovid and Ariosto; he was

*In the Greek Church the 'caloyer' is a professed monk as opposed to the 'dokimos,' or novice. By this quaint phrase Rabelais means to express his love for the Islands of Hyères. Cf. Childe Harold,' canto ii, stanza xlix., 'Here dwells the caloyer,' &c.

the bon père' of Brantôme; the Cardinal du Perron called 'Pantagruel' 'le livre' par excellence. But barely fifty years had elapsed before a reaction commenced, which culminated in the reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. Though La Fontaine and Molière did not scruple to draw largely from his overflowing treasury, though Madame de Sévigné was ready to mourir à rire at his rich humour, his gigantic offences against decorum blinded the world to the daring originality of his fantastic genius. The age of the Grand Monarque was opposed to the sixteenth century, its spirit was out of sympathy with Rabelais' iconoclastic ideas; its taste was outraged by his plain-spoken style; its refined license scandalised by the open coarseness of his manners. It ceased to multiply editions of 'Pantagruel,' and passed from the notes and commentaries of Huet, Passerat, and Ménage to the abridgements and expurgations of the Abbés Pérau and de Marsy. The general tone of feeling is expressed in Voltaire's remark that Rabelais was 'un philosophe ivre qui 'n'a écrit que dans le temps de son ivresse.' A few years later and the tide had once more turned in favour of Rabelais. His earnestness, wisdom, and philosophy were still depreciated; but his claims to rank among great humourists were generally acknowledged. Again Voltaire expressed the altered taste of the day when, in 1760, he wrote to Madame du Deffand: Rabelais, quand il est bon, est le premier des 'bons bouffons.' For the last century the stream has flowed steadily in the same direction. The reputation of Rabelais, not only as a humourist, but as a deep thinker, a zealous reformer, a profound satirist, was carried forward on the tide of the French Revolution to a height from which, to say the least, it has never receded. His place is secured

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among the master-minds of the world.

Few writers have been more pillaged or more imitated. Besides La Fontaine and Molière, Racine, Boileau, Beaumarchais, and Piron are indebted to him for the foundations of some of their most famous passages; even Voltaire, in 'Le Pauvre Diable,' did not hesitate to copy almost sentence by sentence Rabelais' attack upon the monks. Crowds of writers, famous and obscure, paid his genius the sincere flattery of imitation. Les Aventures du Baron de Foeneste ' and La Confession Catholique du Sieur de Sancy,' by Agrippa d'Aubigné; the Voyage dans la Lune' of Cyrano de Bergerac; the Gil Blas' of Le Sage; the Contes Drolatiques' of Honoré de Balzac, are among the most illustrious scions of 'Pantagruel.' Foreign men of letters were equally appre

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ciative of his genius. Without Rabelais Spain would have lost the obra jocosa of Quevedo, and England would have been the poorer by the loss of Gulliver's Travels' and Tristram Shandy.' He has received more consistent honour from England than from his own fellow-countrymen. Two books of Pantagruel' were translated in the sixteenth century, and Shakespeare probably alludes to him in As you like it.'* Southey, one of the purest of English writers, refers to him repeatedly; Hallam, the most impartial of erities, blames the French for their unjust depreciation of his intellectual powers; Scott's healthy temperament found much to admire in his genial humour; Coleridge regarded him as the deepest and boldest thinker of his age, and classed him with Shakespeare, Dante, and Cervantes among the great creative minds of the world. But if his audience in this country has been fit, it has also been few. Many who write allusively of Rabelais as the French Aristophanes, the modern Lucian, the Democritus of his age, the impersonation of the esprit gaulois-many of those who speak of the curé of Meudon in the familiar terms of intimate acquaintance, presume, on the authority of a plausible line in Pope, that he was a mere merry-andrew. It is rare to find anyone who has even attempted to read the immortal romance which makes Rabelais as truly the representative of the French Renaissance as Voltaire was the intellectual embodiment of the critical movement in France in the eighteenth century. Few would be the guests if the host, like the Cardinal du Perron, admitted none to his table but students of 'Pantagruel.' Deserted would be the road to preferment if the passport to an abbey or a cardinal's hat was, as in the case of Louis Barbier, a knowledge of Rabelais.

The age, the man, and the book are profoundly interesting; why, then, is Pantagruel' so little read? Much of the humour has lost its savour with the disappearance of the social conditions on which it turned. On the nineteenth century a wealth of local and personal allusion is wasted. We know little of the romances of false chivalry which Rabelais parodies; we are wearied by the gigantic buffoonery; we are sated with a vinous hilarity which harps mechanically on a single string; our literary taste is offended by the wearisome redundancy with which he exhausts his

See act iii. sc. 2: You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth 'first.' The allusion to Rabelais is not certain, because Gargantua was a popular hero before the publication of 'Pantagruel.'

VOL. CLXIX. NO. CCCXLV.

I

various topics. But the chief reason still remains. To all but students of literature Pantagruel' must necessarily remain a sealed book because of its terrific indecency. No writer, ancient or modern, can rival Rabelais for the volume of the torrent which he pours forth of undisguised, unadulterated, and elaborate filth. Three excuses are pleaded for his obscenity-the manners of the age, the distinction between coarse and seductive pictures, and the necessity of the times. The three apologies are true, but they do not wholly excuse Rabelais. His indecency is characteristic of an age of unblushing licentiousness, and belongs to a period when language went stark naked. As Dutch writers spoke of Petronius Arbiter as vir sanctissimus,' so the ladies and gentlemen of the Court of Francis I. found Rabelais delectable.' Nor is Rabelais an immoral writer. He never panders to impure passions, uses no colours to lure to destruction, takes no sickly delight in tickling the fancy with dreams of unhallowed enjoyment. His freedom of speech is absolutely unbridled; but, though he says whatever comes uppermost, he strips licentiousness of its gay disguises and exhibits vice in all its naked deformity. As a priest nature had for him no mysteries, as an anatomist no sanctities. Yet for all this no one can rise from the perusal of ‘Panta'gruel' as a whole with any feeling of disgust for the author. Coleridge's remark may seem exaggerated, but it is not far from the mark. I could write a treatise in 'praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' work which would make the Church stare and the Conventicle groan, and yet would be truth and nothing but truth.'

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The third excuse for Rabelais is that, as a satirist, he was obliged to work by hints and in masquerade. Like Aristophanes, he disguises his face in the wine-lees. Montesquieu again in the Lettres Persanes,' he distracts attention from his attacks upon society by his pictures of the nude. Voltaire, to whom the experience of the 'Lettres 'Philosophiques' taught the same secret, represents Rabelais explaining to Lucian and Erasmus in the Elysian Fields the method which he followed. Voyant que la sagesse et la science ne menaient qu'à l'hôpital ou au gibet... je 'm'avisai être plus fou que tous mes compatriotes ensemble. Je pris mes compatriotes par leur faible; je parlai de boire, 'je dis des ordures, et avec ce secret tout me fut permis.' Rabelais makes the same excuse for himself. When Panurge cursed the Pope-hawk in the Ringing Island, Edituus warns him to speak low. Panurge changes his

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