a tavern.

and no sisters, that his father had a country property |
called La Devinière, and was either an apothecary or a
tavern-keeper. Half a century after his death De Thou
mentions that the house in which he was born had become
It still stands at the corner of a street called
the Rue de la Lamproie, and the tradition may be correct.
An indistinct allusion of his own has been taken to mean
that he was tonsured in childhood at seven or nine years
old; and tradition says that he was sent to the convent of
Seuilly, though of course he could then have taken no
definite vows, and there is no evidence whatever that the
passage in question, which simply condemns the practice
referred to, has any personal reference. From Seuilly at
an unknown date tradition takes him either to the univer-
sity of Angers or to the convent school of La Baumette
or La Basmette, founded by good King René in the
neighbourhood of the Angevin capital. Here he is sup-
posed to have been at school with the brothers Du Bellay,
with Geoffroy d'Estissac and others. The next stage in
this (as far as evidence goes, purely imaginary) career is
the monastery of Fontenay le Comte, where, as has been
seen, he is certainly found in 1519 holding a position
sufficiently senior to sign deeds for the community, where
he, as will be seen, certainly, though at an unknown date,
took priest's orders, and where he also pursued, again cer-
tainly, the study of letters, and especially of Greek, with
ardour. From this date, therefore, he becomes historically
visible. The next certain intelligence which we have of
Rabelais is somewhat more directly biographical than this
bare entry of his name. The letters of the well-known
Greek scholar Budæus, two of which are addressed to
Rabelais himself and several more to his friend and fellow-
monk Pierre Amy, together with some notices by André
Tiraqueau, a learned jurist, to whom Rabelais rather than
his own learning has secured immortality, show beyond
doubt what manner of life the future author of Gargantua
led in his convent. These letters are partly written in
Greek and partly in Latin. In Tiraqueau's book De Legibus
Connubialibus, which excited a controversy with another
jurist of the west, Bouchard, also a friend of Rabelais,
the latter is described as a man most learned in both
languages and all kinds of scholarship above his age, and
beyond the wont and, if I may say so, the excessive
scrupulousness of his order." The excessive scrupulousness
of the order showed itself before long in reference to Amy
and Rabelais, the latter of whom had, as this sentence of
Tiraqueau's also informs us, translated the first book of
Herodotus. The letters of Budæus show that an attempt
was made by the heads of the convent or the order to
check the studious ardour of these Franciscans; but it
failed, and there is no positive evidence of anything like
actual persecution, the phrases in the letters of Budæus
being merely the usual exaggerated Ciceronianism of the
Renaissance. Some books and papers were seized as sus-
picious, then given back as innocent; but Rabelais was in
all probability disgusted with the cloister,—indeed his great
work shows this beyond doubt. In 1524, the year of the
publication of Tiraqueau's book above cited, his friend
Geoffroy d'Estissac procured from Clement VII. an indult,
licensing a change of order and of abode for Rabelais.
From a Franciscan he became a Benedictine, and from
Fontenay he moved to Maillezais, of which Geoffroy
d'Estissac was bishop. He seems indeed to have been
constantly in the company of the bishop and to have made
many new literary acquaintances, notably Jean Bouchet,
the poet.
To him he wrote an epistle in French verse,
still extant, which proves that Rabelais, much more truly
than Swift, never could have been a poet. The title of
this epistle is, however, noteworthy, inasmuch as the author
is described in the original (a collection of Bouchet's works

published in 1545) as a man of great literary knowledge
in Greek and Latin, and as a great orator in Greek, Latin,
and French. But even this learned and hospitable retreat
In or before 1530
did not apparently satisfy Rabelais.
he left Maillezais, abandoned his Benedictine garb for
that of a secular priest, and, as he himself puts it in his
subsequent Supplicatio pro Apostasia to Pope Paul III.,
per seculum diu vagatus fuit." He is met at Montpellier
in the year just mentioned. He entered the faculty of
medicine there on the 16th of September and became
bachelor on the 1st of November, a remarkably short in-
terval, which shows what was thought of his acquirements.
Early in 1531 he lectured publicly on Galen and Hippo-
crates, while his more serious pursuits seem to have been
chequered by acting in a morale comédie, then a very fre-
Visits to the Îles d'Hières,
quent university amusement.
and the composition of a fish sauce in imitation of the
ancient garum, which he sent to his friend Dolet, are
associated, not very certainly, with his stay at Montpellier,
which, lasting rather more than a year at first, was renewed
at intervals for several years.

In 1532, however, and probably rather early than late in
that year, he had moved from Montpellier to Lyons. Here
he plunged into manifold work, literary and professional.
He was appointed before the beginning of November phy-
sician to the hôtel dieu, with a salary of forty livres per
annum. He edited for Sebastian Gryphius, in the single
year 1532, the medical Epistles of Giovanni Manardi, the
Aphorisms of Hippocrates, with the Ars Parva of Galen,
and an edition of two supposed Latin documents, which,
however, happened unluckily to be forgeries. These three
works were dedicated in order to his three chief friends
of Touraine and Poitou, André Tiraqueau, the bishop of
We also have a Latin letter
Maillezais, and Bouchard.
written on 1st December 1532 to a certain Bernard de
Salignac, otherwise unknown.

It is certain that at this time Lyons was the centre and to a great extent the headquarters of an unusually enlightened society, and indirectly it is clear that Rabelais became intimate with this society. A manuscript distich, which was found in the Toulouse library, on the death of an infant named Theodule, whose country was Lyons and his father Rabelais, would seem to show that he here entered into other connexions than those of friendship. Absolutely nothing, however, is known about the child and its mother; it is enough to say that the existence of the former would have been by the manners and morals But what makes the of the time very easily condoned. Lyons sojourn of the greatest real importance is that at this time probably appeared the beginnings of the work which was to make Rabelais immortal. It is necessary to say "probably," because the strange uncertainty which rests on so much of his life and writings exists here also. There is no doubt that both Gargantua and Pantagruel were popular names of giants in the Middle Ages, though, curiously enough, no mention of the former in French literature much before Rabelais's time has been traced. In 1526, however, Charles de Bordigné, in a satiric work of no great merit, entitled La Légende de Pierre Faifeu, has the name Gargantua with an allusion, and in 1532 (if not earlier) there appeared at Lyons Les Grandes et Inestimables Chroniques du Grand et Enorme Géant Gargantua. This is a short book on the plan of the later burlesques and romances of the Round Table. Arthur and Merlin appear with Grantgosier, as he is here spelt, Galemelle (Gargalelle), But there is Gargantua himself, and the terrible mare. no trace of the action or other characters of Gargantua that was to be, nor is the manner of the piece in the least worthy of Rabelais. No one supposes that he wrote it, though it has been supposed that he edited it and that in`

reality it is older than 1532, and may be the direct subject |
of Bordigné's allusion six years earlier. What does, how-
ever, seem probable is that the first book of Pantagruel
(the second of the whole work) was composed with a
definite view to this chap book and not to the existing
first book of Gargantua, which was written afterwards
when Rabelais discovered the popularity of his work and
felt that it ought to have some worthier starting-point than
the Grandes Chroniques. The earliest known and dated
edition of Pantagruel is of 1533, of Gargantua 1535,
though this would not be of itself conclusive, especially as
we actually possess editions of both which, though un-
dated, seem to be earlier. But the definite description of
Gargantua in the title as
Père de Pantagruel," the omis-
sion of the words "second livre" in the title of the first
book of Pantagruel while the second and third are duly
entitled "tiers" and "quart," the remarkable fact that
one of the most important personages, Friar John, is absent
from book ii., the first of Pantagruel, though he appears
in book i. (Gargantua), and many other proofs show the
order of publication clearly enough. There is also in
existence a letter of Calvin, dated 1533, in which he speaks
of Pantagruel, but not of Gargantua, as having been
condemned as an obscene book. Besides this, 1533 saw the
publication of an almanac, the first of a long series which
exists only in titles and fragments, and of the amusing
Prognostication Pantagrueline (still, be it observed, Panta-
grueline, not Gargantuine). Both this and Pantagruel
itself were published under the anagrammatic pseudonym
of "Alcofribas Nasier," shortened to the first word only
in the case of the Prognostication.

This busy and interesting period of Rabelais's life was brought to a close apparently by his introduction or reintroduction to Jean du Bellay. They had been, it has been said, schoolfellows, but Bellay does not appear among the list of Rabelais's friends in the first years of his emancipation. From 1534, however, he and the other members of his family appear as Rabelais's chief and constant patrons during the remainder of his life. It was just before Christmas that Jean du Bellay, passing through Lyons on an embassy to Rome, engaged Rabelais as physician. The visit did not last very long, but it left literary results in an edition of a description of Rome by Marliani, which Rabelais published in September 1534. It is also thought that the first edition of Gargantua may have appeared

Compaing. The luckless printer has left a poem on the occasion, and two other writers, Salmon Macrin and Nicholas Bourbon, have also left poems of this date expressing the regard in which Rabelais was generally held. Now, too, he took his doctor's degree at Montpellier, lectured on the Greek text of Hippocrates, and next year made a public anatomical demonstration. During these two years he seems to have resided either at Montpellier or at Lyons. But in 1539 he entered the service of Guillaume du Bellay-Langey, elder brother of Jean, and would appear to have been with him (he was governor of Piedmont) till his death on 9th January 1543. Rabelais wrote a panegyrical memoir of Guillaume, which is lost, and the year before saw the publication of an edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel, book i., together (both had been repeatedly reprinted separately), in which some dangerous expressions were cut away. Nothing at all is known of his life, whereabouts, or occupations till the publication of the third book, which appeared in 1546, avec privilége du roi,” which had been given in September 1545.

Up to this time Rabelais, despite the condemnation of the Sorbonne referred to above, had experienced nothing like persecution or difficulty. Even the spiteful or treacherous act of Dolet, who in 1542 reprinted the earlier form of the books which Rabelais had just slightly modified, seems to have done him no harm. But the storm of persecution which towards the end of the reign of Francis I. was fatal to Dolet himself and to Despériers, while it exiled and virtually killed Marot, did not leave Rabelais scatheless. There is no positive evidence of any measures taken or threatened against him; but it is certain that he passed nearly the whole of 1546 and part of 1547 at Metz in Lorraine as physician to the town at the salary of 120 livres, that Sturm speaks of him as having been "cast out of France by the times" (with the exclamation peû Tŵv xpóvwv) in a contemporary letter, and that he himself in a letter, also contemporary, though it is not clear whether it is of 1546 or the next year, gives a doleful account of his pecuniary affairs and asks for assistance. At Francis's death on 31st March 1547 Du Bellay went to Rome, and at some time not certain Rabelais joined him. He was certainly there in February 1549, when he dates from Du Bellay's palace a little account of the festivals given at Rome to celebrate the birth of the second son of Henry II. and Catherine de' Medici. This account, the Sciomachie In the spring of 1535 the authorities of the Lyons as it is called, is extant. In the same year a monk of hospital, considering that Rabelais had twice absented Fontevrault, Gabriel du Puits-Herbault, made in a book himself without leave, elected Pierre de Castel in his called Theotimus the first of the many attacks on Rabelais. room; but the documents which exist do not seem to It is, however, as vague as it is violent, and it does not infer that any blame was thought due to him, and the seem to have had any effect. Rabelais had indeed again appointment of his successor was once definitely postponed made for himself protectors whom no clerical or Sorbonist in case he should return. An epigram of Dolet shows jealousy could touch. The Sciomachie was written to the that at least once and probably about this time he percardinal of Guise, whose family were all-powerful at court, formed a public dissection. At the end of 1535 Rabelais and Rabelais dedicated his next book to Odet de Chatillon, once more accompanied Jean du Bellay, now a cardinal, afterwards cardinal, a man of great influence. Thus Rabelais to Rome and stayed there till April in the next year. This was able to return to France, and was presented to the stay furnishes some biographical documents of importance livings of Meudon and St Christophe de Jambet. It may, in the shape of letters to Geoffroy d'Estissac, of the already- however, surprise those who have been accustomed to hear mentioned Supplicatio pro Apostasia, and of the bull of him spoken of as "curé de Meudon" and who have read absolution which was the reply to it. This bull not only lives of him founded on legend to find that there is very freed Rabelais from ecclesiastical censure but gave him the little ground for believing that he ever officiated or resided right to return to the order of St Benedict when he chose, there. He certainly held the living but two years, resignand to practise medicine. He took advantage of this bulling it in January 1552 along with his other benefice, and and became a canon of St Maur. The monastery having it is noteworthy that at the episcopal visitation of 1551 but recently become collegiate, there seems to have been he was not present. To this supposed residence at Meudon some technical difficulty which necessitated a new suppli- and to the previous stay at Rome, however, are attached cation. In the next year (1537) we find Rabelais present two of the most mischievous items of the legend, though at a dinner where the friends of Étienne Dolet met to fortunately two of the most easily refutable. It is said that congratulate him on his pardon for the homicide of Rabelais met and quarrelled with Joachim du Bellay the

this year.

what this means. It is, in plain English, humour. The definition | any kind must justify themselves by their own power of seeing of humour is a generally acknowledged crux, and till it is defined the definition of Pantagruelism will be in the same position. But that it consists in the extension of a wide sympathy to all human affairs together with a comprehension of their vanity may be said as safely as anything else. Moroseness and dogmatism are as far from the Pantagruelism of Rabelais as maudlin sentimentality or dilettantism. Perhaps the chief things lacking in his attitude are, in the first place, reverence, of which, however, from a few passages, it is clear he was by no means totally devoid, and an appreciation of passion and poetry. Here and there there are touches of the latter, as in the portrait of Quintessence, but passion is everywhere absent an absence for which the comic structure and plan of the book does not by any means supply a complete explanation.

For a general estimate of Rabelais's literary character and influence the reader may be referred to the article FRANCE (vol. ix. p. 652). But some detailed remarks must be given here. The life and works of Rabelais, despite the considerable number of publications of which they have been the subject, have hitherto been less fully and satisfactorily treated than the life and works of any author who occupies an equally important place. As will have been seen from the foregoing attempt to give the actual facts, a whole legend has grown up round the scanty details recorded of him, and many, if not all, of the particulars of that legend can be shown to be false. But no one hitherto has undertaken in a satisfactory fashion the construction of a rigorously critical life. In the same way there are many questions in reference to his main work which have never been thoroughly and finally sifted by a critical intelligence equal to the task. Limits of space, to say no more, prevent any such attempt being made here; but there are three questions without the discussion of which this notice of one of the foremost writers of the world would not be worthy of its present place. These are -What is the general drift and purpose of Gargantua and Pantagruel, supposing there to be any? What defence can be offered, if any defence is needed, for the extraordinary licence of language and imagery which the author has permitted himself? What was his attitude towards the great questions of religion, philosophy, and politics? These questions succeed each other in the order of reason, and the answer to each assists the resolution of the next.

There have been few more remarkable instances of the lues commentatoria than the work of the editors of Rabelais. Almost every one appears to have started with a Rabelais ready made in his head, and to have, so to speak, read that Rabelais into the book. Those who have not done this, like Le Duchat, Motteux, and Esmangart, have generally committed the error of tormenting themselves and their author to find individual explanations of personages and events. The extravagance of the last-named commentator takes the form of seeing elaborate allegories; that of some others devotes itself chiefly to identifying the characters of the romance with more or less famous historical persons. But the first blunder, that of forming a general hypothetical conception of Rabelais and then adjusting interpretation of the work to it, is the commoner. This conception, however, has singularly varied. According to some expositors, among whom the latest and not the least respectable is M. Fleury, Rabelais is a sober reformer, an apostle of earnest work, of sound education, of rational if not dogmatic religion, who wraps up his morals in a farcical envelope partly to make them go down with the vulgar and partly to shield himself from the consequences of his reforming zeal. According to others, of whom we have had in England a distinguished example in Mr Besant, Rabelais is all this but with a difference. He is not religious at all; he is more or less anti-religious; and his book is more or less of a general protest against any attempt to explain supernaturally the riddle of the earth. According to a third class, the most distinguished recent representative of which was M. Paul Lacroix, the Rabelaisian legend does not so much err in principle as it invents in fact. Rabelais is the incarnation of the "esprit Gaulois," a jovial careless soul, not destitute of common sense or even acute intellectual power, but first of all a good fellow, rather preferring a broad jest to a fine-pointed one, and rollicking through life like a good-natured undergraduate. Of all these views it may be said that those who hold them are obliged to shut their eyes to many things in the book and to see in it many which are not there. The religious part of the matter will be dealt with presently; but it is impossible to think that any unbiassed judge reading Rabelais can hold the grave philosopher view or the reckless good fellow view without modifications and allowances which practically deprive either of any value as a sufficient explanation of the book and its writer. Those who, as it has been happily put, identify Rabelais with Pantagruel, strive in vain on any view intellectually consistent or morally respectable to account for the vast ocean of pure or impure laughter and foolery which surrounds the few solid islets of sense and reason and devotion. Those who in the same way identify Rabelais with Panurge can never explain the education scheme, the solemn apparition of Gargantua among the farcical and fantastic variations on Panurge's wedding, and many other passages; while, en the other hand, those who insist on a definite propaganda of

things invisible to plain men. But these vagaries are not only unjustifiable; they are entirely unnecessary. No one reading Rabelais without parti pris, but with a good knowledge of the history and literature of his own times and the times which preceded him, can have much difficulty in appreciating his book. He had evidently during his long and studious sojourn in the cloister (a sojourn which was certainly not less than five-and-twenty years, while it may have been five-and-thirty, and of which the studiousness rests not on legend but on documentary evidence) acquired a vast stock of learning. He was, it is clear, thoroughly penetrated with the instincts, the hopes, and the ideas of the Renaissance in the form which it took in France, in England, and in Germany,—a form, that is to say, not merely humanist but full of aspirations for social and political improvement, and above all for a joyous, varied, and non-ascetic life. He had thoroughly convinced himself of the abuses to which monachism lent itself. Lastly, he had the spirit of lively satire and of willingness desipere in loco which frequently goes with the love of books. It is in the highest degree improbable that in beginning his great work he had any definite purpose or intention. The habit of burlesquing the romans d'aventures was no new one, and the form lent itself easily to the two literary exercises to which he was most disposed,-apt and quaint citation from and variation on the classics and satirical criticism of the life he saw around him. The immense popularity of the first two parts induced him to continue them, and by degrees (the genuineness of the fifth book at any rate in substance is here assumed) the possibility of giving the whole something like a consistent form and a regular conclusion presented itself to him. The voyage in particular allowed the widest licence of satirical allusion, and he availed himself of that licence in the widest sense. Here and there persons are glanced at, while the whole scenery of his birthplace and its neighbourhood is curiously worked in; but for the most part the satire is typical rather than individual, and it is on the whole a rather negative satire. In only two points can Rabelais be said to be definitely polemic. He certainly hated the monkish system in the debased form in which it existed in his time; he as certainly hated the brutish ignorance into which the earlier systems of education had suffered too many of their teachers and scholars to drop. At these two things he was never tired of striking, but elsewhere, even in the grim satire of the Chats fourrés, he is the satirist proper rather than the reformer. It is in the very absence of any cramping or limiting purpose that the great merit and value of the book consist. It holds up an almost perfectly level and spotless mirror to the temper of the earlier Renaissance. The author has no universal medicine of his own (except Pantagruelism) to offer, nor has he anybody else's universal medicine to attack. He ranges freely about the world, touching the laughable sides of things with kindly laughter, and every now and then dropping the risibile and taking to the rationale. It is not indeed possible to deny that in the Oracle of the Bottle, besides its merely jocular and fantastic sense, there is a certain "echo," as it has been called, "of the conclusion of the preacher," a certain acknowledgment of the vanity of things. But in such a book such a note could hardly be wanting unless the writer had been a fanatic, which he was not, or a mere voluptuary, which he was not, or a dullard, which he was least of all. It is, after all, little more than a suggestion, and is certainly not strengthened by anything in the body of the work. Rabelais is, in short, if he be read without prejudice, a humourist pure and simple, feeling often in earnest, thinking almost always in jest. He is distinguished from the two men who alone can be compared to him in character of work and force of genius combined-Lucian and Swift-by very marked characteristics. He is much less of a mere mocker than Lucian, and he is entirely destitute, even when he deals with monks or pedants, of the ferocity of Swift. He neither sneers nor rages; the rire immense which distinguishes him is altogether good-natured; but he is nearer to Lucian than to Swift, and Lucian is perhaps the author whom it is most necessary to know in order to understand him rightly.

If this general view is correct (and it may at least claim to be founded on nothing but the reading of Rabelais himself without prejudice and with a tolerable apparatus) it will probably condition to some extent the answer to be given to the two minor questions stated above. The first is connected with the great blemish of Gargantua and Pantagruel,-their extreme coarseness of language and imagery. It is somewhat curious that some of those who claim Rabelais as an enemy of the supernatural in general have been the loudest to condemn this blemish, and that some of them have made the exceedingly lame excuse for him that it was a means of wrapping up his propaganda and keeping it and himself safe from the notice of the powers that were. This is not complimentary to be true. Rabelais, and, except in some very small degree, it is not likely to For as a matter of fact obscenity no less than impiety was charged against him by his ultra-orthodox enemies, and the obscenity no less than the supposed impiety gave them a handle against him before such bodies as the Sorbonne and the parliaments. As for the extreme theory of the anti-Rabelaisians, that Rabelais