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DEDICATED, BY PERMISSION, TO HER MAJESTY.

BIOGRAPHY

OR

Third Division of "The English Cyclopædia,"

CONDUCTED BY

CHARLES KNIGHT.

VOLUME V.

LONDON:

BRADBURY, EVANS, & CO., 11, BOUVERIE ST., FLEET ST., E.C.

SCRIBNER, WELFORD, & CO., 654, BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

1867.

LONDON:

BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

209408 MAR -7 1917

AE •EN4

BIOGRAPHY.

VOLUME V.

The asterisk* prefixed to the name indicates that the subject of the memoir is still living.

RABELAIS, FRANÇOIS.

RA ABELAIS, FRANÇOIS, was born in 1483 (M. Rathery says in 1495), at Chinon in Touraine. He entered the order of St. Francis, but his jovial temper and satirical humour made him obnoxious to his brother monks, and he was glad to obtain permission to remove into a convent of Benedictines. But here also he could not sympathise with the habits of his brethren, and at last he ran away from his convent, and went to Montpelier, where he studied medicine and took his doctor's degree. He practised as a physician, though he retained the garb of a secular priest; and in his capacity of physician he became known at the court of Francis I. In 1536 he accompanied Cardinal du Belloi to Rome, and obtained the pope's absolution for the breach of his monastic vows. On his return to France he obtained a prebend in a collegiate church, and was afterwards appointed curé or rector of Meudon, in which situation he continued till his death in 1553.

Rabelais was a man of extensive and varied information; he was acquainted with the principal European languages, besides Latin and Greek, but his principal merit consists in overflowing humour, and in the acuteness with which he caught at and exposed the absurdities and the vices of his contemporaries, sheltered as they were by hallowed prejudice or by the cloak of superstition and hypocrisy. His principal work is a satirical novel, in which, under an allegorical veil, he lashes all classes of society, kings, statesmen, scholars, clerical as well as lay, prelates and popes, and especially monks, of whom he seems to have had a special dislike. Rabelais took for his first hero Gargantua, a gigantic personage, about whom there were many wonderful traditional stories, to which Rabelais added many more. Gargantua lived for several centuries, and at last begot a son, Pantagruel, who is as wonderful as himself; beneath his tongue a whole army takes shelter from rain; in his mouth and throat are cities which contain an immense population, &c. The adventures of these personages are all ridiculous, and are described in humorous language, which often descends to low buffoonery and very frequently to obscenity. This obscenity was according to the taste of the age, but it now is, in its loathsome excess, the chief drawback to the reading of the book. But under this coarse covering there lies a moral, for Rabelais meant to correct and improve society by his satire. He exposes the faults of the education of his time, the barbarous eloquence of college pedants, the folly of scholastic disputation, and the pretensions of self-styled philosophers; all which are successively held up to ridicule in the harangue of Janotus de Braginardo, in which he demands back the bells of the cathedral of Notre Dame, which Gargantua had detached from the belfry and appended to the neck of his mare; in the curious catalogue of the books of the library of St. Victor; in the disputation carried on by signs between Panurge and the English Thaumaste; and, lastly, in the description of the prodigies which science had produced in the country of Quint-Essence, or kingdom of Entéléchie. In another part of his work the author exposes the manners of courts and the weakness even of good monarchs. Pantagruel is a virtuous prince, devout, and severe in his morals, and yet he takes for his favourite Panurge, an arrant rogue, a drunkard, a coward, and a libertine, who seems to be a counterpart of the Margutte of Pulci's 'Morgante Maggiore,' for Rabelais was acquainted with the Italian romance writers, whose tales of giants and heroes and their wonderful achievements he probably had in view in his caricatures. The disastrous wars of Charles VIII. and Francis I. had produced too many evils in his time not to attract Rabelais' censure. To the headlong ambition of those conquerors he opposes the prudence and moderation of his heroes,

BIOG. DIY. VOL. V.

RABENER, GOTTLIEB WILHELM.

who, before they enter upon even a defensive war, exhaust every means of conciliation. Rabelais sneers openly at the pretensions of the popes to interfere in temporal matters, and in his fourth book he exposes the pretended mortifications of a certain class of devotees who feasted on meagre days on a variety of dishes of the finest fish and other savoury things.

It has been assumed by some that Rabelais' work is a continued allegory of the events and personages of his time; and people have fancied that they recognised Francis I. in Gargantua, Henri II. in Pantagruel, Louis XII. in Grand Gousier, &c. This however seems very doubtful, and the notion has been strongly combated by Ch. Nodier, in an article 'De quelques livres satiriques et de leur clef,' Paris, 1834. It seems more likely that Rabelais made occasional allusions to some of the leading characters of his age and their prevailing faults, while he lashed in general the vices and follies of society. With regard to the traditional stories of Gargantua, which he took for his subject, see Notice de deux anciens Romans, intitulés les Chroniques de Gargantua, où l'on examine les rapports qui existent entre ces deux ouvrages et le Gargantua de Rabelais, et si la première de ces Chroniquos n'ost pas aussi de l'auteur de Pantagruel,' by J. Ch. Brunet, author of the Nouvelles Recherches Bibliographiques,' Paris, 1824.

The romance of Rabelais has gone through several editions, and has been translated into German and English. One of the best French editions is that by Duchat, Euvres de Maitre François Rabelais, avec des remarques historiques et critiques,' 3 vols. 4to, Amsterdam, 1741. An excellent recent French edition of the works of Rabelais is that published by E. Johanneau and Esmangart, with a biography of the author, and his 'Songes drolatiques,' being a collection of one hundred and twenty caricatures, designed by Rabelais himself, and intended to represent the characters of his romance, and also his 'Sciomachie,' a work which had become extremely scarce. Swift, in his 'Gulliver's Travels,' has imitated Rabelais. Rabelais was charged in his lifetime with irreligion and heresy, but he was protected by Francis I., who, having read his romance, said that he found no grounds for the charge. Rabelais knew Calvin, who at one time thought of numbering him among his followers, but there was too much dissimilarity between the two men to allow any such connection, and Calvin having gravely censured Rabelais for his profane jesting, the satirist took his revenge by placing in the mouth of Panurge, while buying a sheep of Din denault, some of the theological expressions of his austere monitor. RABENER, GOTTLIEB WILHELM, born in 1714 at Wachau near Leipzig, was educated in the public school at Meissen. In 1734 he went to the University of Leipzig to study the law, where he became acquainted with some of the most eminent men of the age, and formed an intimate friendship with Gellert, with whom he took an active part in the establishment of a celebrated literary periodical called 'Bremer Beiträge.' In 1741 he received an office in the board of taxes for the circle of Dresden, and in 1763 he was appointed counsellor of the court of aids (Steuerrath), which office he held until his death, on the 26th of March 1771. Rabener was in his time one of the most popular writers in Germany, and he exercised a very beneficial influence upon his countrymen. His satires, in which he attacked in a goodhumoured strain the most glaring follies, fashions, and pretensions of his time, though not marked by much depth of thought, are still instructive and amusing as historical pictures of the age in which he lived, for the things which he ridiculed have long ceased to exist.

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