RABELLAIS (Francis), a French writer famous for his satiric tales, was born at Chinon in Touraine, about the year 1483. He was first a Franciscan friar; but quitting his religious habit, studied physic at Montpelier, where he took his doctor's degree. It is said, that the chancellor du Pratt having abolished the privileges of the faculty of physic at Montpelier by a decree of the parliament, Rabelais had the address to make him revoke what he had done; and that those who were made doctors of that university wear Rabelais's robe, which is there held in great veneration.

Some time after, he came to Rome, in quality of physician in ordinary to cardinal John du Bellay bishop of Paris. Rabelais is said to have used the freedom to jeer pope Paul III. to his face. He had quitted his religious connections for the sake of leading a life more agreeable to his taste; but renewed them on a second journey to Rome, when he obtained, in 1536, a brief to qualify him for holding ecclesiastical benefices; and, by the interest of his friend cardinal John du Bellay, he was received as a secular canon in the abbey of St Maur near Paris. His profound knowledge in physic rendered him doubly useful; he being as ready, and at least as well qualified, to prescribe for the body as for the soul: but as he was a man of wit and humour, many ridiculous things are laid to his charge, of which he was quite innocent. He published several things; but his chief performance is a strange incoherent romance, called the History of Gargantua and Pantagruel being a satire upon priests, popes, fools, and knaves of all kinds. This work contains a wild irregular profusion of wit, learning, obscenity, low conceits, and arrant nonsense; hence the threadbare of his satire, in some places where he is to be understood, gains him credit for as good meanings where no meaning is discoverable. Some allusions may undoubtedly have been so temporary and local as to be now quite lost, but it is too much to conclude thus in favour of every unintelligible rhapsody: for we are not without English writers of great talents, whose sportive geniuses have betrayed them into puerilities, no less incoherent at the times of writing, than those of Rabelais appear above two centuries after. He died about 1553.