n an apothecary of that town, and proprietor of the farm of La Devinière in the neighbourhood, celebrated for an excellent Burgundy which was grown upon it, and where, it is said, a great part of the romance was written. According to some biographers, however, he was a vintner in Chinon, and kept a cabaret there at the sign of the Lamprey. The probability is, that, in a certain sense, he combined both occupations, dealing in drugs and spices, "and other things of great price;" and also, like many other gentlemen of good position, disposing of the wine produced upon his own property, a traffic very different in its nature from that suggested by the modern ideas of an apothecary and keeper of a cabaret. He was unquestionably a man of substance, and able to procure for his son an education of as high a character as was then to be obtained. He sent him to be educated by the monks of Scully, an abbey not far from Chinon; but the boy's progress under their care was so unpromising as to occasion his removal to the university of Angers, according to some biographers, or according to others, to the convent of La Baumette, near that town. Here he studied for some time, but apparently with no more satisfactory results than before. It was at this establishment that he made the acquaintance of the brothers Du Bellay, one of them afterwards the celebrated cardinal. The friendship then formed lasted through life, and ultimately proved of the greatest service to Rabelais. It may be assumed that it was rather from submission to his father's wish than from natural inclination that he is found to have soon afterwards adopted a monastic life. In 1511, after passing through the usual preparatory studies, he was admitted into the order of Cordeliers at the convent of Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, where he assumed the religious habit. Here he prosecuted his studies with such zeal as to retrieve any loss of time which indolence or injudicious tutors might previously have occasioned. Striking out of the usual routine of scholastic study, which then held undivided sway in the monastic houses, he applied himself with unusual industry and research to the cultivation of the sciences. It was his aim, says Niceron, to become a grammarian, poet, philosopher, physician, jurist, and astronomer; and the encyclopaedic knowledge displayed in his works bears ample testimony to his success. He possessed a peculiar aptitude for the acquisition of the languages; an aptitude which afterwards showed itself in his command of Italian, Spanish, German, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. At this period, in fact, he was a perfect master of the Latin and Greek tongues, the latter of which had for some time been engaging the attention of the most enlightened spirits of the age. Within the walls of Fontenay-le-Comte, however, a Greek book was looked upon as no better than a work of magic, and the man who commanded the key to its secrets passed for a trafficker in "the arts inhibited;" and Rabelais' attachment to the Greek writers drew upon him and his friend Pierre Ami, a brother of the same order, the hatred and persecution of his fellow-monks. His independence of spirit and generous ardour in the pursuit of learning, which could not but be felt as a reproach to their own resolute ignorance, pedantry, and sloth, were continually furnishing fresh incentives to their rancour, and they omitted no opportunity of subjecting his friend and himself to annoyance. Among other persecutions to which they were subjected, their cells were ransacked, and their precious Greek volumes confiscated. Worn out by repeated aggressions, Rabelais followed the advice of his friends, and resolved to quit a society where he found so little that was congenial to his own disposition. It has been alleged that the true cause of this step was his own profligacy; but this is only the first of the many groundless charges against him, engendered either by the malice of his enemies, or originating in a misapprehension of his character from the nature of his famous romance, as that of a man whose whole life was a noisy jest, a soulless round of sensual indulgences. Had such really been his character, as has been pertinently remarked by Père Niceron, "these were not the days when, for such a cause, he needed to have left his monastery; he might have given free rein to his propensities there, and yet have made no deviation from the ordinary course." The authority of a churchman on such a point is conclusive. But there is direct evidence, in the letters of Budacus, that Rabelais was persecuted because of his much-dreaded knowledge of the noblest language of antiquity. "Multa et atrocia passus gratia amoris Graecarum literarum," are the words of Budacus.

Rabelais had by this time made influential friends, who, seeing how uncongenial to his nature were all the habits of the severe order of Mendicant friars to which he belonged, exerted themselves to secure for him the advantages of a milder order. Accordingly, about the year 1524 a brief was obtained from Pope Clement VII., allowing him to pass from the order of St Francis into that of St Benedict; and leaving this "pack of capuchins, monks, who forbade the use of beans, that is, Pantagrueline books," to borrow a phrase from the prologue to the fifth book of his romance, he entered the monastery of Maillezais in Poitou. There he remained during several years; but he appears to have found himself little better off in his new quarters than in those which he had left. They did not present him, it is said, with such resources as he desired for extending the limits of his knowledge, more especially in medical science. He accordingly quitted the monastery abruptly. His motives for this step were doubtless of a mingled nature, of which it is but reasonable to suppose the chief was a disgust at the torpor and profitless seclusion of a monastic life, by escaping from which he could alone hope to find opportunities for exercising his stirring and strongly practical intellect in a field of action, observation, and experience, sufficiently ample for its desires. However this may be, he laid down the regular habit for that of a secular priest, and quitted Maillezais without the sanction of his superior, a breach of ecclesiastical discipline which exposed him to its severest censures. After rambling about for some time in the diligent pursuit of medical knowledge (as he says himself in his petition to Pope Paul III. for absolution from the penalties incurred by his unauthorized retirement from Maillezais), he settled at Montpelier in 1530, and, after taking his physician's degree at its university, practised the medical profession there with credit and success. It appears by the dedication to Godefroy d'Esisacq, then bishop of Maillezais, who had studied along with him at La Baumette, of an edition of Hippocrates' Aphorisms and the Ars Pareae of Galen, published by Rabelais in 1532 at Lyons, and highly esteemed by the medical and literary men of the time, that his lectures on physic at the university of that place had attracted considerable attention. Such, indeed, was the distinction he attained, that he was selected by the university as their deputy to procure a restitution of the privileges of which one of its colleges had been denuded by the chancellor Du Prat. The means employed by Rabelais for obtaining access to the chancellor have formed the subject of a story to be found in all his biographies; but it is too obviously a fabrication from an incident in his own romance (the introduction of Panurge to Pantagruel, book ii., c. ix.) to deserve a place here. He succeeded in the object of his mission, and his services to the university were perpetuated in a custom, still, according to the Biographie Universelle, in existence, by which every candidate is required to put on Rabelais' gown upon receiving his physician's degree.

In 1532 we find him established at Lyons, where he was hospital physician, and taught and practised for several years. During his residence in Lyons, Rabelais published several works. Besides those above mentioned, he published in 1532 the Epistolae Medicinae Manordi, and edited numerous publications on medicine, archaeology, and jurisprudence. He edited a series of almanacs from 1538 to 1550, which are chiefly interesting for their disclaimers of that power of divination to which the professors of astrological science have always pretended. "Ce sont les secrets du conseil étroit du Roi éternel," he says, in the almanac for 1538, speaking of future events, "que tout ce qui est et ce qui fait moindre à son franc arbitre et bon plaisir, lesquels vault mieux taire et adorer en silence." It is probable that he acted as corrector of the press for one of the great printing establishments, from which at this period emanated many of the most celebrated editions of both the Italian and French authors. At the commencement of the year 1534 his old schoolfellow and friend, Jean du Bellay, then bishop of Paris, having occasion to pass through Lyons on his way to the papal court, regarding the divorce of Henry VIII., of England, took Rabelais along with him in the capacity of his physician; thus enabling him to realize what had long been his passionate wish, a personal acquaintance with Italy and the Eternal City. For, to use the words of his dedication to Du Bellay of an edition of Marliani's Typographia Antique Roma, published under Rabelais' superintendence, by Gryphius at Lyons in 1534, "from the first moment that I was able to appreciate the worth of polite learning, it was amongst the foremost of my desires to travel throughout Italy, and to view the capital of the Roman world." The opportunity for gratifying the popular conceptions of his character afforded by this visit of the great satirist of the abuses of the Romish Church to the court of its supreme head, has never been overlooked by the anecdote-mongers; and several absurd stories of his conduct have accordingly been handed down from biographer to biographer, till they seem almost to have acquired the authority of undoubted truths. One specimen of these will be sufficient. When the Cardinal du Bellay was presented to the Pope, he, as ambassador of Francis I., went through the usual ceremony of kissing his holiness's slipper. His suite followed his example, all except Rabelais, who remained leaning against a pillar, and exclaimed, loud enough to be heard, "that if his master, who was a great lord in France, were unworthy to kiss the Pope's feet, his holiness might untruss, and possibly, after reasonable abstinence, a part might be found where an humble follower like himself might presume to apply his lips." The improbability that Rabelais should have expressed himself in these terms, filling the situation which he did, and when, too, he was on the eve of supplicating a release from this very Pope from the ecclesiastical penalties he had incurred by his unauthorized desertion of the monastery of Maillezais, speaks sufficiently for the worthlessness of this story. But its real source is obvious enough, and may be found in book iv., c. xlviii., of his romance. It needed but a poor invention to construct such a tale out of the extravagant devotion of the worthies who greeted Pantagruel and his band on their arrival at the island of Papainy. That, however, which, as told by Rabelais himself, is a stroke of the most caustic satire, makes but a sorry jest in the hands of those who first invented a theory of his character, and then fabricated anecdotes to support and illustrate it. Rabelais' judgment, it is certain, was quite as powerful as his wit; and he knew too well when to discharge his bolt with effect ever to let it fly where detriment to the archer himself could alone be the result. The veil of extravagance which he has thrown over his great satirical work, is the best possible proof how unlikely he was to be guilty of any such piece of superfluous imprudence.

Rabelais seems to have gone back to Lyons for a time, as his Epistle Dedicatory to Du Bellay of his edition of Marliani's Antiquitates Roma Antiquae is dated from that city on the 31st of August 1534. He returned shortly afterwards to Rome, and rejoined Du Bellay, who had been created cardinal on the 21st of May 1535. His letters to Godefroy d'Estissac, whose favour he had won during his residence at his abbey of Maillezais, and continued ever afterwards to retain, are dated from Rome during the two following years. Availing himself of the opportunity which his presence on the spot afforded, he petitioned Pope Paul III. to be absolved from the penalties incurred by the abandonment of his order. Rabelais merits had secured him the esteem of Cardinals de Genetis and Simonetta, and they combined with Du Bellay and the Bishop of Masson in forwarding his petition. By their exertions a bull in his favour was obtained gratis, contrary to the usual practice. It was granted on the 17th of January 1536, in terms of his request, allowing him to return into any house of the Benedictine order which would receive him, and to practise physic, upon condition of his doing so without hope of fee or reward. This release from the ecclesiastical disabilities consequent upon his transgression of the church's rules, enabled the Cardinal du Bellay to assign him a place in his abbey of St Maur des Fosses, near Paris. Here he remained until the year 1542, when he was appointed by the same friend to the cure of Meudon; and he continued in the zealous discharge of the duties of this station down to the close of 1551. "Ever mindful," says Niceron, "to instruct his people, he made it part of his care to give their children a knowledge of church music, of which he was himself a thorough master. His house was always open to the poor and wretched, whom he assisted to the utmost of his means; and he was in the habit of drawing men of learning and science about him, to discourse with them upon their several pursuits. Against women, however, his gates were barred, and his reputation on this score is wholly without blemish. This," he adds, "is the uniform testimony of contemporary biographers; and Antony Le Roil, who wrote a Life of him in 1649, avers that such was then the prevailing tradition at Meudon. His knowledge of medicine rendered him doubly useful to his parishioners, who invariably found him ready to minister to their wants both corporeal and spiritual." He died in Paris in 1553, in the Rue des Jardins, parish of St Paul, and was buried in the cemetery of that church.

His deathbed has not escaped profanation by the caterers for the jest-books; and there are few stories more common than his calling for his domino when he felt his end approaching, with the words, "Beati qui in Domino moriuntur." Another anecdote, even more detrimental to his character, is in every-day circulation, by which he is reported to have replied to a page sent by Du Bellay to inquire after his health, "Tell your master the state you find me in; I am going in quest of a Great Perhaps. He is up in the jay's nest. Bid him keep where he is; and for you, you will never be anything but a fool. Draw the curtain; the farce is ended." Those who have read Rabelais' spirit might need no confutation of this slanderous fabrication of monkish malice, the miserable patchwork from some half-dozen threadbare facetiae. The simple fact recorded by Du Verdier is worth a thousand such tales; and it determines, if indeed such evidence were necessary, Rabelais' opinion as to the momentous doctrine which he is here represented to have viewed as no more than "a great perhaps." In a copy of Galen, annotated throughout in the handwriting of Rabelais, which had come into the Bishop of Evreux's possession, opposite a passage in which Galen argues for the mortality of the soul, Rabelais had written, "Hic vero Galenus se plumbum ostendit." Du Verdier also states, whilst at the same time he retracts what he had formerly been led, in accordance with the popular voice, to say against Rabelais in his Bibliothèque Française, that "the manner of his death compels us to form a judgment of him totally at variance with that which is currently received." The particular circumstances of this event are not now known, but they were doubtless such as became a pious and eminently thoughtful man.

One cannot help regretting, with Coleridge, "that no friend of Rabelais, and surely friend he must have had, has left an account of him." Had any such account existed, it would unquestionably have conveyed an impression of his personal character very different from that which the current anecdotes of him are calculated to produce. It is the peculiar misfortune of distinguished humourists to have the paternity of such jests as are tossing unclaimed about the world laid to their charge. They become a sort of founding hospital for wit; and Rabelais has had more than his share of this abandoned progeny thrust upon him. His reputation as a man has suffered accordingly, and this for an obvious reason; for just in the degree that a great man's mind is marked by features which puzzle the finest sagacity to discriminate and reconcile, are people disposed to pronounce an authoritative judgment regarding him. Rabelais, all such cases a lively anecdote or sparkling witticism is too cheap and pleasant a method of settling a doubtful character not to be generally adopted. They commonly fall in with the conclusion which lies nearest to the surface, and being thus most easily come at, they are eagerly caught up and borne along from mouth to mouth till their mere repetition sanctifies the delusion out of which they sprung. One common character runs throughout all the anecdotes of which Rabelais is the hero. They show a mind without gravity or depth, giving the rein to its most wayward salies, destitute of self-respect, and reckless either of present circumstances or of future results. Such is just the character which a superficial observer is likely to form of him from his own romance. The rhodomantle, the coarseness, the downright nonsense, the reckless exuberance of humour, are easily noted; whilst the vein of deep and earnest thought which ever and anon shows itself amid the surrounding extravagance, the infinite good sense, the high-toned and enlightened philanthropy, and the great moral purpose which the author had in view, escape the careless and unpenetrating eye. The vices which he has laid bare with such masterly tact have been set down as his own, and he is charged with having been a profligate, a debauchee, and a buffoon, devoid at once of self-respect and of reverence for whatsoever is sacred or noble. But everything which is authentically known of his life, not less than what may be inferred from a careful study of his works, goes to discomfiture such a conclusion. He was beloved and respected by many of the most illustrious and virtuous prelates of his time, admitted into their most private councils, and charged with the most important trusts. All his works, except his romance, which, being a reflection of the time, must needs carry its grossness and licentiousness upon its front, are conceived in a uniformly grave and learned spirit; and in his letters, where certainly a light or ribald mind was most likely to have shown itself, there is nothing to be found unworthy of the scholar, the gentleman, and the churchman. These facts are utterly inconsistent with the charges of buffoonery, immorality, and irreligion which are usually coupled with his name; and assuredly, if his life had given any warrant for such charges, there were jealous enemies enough to have placed the fact beyond all doubt.

In common with the other great assailants of religious abuses, Rabelais was branded with the names of heretic and atheist, and the dedication of the fourth book of his romance makes an indignant allusion to the circumstance. Epithets like these, however, he could well afford to share with such men as Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon. Had he escaped them, indeed, there would have been some cause for wonder; for assuredly the severest blow ever levelled against the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church was the publication of the Chronicle of the Wondrous Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The popularity of its form secured it attention, where a formal censure would have been disregarded; and it was read on every hand with unexampled avidity. Calvin spoke of part of it with asperity, but others of the Reformers, penetrating its real spirit, gave it their warmest approval, and Izaak's well-known epigram has long graced every edition of the book.

Quid sit negatior, tractantem ut serius visceri, Cum serio facies die, rogo, quantus erit? If he, who in his frolic mood Outdoes the lore of toilsome sages, Should don grave Wisdom's reverend hood, What might be looked for from his pages?

"Beyond a doubt," says Coleridge, "he was among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his age. His buffoonery was not merely Brutus' rough stick, which contained a rod of gold; it was necessary as an amulet against the monks and bigots. Never was there a more plausible, and seldom, I am persuaded, a less appropriate line, than the thousand-times-quoted

'Rabelais laughing in his easy chair'

of Mr Pope. The caricature of his filth and zanyism proves how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which lie stood. 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 the truth, and nothing but the truth. I class Rabelais with the great creative minds of the world [Homer], Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c." The prevalent coarseness, though this even is not always without its meaning, of Rabelais' great work, makes it repulsive to the mass of readers; and this it is, probably, which has enabled modern writers to appropriate its thoughts and witticisms with impunity. But the richness of invention, the dramatic force of the characters, the originality and vigour of thought, the wit, the learning, the satire, poignant yet without cynicism, the wise philosophy, and the atmosphere of triumphant joyousness which invests the whole, justify the praises of Coleridge, and will secure its fame as long as vice remains to be lashed and folly to be ridiculed.

It is impossible not to admire the robust and healthy nature of the mind of Rabelais, which, at a time when earnestness was constantly running into extravagant excesses in the persons of the other great reformers of the period, maintained its equipoise, without losing any of its intensity in seizing and grappling with the predominant abuses. Nor is its moral culture less conspicuous, which, in an age when the face of society presented so much to impress a conviction of the farce and hollowness of the world, preserved him, in despite of his acute sense of the absurd, the false, and the contemptible, as well as of his strong satirical bias, from becoming a morbid and misanthropical reviler of mankind. "I ask not," says Coleridge, "the genius of a Machiavel, a Tacitus, or a Swift; it needs only a worldly experience and an observing mind to convince a man of forty that there is no medium between the creed of misanthropy and that of the gospel." Which of these, then, was the creed of Rabelais? Most certainly the latter. He hates cant in all its shapes, hypocrisy under all its disguises; tyranny, intolerance, villainy, selfishness, and all its breed of tyrannical vices, are his abhorrence; mere folly he makes his sport, and he dallies with absurdity with a very wantonness. But he never forgets that he, the satirist, is himself come of the stock of Adam, or libels the Creator by flying in the face of that nature which, good or bad, is still his gift. Rabelais takes life as it is; he would fain see it better, and lends a helping-hand to make it so. Like his great countryman Beranger,

"Du l'univers observant la machine, Il y voit du mal, et n'aime que le bien."

He detests the evil with which the world is overrun, but he never abandons his faith in the good. His satire is not the angry yelping of a currish nature, the overflow of sour secretions and accumulated bile. Where it is grave, it is the commanding voice of honest indignation; where jovial, its kindliness of tone makes you like the man, whilst you admire his genius. He is essentially kindly even in his severest moods; and this is apparent in the very form of his satire. Its most caustic strokes are given with a merry voice and laughing eye; and yet, whilst apparently revealing in the most unrestrained ebullitions of mere animal spirits and licentious fancy, he is covertly stripping sensualism of its enticements, and enforcing the strongest lessons of humility. He possessed, in short, the wisdom of love, which is "the creed of the gospel;" and this his great romance testifies in a hundred places. At the same time, its defects are great and manifold, and these cannot be better summed up than in the words of La Bruyère:—"Ra- Gottlieb Wilhelm, a German satirist, born in 1714 near Leipzig, and studied law at the university of that city. While holding a civil office at Dresden he commenced to write satires upon men and manners. An observant eye and a humorous and benevolent disposition qualified him in an especial manner to be the censor of social follies and vanities. His descriptions were faithful, vigorous, and good-natured; and his style was correct, pointed, and flowing. Accordingly he attained a high reputation as a satirist. During his lifetime his works passed through several editions, and were translated into French and Dutch. After his death in 1771 they appeared in an eleventh edition, in 6 vols. 8vo, Leipzig, 1777. They have now a historical value as a record of habits and modes of life which have passed away.