twenty-six years older than Calvin. But it was by no means uncommon at that time to see men that had been bred in the church, cast adrift to seek, late in life, for new ties and occupations. Many were the strange waifs that the Reformation had washed afloat upon society; nor of all these was there one whose severance from the papal wreck should have been less a matter of surprise than that of Rabelais.

Born in 1483, at the small town of Chinon, in Touraine, where his father, who was an innkeeper, owned or rented a farm adjacent to a convent of Benedictine monks, Rabelais had been destined for the church from his boyhood; and after receiving the usual modicum of education, and fulfilling the usual novitiate, he had at last, in his twenty-ninth year (1511) been admitted into priest's orders as a member of a fraternity of Franciscan or Mendicant Grey Friars, established at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou. A position less suitable for a man of his tastes and temperament could not possibly have been found. To wear a coarse grey cloak and hood, to go barefooted, and live on fish and other meagre diet, to cherish a humble and abject demeanour, and to abstain from all unnecessary learning-such were the rules imposed upon the Franciscan friars by the will of their founder; and whatever relaxations in these rules time may have introduced, enough of their spirit remained to preserve for the order its traditional character as the most ascetic and beggarly in the church. In any convent whatever, Rabelais would have been an unruly subject; but in a convent of Franciscans he was discord incarnate. His conventual offences were numerous. In the first place, it appears, he was by far too studious in his habits for a Franciscan; he, and another brother, named Peter Amy, would persist, among other things, in learning Greek together, and in corresponding with eminent Greek scholars, such as the celebrated Budæus-of all which it was clear to the friars that no good could come. Further, there was good reason, after the promulgation of the Lutheran heresy, to believe that brother Rabelais was by no means an orthodox catholic in his views of that movement, if, indeed, he was not in secret a disciple of Luther. But, worse than all, as we guess, he was of a disposition altogether intractable and uncomfortable,' un prêtre,' as his friend Budæus hinted, ' d'un caractère bien difficile et morose;' an earlier Swift, in short, for bitterness and satiric humour. It is nowise necessary to add to these traits, as some do, the imputation of personal lewdness, in order to complete our picture of a man that would be likely to keep a community of Grey Friars in a state of hot water. Suffice it that, during thirteen

years, he was, somehow or other, the most unpopular man in the monastery. At last, this dislike of his brother monks to him showed itself in a somewhat serious fashion. In 1524, in consequence of some formidable breach of rule-a profane practical jest, tradition says, that brought the whole convent into public scandal-brother Rabelais was condemned by the conventual chapter to the terrible punishment called in pace-that is, to perpetual imprisonment, on bread and water, in a subterranean cell. It was not so easy, however, thus to dispose of a man whose abilities and learning, in spite of any faults he may have had as regarded faith or morals, had already procured him some local reputation—a man that knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had Budæus and bishops for his friends. The whole neighbourhood of Fontenay-le-Comte rose in his favour; and by the exertions of certain influential individuals, among whom was André Tiraqueau, lieutenant-general of the district, and Geoffroi d'Estissac, bishop of the see of Maillezais in the same province of Poitou, not only was Rabelais released from his durance, but a papal indulgence was procured enabling him to quit his monastery altogether, and, in spite of his former vows as a Franciscan, enter the aforesaid bishop's own chapter, the Abbey of Maillezais, of the wealthy and scholarly order of St. Benedict. Even this change of situation, however, did not satisfy him; and it was not long before, assuming the habit of a secular priest, and so renouncing all monastic restraint, he decamped from the abbey without leave, and became once more a denizen of the common world. The Bishop of Maillezais, one of those easy semi-Lutheran prelates that then abounded, winked at this act of his protegé; and for several years the ex-monk lived and went about with him as his friend and secretary. It was at this time and in this situation that he became connected with Clement Marot, Etienne Dolet, Antoine Heroet, Hugues Salel, Bonaventure des Periers, and other distinguished literary sceptics of the day, in all of whom, sympathy with at least the negative side of the Lutheran movement was tolerably apparent; as well as with the four celebrated brothers · Du Bellay, who, though all high civic or ecclesiastical functionaries, were yet all more or less Lutheran in their sentiments. There is even ground for supposing, that about the same period, he met and formed some slight acquaintance with Calvin, then a mere youth, but already known, like himself, as a profound Greek scholar. In 1530, however, the mixed party of wits, scholars, and public men, that seemed thus to be forming itself as a Lutheran, or semi-Lutheran, element in French society, found cause for prudence, if not for alarm; persecution

having assumed so decided a form in the counsels of Francis I., as to sanction the burning of suspected heretics in the streets of Paris. Accordingly, there was a temporary cessation of all overt demonstration of opinion, or of Lutheran collusion, if any such existed, on the part of our ex-monk and his friends. The Bishop of Maillezais and the Du Bellays jogged on as politic men in office that could keep their thoughts to themselves; Clement Marot, a prosecution for eating bacon in Lent hanging over him, continued to write popular verses; the noble Calvin calmly pursued his peculiar way as a laborious student, whom a high destiny awaited; and Rabelais, a runaway monk, with forty-eight years of his life gone, and the world yet before him, resolved, as we have seen, to study medicine.

The memory of Rabelais is sacred in Montpellier to this day. For many years after his death, the red gown which he had worn when a student, was carefully preserved; and, by way of ceremony, every medical pupil at the university was invested with it on passing his fifth examination. The ceremony is

still kept up; but the real gown has twice been replaced by a substitute. According to the tradition, this custom is commemorative not merely of the fact that Rabelais studied at the university, but also of a signal service that he rendered it, in procuring, under very difficult circumstances, and by a very jocose stratagem, the restoration of certain privileges that had been withdrawn from it by Chancellor Duprat. All that is certain, however, is that Rabelais remained at the university about two years; that he obtained a bachelor's degree in medicine; that he led what might be called a merry life for a man verging on fifty-acting plays and farces with his fellowstudents; and that, on leaving Montpellier for Lyons, in 1532, he carried with him a real knowledge of what was then taught as physic, as well as a full title to practise it.

Settled at Lyons, whither he was probably led by the instances of his friend Dolet, his first occupation was to edite two medical works-the one consisting of Letters of an Italian physician, named Manardi, and the other of revised Latin versions of certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen. These works, however, did not sell. Two other productions, of an erudite literary character, were equally unsuccessful; and, as the common story goes, it was to make up to his publisher, Gryphius, the losses he had sustained by undertaking them, that Rabelais resolved to attempt something in a more popular vein. The result was the publication in the same year of a mock tale of chivalry entitled, Chronique Gargantuine, or more fully, The great and inestimable Chronicles of the great and

'enormous Giant Gargantua, containing his genealogy, the greatness and force of his body, as well as the marvellous feats of arms that he did for King Artus; as see hereafter, newly printed.' Of this slipshod performance, doubtless written currente calamo, and, as the author says, during the time allotted to eating and drinking,' there were sold, he says, more copies in two months than were sold of the Bible in nine years.' No time was, therefore, lost in bringing out a second edition of the same, greatly altered and enlarged; and in following it up in 1533 with a sequel, or continuation, under the name, 'Pantagruel; "the horrible and astounding feats and prowesses of the very renowned 'Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, son of the great giant Gargantua; 'newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier.' This production, which forms the second book of the works of Rabelais, as they now stand, is in reality the parent of the other four books, nothing being contained in them that does not grow out of it necessarily or otherwise. The author, in passing from the Chronique, which he had thrown off so hastily, to this second work, or sequel, had evidently enlarged the design of his fiction, and determined to give it a new character. Accordingly, while he retains in the Pantagruel a great deal of the absurd machinery of the Chronique, making his hero a giant, and everything about him gigantesque, it is clear that he no longer aims at a mere boisterous parody of the legends of giants and enchantments, that then formed the staple popular literature of Europe. Merlin, King Arthur, Gog, Magog, and other similar personages, that had figured in the Chronique, are disbanded; and Pantagruel, the gigantic son of the giant Gargantua, moves on through a very different world from that to which his father had belonged. Paris, and the whole contemporary French world, that Rabelais himself knew, rise distinctly before one; and the author, descending like a licensed jester among real things and events, riots in universal allusion and invective. The transition is somewhat, though not entirely, as if from penning The Adventures of Jack the Giant Killer, one had passed to the composition of the Voyage to Brobdignag. Fancy does not yet succumb, indeed, so as to play only a second part; but purpose and savage intent are everywhere visible.

Rabelais had thus discovered his true vein, found out the natural bent of his genius, ascertained that he was a born satirist, and all-irreverent jester. A somewhat odd discovery to be made so late, and after such varied premisses! To have become a priest; to have spent thirteen years in a convent of beggarly ignoramuses; to have learnt Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and otherwise pursued knowledge under difficulties;

to have been once all but starved to death in a mouldy cellar; to have changed one monkish order for another; to have been secretary to a bishop; to have kept company with distinguished scholars and wits; to have seen and talked with young Calvin; to have studied medicine, and edited heavy medical books; and then, at last, in his fiftieth year, to find out, by mere chance, that, after all, he was nothing else than what he had been at first-a village innkeeper's son, making fun every morning with the hostlers at his father's door; listening every night to snatches of song, broad jests, and roars of tipsy laughter from the tap-room; and au fait (the kitchen being his own) in all the mysteries of cooked and preserved meats! Such, however, was the fact of the case. What Rabelais was

at the last, he was in embryo while a boy about his father's inn at Chinon. Take, for example, the opening passage of the Prologue to his Fourth Book:

Good people, God save and keep you! Where are you? I can't see you. Wait till I put on my spectacles. Ha, ha!-soft and fair goes Lent; I see you. Well, you have had a good vintage, they tell me. I am not a bit vexed at it. You have found an infallible cure against all weather changes. 'Tis bravely done. You, your wives, children, friends, and families, are in as good health as hearts could wish. It is well, it is good; it is as I would have it. God be praised for it; and, if it be his sacred will, long may you be kept so. For my own part, thank His kindness, I am there and thereabouts; and by the means of a little Pantagruelism (which is, as you know, a certain jollity of spirit pickled in the scorn of fortune), you see me now hale and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.'

What have we here but the salutation of a country innkeeper to his customers on a market-day? We seem to see old Thomas Rabelais, a ruddy, jovial soul, with plenty to say, and genius in the very wink of his eye, standing under his own sign of the Lamprey, and welcoming his guests in his bantering way, his first-born chewing a straw, and sympathetically looking on. 'And so you mean to make that boy of yours a priest, Master Rabelais?' we may farther fancy some crony of his saying to him: Take my word for it, he is fitter to ride horses, and fire off damp gunpowder.' And Gaffer Jacques would have been right. After forty weary years, the boy that his father, by the advice of some neighbouring Benedictine, had destined to the priesthood, had but come round again to his pristine nature; not, however, without difference or advantage, resulting from so long a circuit. Setting aside the mere fact of acquisitions gained, whereby what in Thomas Rabelais had been but village gossip, became in his son matter and faculty to make a nation