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CO
THE
WORKS
I-RANCIS RA.BELAIS.
CrattflateU from tfje dfr*nrf>.
BY
SIR THOMAS URaiJHART AND MOTTEUX;
WITH
EXPLANATORY NOTES, BY DUCHAT, OZELL, AND OTHERS.
A NEW EDITION, HEVISED, AND WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES.
VOL. I.
LONDON :
M. G. BOHN, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, 1851.
list
CONTENTS.
Page
The Life of Rabelais
Some Learned Men's Opinions of Rabelais
The Preface ; wherein is given an Account of the Design and N ature
of this Work, and a Key to some of its most difficult Passages The List of some of the Names mentioned in the First, Second and Third Books of Rabelais, explained in the Preface
BOOK I. TREATING OF THE INESTIMABLE LITE OF THE GREAT GARQANTUA,
FATHER OF PANTAGRUEL.
To the Readers . . . . • - Q3 ^
The Author's Prologue . . Chap I. Of the Genealogy and Antiquity of Gargantua
II The Antidoted Fanfreluches ; or, a Galimatia of extra- vagant conceits found in an ancient Monument
III. How Gargantua was carried eleven months in his
Mother's Belly..
IV. How Gargamelle, being great with Gargantua, did eat a j huge deal of tripes
*S v. How they chirped over their cups . .
/VI. How Gargantua was born in a strange manner . . H5
j/VIL After what manner Gargantua had his name given him,
and how he tippled, bibbed, and curried the can VIII. How they apparelled Gargantua ,/ IX. The Colours and Liveries of Gargantua
X. Of that which is signified by the colours white and blue XI. Of the youthful age of Gargantua . . • • J33
XII. Of Gargantua's Wooden Horses
XIII. How Gargantua's wonderful understanding became known to his Father Grangousier, by the invention of a torchecul or wipe-breech
S XIV. How Gargantua was taught Latin by a Sophister 4/1 XV. How Gargantua was put under other Schoolmasters . .
CONTENTS.
x Chap,
•^ XVI. How Gargantua was sent to Paris, and of the huge Great Mare that he rode on ; how she destroyed the Ox-
X Flies of the Beauce .. .. .. ..
How Gargantua paid his welcome to the Parisians, and
how he took away the great Bells of our Lady's Church 153 XVIII. How Janotus de Bragmardo was sent to Gargantua, to
recover the Great Bells .. .. ..156
</ XIX. The Oration of Master Janotus de Bragmardo, for the
recovery of the Bells .. .. .. ..157
XX. How the Sophister carried away his cloth, and how he . had a Suit in Law against the other Masters . . 163
I/ XXI. The Study of Gargantua, according to the discipline of
his Schoolmasters and Sophisters . . . . 168
XXII. The Games of Gargantua . . >. . . ..171
V XXIII. HowGargantua was instructed by Ponocrates, and in such
sort disciplinated, that he lost not one hour of the day 175 XXIV. How Gargantua spent his time in rainy weather . . 183 y XXV. How there was a great Strife and Debate raised betwixt the Cake-Bakers of Lerne, and those of Gargantua's country, whereupon were waged great wars . . 186
XXVI. How the Inhabitants of Lerne, by the commandment of Picrochole, their King, assaulted the Shepherds of / Gargantua unexpectedly and on a sudden . . 1 90
y XXVII. How a Monk of Seville saved the close of the Abbey . from being ransacked by the Enemy .. ..192
i/XXVIII. How Picrochole stormed and took by assault the Rock Clermond, and of Grangousier's unwillingness and . aversion from the undertaking of war .. .. 198
/ XXIX. The tenor of the Letter which Grangousier wrote to his
Son Gargantua . . . . . . . . 200
XXX. How Ulrich Gallet was sent unto Pierochole . . 201
I/ XXXI. The Speech made by Gallet to Picrochole . . . . 202
How Grangousier, to buy peace, caused the Cakes to be restored .. .. .. .. .. 205
How some Statesmen of Picrochole, by hair-brained counsel, put him in extreme danger . . . . 208
XXXIV. How Gargantua left the city of Paris, to succour his country, and how Gymnast encountered with the enemy .......... 213
XXXV. How Gymnast very souply and cunningly killed Captain
Tripet, and others of Picrochole's Men . 215
CONTENTS. V
Chap. Page
r XXXVI. How Gargantua demolished the Castle at the Ford
of Vede, and how they passed the Ford . . 218
XXXVII. How Gargantua, in combing his Headj made the
great Cannon Balls fall out of his Hair . . 220
XXXVIII. How Gargantua did eat up six Pilgrims in a sallad 222 XXXIX. How the Monk was feasted by Gargantua, and of the
jovial discourse they had at supper . . . . 225
XL. Why Monks are the outcasts of the World ; and
wherefore some have bigger Noses than others . . 230 ' XLI. How the Monk made Gargantua sleep, and of his
hours and breviaries . . . . . 233
\/XLII. How the Monk encouraged his fellow-champions,
and how he hanged upon a tree . . . . 236
XLIII. How the Scouts and Fore-Party of Picrochole were met with by Gargantua, and how the Monk slew Captain Draw-forth, and then was taken Prisoner by his Enemies . . . . . . ^ . . 239
XLIV. How the Monk rid himself of his Keepers, and how
Picrochole's Forlorn Hope was defeated . . 243
XLV. How the Monk carried along with him the Pilgrims, and of the good words that Grangousier gave them .. .. .. .. ..245
[. How Grangousier did very kindly entertain Touch- faucet his Prisoner . . . . . . . . 248
XL VII. How Grangousier sent for his Legions, and how Touchfaucet slew Rashcalf, and was afterwards executed by the command of Picrochole . . 251
XLVIII. How Gargantua set upon Picrochole within the Rock Clermond, and utterly defeated the Army of the said Picrochole . . . . . . . . 254
XLIX. How Picrochole in his flight fell into great mis- fortunes, and what Gargantua did after the Battle 257 VXi. Gargantua's speech to the vanquished . . . . 259
^El. How the victorious Gargantuists were recompensed * after the Battle .. .. .. ..263
t^L\\, How Gargantua caused to be built for the Monk
the Abbey of Theleme . . . . . . 265
How the Abbey of the Thelemites was built and endowed .. .. .. .. ..267
i/LIV. The Inscription set upon the great Gate of Theleme 270 What manner of dwelling the Thelemites had . . 274
VI CONTENTS.
Chap. Pag,
yL\l. How the Men and Women of the religious order of The-
leme were apparelled . . . . . . . . 27i
^/fjVU. How the Thelemites were governed, and of their manner
of living .. .. .. .. ..27!
LVIII. A Prophetical Riddle 281
BOOK II. PANTAGRUEL, KING OF THE DIPSODES, WITH HIS HEROIC ACTS AND
PROWESSES. The Author's Prologue . . . . . . . . . . 28!
Chap. I. Of the original and antiquity of the great Pantagruel . . 28i ^/ll. Of the Nativity of the most dread and redoubted Panta-
^ gruel 29!
III. Of the grief wherewith Gargantua was moved at the de- > cease of his Wife Badebec . . . . . . 295
4"TVr. Of the Infancy of Pantagruel . . . . . . 30]
V. Of the acts of the noble Pantagruel in his youthful age . . 3Q< ''VI. How Pantagruel met with a Limousin, who affected to
speak in learned phrase .. .. .. 31 (
VII. How Pantagruel came to Paris, and of the choice books * of the Library of St. Victor . . . . . . 31^
*^III. How Pantagruel, being at Paris, received letters from his
/ Father Gargantua, and the copy of them . . . . 34-;
«/IX. How Pantagruel found Panurge, whom he loved all his
life-time .. .. .. .. .. 34<
X. How Pantagruel equitably decided a controversy, which was wonderfully obscure and difficult, whereby he was . reputed to have a most admirable judgment . . . . 35f
XI. How the Lords of Kissbreech and Suckfist did plead
before Pantagruel without an Attorney . . .361
XII. How the Lord of Suckfist pleaded before Pantagruel 36/
XIII. How Pantagruel gave judgment upon the difference of
the two Lords . . . . . . . . . . 372
XIV. How Panurge related the manner how he escaped out of
the hands of the Turks . . . . . . . . 37€
XV. How Panurge showed a very new way to build the Walls
of Paris .. .. .. .. ..383
V/XVI. Of the qualities and conditions of Panurge .. .. 38£
^XVII. How Panurge gained the pardons, and married the old
Women, and of the Suit in Law which he had at Paris 395 XVIII. How a great Scholar of England would have argued
against Pantagruel, and was overcome by Punurge . . 398
THE
LIFE OF RABELAIS.
HAD Rabelais, like Cardan, Scaliger, Thuanus, and other learned men, given us the history of his life, employed, as it was, wholly in mirth, and penned by so uncommon a hand, it must needs have pleased not only more than the most di- verting works of others, but even more than his own un- paralleled chronicle.
But, by a cruel fatality, most of those whose works per- petuate the lives of others, neglect to eternize their own by such a method ; and, instead of painting themselves and their most memorable actions, only strive to be known by the pictures of strangers which they have drawn : some of them, perhaps, flatter themselves with the examples of a small number of happy men, the picture of whose lives and persons has been consecrated to posterity by pencils equal to those with which they had redeemed others from oblivion : but, as few prove kinder to us than ourselves, those who ex- pect to be excepted out of that rule, after their deaths, may be assured, that if, by chance, some of their able survivors bestow one short minute to give, en passant, an imperfect idea of their resemblance, ten ill hands, rudely attempting to do the same, while they faintly hit one lineament, will, miscarry on the rest, and thus ignorantly or maliciously ridi- cule what they pretend to represent.
It is true the ancient philosophers have had their Laertius ; and the heroes, their contemporaries, their Plutarch : but now that history seems almost lost in disorderly memoirs, its primitive chaos, great warriors are as unlikely to find good historians as famous authors.
VOL. I. B
THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
Thus Rabelais, that greater Lucian of France, has been even worse used than that of Greece ; for though we know the old only by his writings, yet few fabulous stories wrong his memory, while that of Rabelais is so much abused by unkind Fame, that, to know him, it were perhaps better only to seek this modern Lucian, as we do the old, in the pictures which he has drawn of others, than in those which his care- less or malicious painters have given us of him.
However, you have here the best account I could get of him : neither was it without much difficulty that, out of the ruins of time, in a kingdom where it is not easy to find many books and persons that can inform us of this author, I could gret together what follows ; principally if we consider how little is to be found in the late French editions of his works.
FRANCIS RABELAIS was born about the year H83, at Chinon, a very ancient little town, situate near the place where the river Vienne loses itself into the Loire, in the pro- vince of Touraine, in France. His father, Thomas Rabelais, was an apothecary of that town, and possessed an estate called La Deviniere ; l near which place, having first sent his son Francis to be educated by the monks of the abbey of Seville, and finding that he did not improve, he removed hinvto the university of Angers, where he studied some time at a con- vent called La Baumette, but without any considerable suc- cess. There he became acquainted with Messieurs du Bel- lay, one of whom was afterwards cardinal : and it is said, that Rabelais, having committed some misdemeanour, v.'us there very severely used.
A famous author writes,2 that he was bred up in a convent of Franciscan friars, in the Lower Poictou, and was received into their order. Which convent can be -no other than that of Fontenay-le-Comte,3 in the said province, where he proved a great proficient in learning ; insomuch that, of the friars, some envied him, some, through ignorance, thought him a conjuror, and, in short, all hated and misused him, because he studied Greek, the beauties of which tongue they could not relish ; its novelty making them esteem it not only bar- barous, but antichristian. This we partly observe by a letter
1 Particular, de la Vie et Moeurs de Rabelais, imprim. devant ses GEuvres. 2 Scacvol. Samarthanus, lib. i. Elog. Clar. Vir.
3 Thresor. Chronolog. de St. Romuald. 3rd part.
THE LIFE OF BABELAIS. 3
which Budaeus,4 the most learned man of his age in that tongue, wrote to a friend of Rabelais, wherein he highly praises him, particularly for his excellent knowledge in that tongue, and exclaims against the stupidity and ingratitude of those friars.
Such a misfortune befel Erasmus ; as also the learned Rabanus Maurus Magnentius, Abbot of Fulda and Archbishop of Mentz :5 for having, while he resided with them in his abbey, composed some excellent poems in verse, they only served to expose him to the hatred of his monks, who ac- cused him of applying himself too much to spiritual things, and too little to the increase of the temporal, to the loss, as they thought, of the monastery ; so that about the year 842, he was forced to fly to Lewis, King of Germany, his pro- tector ; where his monks, who had soon found their error and their loss in the absence of so excellent an abbot, came to beg his pardon, and prayed him to resume the adminis- tration of the abbey, which, however, he resolutely declined.
Thus Rabelais, hating the ignorance and baseness of the Cordeliers, was desirous enough to leave them, being but too much prompted to it by several persons of eminent quality, who were extremely delighted with his learning and facetious conversation.
A monk relates,6 that he was put in pace, that is, between four walls, with bread and water, in the said convent, for some unlucky action ; and was redeemed out of it by the learned Andrew Tiraqueau, then lieutenant-general (that is, chief judge) of the bailiwick of Fontenay-le-Comte ; and, by tradition, it is said in that town, that, on a day when the country people used to resort to the convent church to ad- dress their prayers, and pay their offerings to the image of St. Francis, which stood in a place somewhat dark near the porch, Rabelais, to ridicule their superstition, privately re- moved the saint's image, and placed himself in its room, having first disguised himself : but at last, too much pleased with the awkward worship which was paid him, he could not forbear laughing, and made some motion ; which being observed by his gaping staring worshippers, they cried out, " A miracle ! my good lord St. Francis moves !" Upon which
4 BudiEus Grcec. Epist. 5 Rabanus, Brower in Fold. Hist.
6 P. de St. Romuald. Feuillant.
B 2
4 THE LIFE OF EABELAIS.
an old crafty knave of a friar, who knew stone and the virtue of St. Francis too well to expect this should be true, drawing near, scared our sham-saint out of his hole ; and, having caused him to be seized, the rest of the fraternity, with their knotty cords on his bare back, soon made him know he was not made of stone, and wish he had been as hard as the image, or senseless as was the saint ; nay, turned into the very image of which he lately was the representation.
At last, by the intercession of friends, of which Geoffrey d'Estissafc, Bishop of Maillezais,7 is said to have been one, he obtained Pope Clement VII. 's permission to leave the beggarly fellowship of St. Francis, for the wealthy and more easy order of St. Benedict, and was entertained in that bishop's chapter, that is, the Abbey of Maillezais. But his mercurial temper prevailing after he had lived some time there, he also left it ; and, laying down the regular habit, to take that which is worn by secular priests, he rambled up and down awhile, till at last he fixed at Montpellier, took all his degrees as a physician in that university, and practised physic with reputation. And by his epistle 8 before the translation of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and some works of Galen, which he published and dedicated to the Bishop of Maillezais, in 1532, he tells him that he publicly read physic in that university to a numerous auditory.
It is vulgarly said, that Rabelais having published some physical tract, which did not sell, upon the disappointed bookseller's complaint to him, told him, that since the world did not know how to value a good book, they would un- doubtedly like a bad one, and that accordingly he would write something that would make him large amends ; upon which he composed his Gargantua and Pantagruel, by which the bookseller got an estate. But either this is an error, or
7 The bishop's see is now removed to Rochelle. 8 Quum anno
snpenore Monspessuli Aphorismos Hippocratis, et deinceps Galeni Artem Medicara frequent! auditorio publice enararrem, Antistes claris- sime, annotaveram loca aliquot in quibus interpretes mihi non admodum satisfaciebant. Collatis enim eorum traductionibus cum exemplari graecanico quod, praeter eaquse vulgo circumferuntur, habebam vetustis- simura, literisque lonicis elegantissime, castigatissimeque exaratum, comperi illos quam plurima omisisse, qusedam exotica et notha adje- cisse, qusedam minus expressisse, pauca iuyertisse verius quam vertisse, #c. _ F. Rabelaesus in Hippocr. Aphor.
THE LIFE OF KABELAIS. O
Rabelais must have been more imposed on than our Sir Walter Raleigh was by his selfish stationer ; since the above- mentioned translation, which was printed by the famous Gryphius of Lyons, at first, in 1532, was reprinted many times since, particularly in 1543, of which date I have an edition of it ; which was undoubtedly before Rabelais began to write his Gargantua ; and none ever mentioned any other tract of physic by him ; and also when he speaks of his An- notations 9 on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, he says, that Gryphius importuned him very much to consent that they might be printed.
We do not know how he came to leave Montpellier, though probably he was sent by its university to solicit for them at court, and then was invited to stay at Paris, of which John du Bellay, his friend, afterwards cardinal, was not only bishop, but governor ; at least, it is certain he attended him in his embassy to Pope Paul III., though I believe that the chief occasion of his going to Rome, was to put a stop to the ecclesiastical censures fulminated against him for leaving his convent ; and it is thought the Bishop of Maillezais abetted that desertion, and encouraged him in his studies at Mont- pellier, which perhaps made Rabelais afterwards dedicate to him, and own then, that he owed all things to him.10
It is likely our doctor had then a prospect of the benefices with which he soon afterwards was gratified by that cardi- nal ; and for that reason was glad to be eased of the censures under which he lay, which made him incapable of enjoying anything. The Bishop of Montpellier himself was a protest- ant, and might have kept always his bishopric, had he writ- ten as mystically as Rabelais. The Cardinal Chatillon also was not only a protestant, but married, as well as John de Mont- luc, Bishop of Valence ; yet, as well as many others, in those times, who were against the errors of the church of Rome in their hearts, they had benefices in it, and favoured the reformation, perhaps more than those who openly professed it. So Rabelais seems to me to have passed into Italy only
9 Contendit a me multis verbis ut eos sinerem in communem studio- sorum utilitatem exire. 10 Hie non dicam, qua ratione adductus
sim, id, quicquid est laboris, tibi ut dicarera. Tibi enim jure debetur quicquid efficere opera mea potest ; qui me sic tua benignitate usque fovisti, ut quocunque oculis circumferam ovdkv r\ ovpavbs fjdt QaXaaca munificentia: tuse sensibus meis obversetur.
D THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
in the quality of a penitent monk, being first obliged to sub- mit to his abbot, and the orders of the convent which he had left many years ; else, had he been then physician to Cardi- nal du Bellay,11 then ambassador to the pope, he would not have recommended himself to the alms of his superior, the Bishop of Maillezais, as he does in his letters to that prelate ; to whom he writes, that the last money which he had re- mitted to him was almost gone ; " though," says he, " I have put none of it to an ill use." 12 Neither would he have add- ed, that he used constantly to eat either with Cardinal du Bellay, or the Bishop of Mascon, who had succeeded him in the embassy, (doubtless upon the other's promotion to the rank of cardinal,) but that much money was spent in dis- patches, clothes, and chamber-rent ; which shows also, that though he, as a friend, did eat with one of those two, yet he paid for his lodging elsewhere. By these letters, which Messieurs de St. Marthe, gentlemen famous for learning, have not disdained to publish with their learned and curious observations, of ten times their length, we see that Rabe- lais held also a private correspondence in characters with the Bishop of Maillezais, to whom they are directed, and that the bishop was far from being bigotted to popery. We also know by them, that Rabelais obtained his absolution of Pope Paul III. the 17th of January, 1536, whereby he had leave given him to return to Maillezais, and to practise physic, either at Rome or elsewhere ; that is, without any gain and only by charity. We also find that he had gained the es- teem of Cardinal de Genutiis, accounted the ornament of the college, and Cardinal Simonetta, eminent for virtue, and other worthy prelates, besides Cardinal du Bellay, and the Bishop of Mascon, who procured him his bulls gratis, and had even offered him to make use of their king's name, had it been needful.13
It is reported that Bishop du Bellay, as King Francis I.'s ambassador when he had audience of Paul III. having kissed that pope's slipper, which ceremony is by some called adoration, all the rest of his retinue did the same, if we except Rabelais, who, fixed as the pillar against which he
11 Epist. de Rabel. Pag. 5, p. 49. 12 Et si n'en ay rien des-
pendu en meschancete. Ibid., pag. 49. 13 Sadoletus Ital. Sacr.
T. 3.
THE LIFE OF EABELAIS. 7
leaned, said, that if the ambassador, who was a very great lord in France, was unworthy to kiss the pope's foot, they might even let down his holiness's breeches and wash his a — , and then he might presume to kiss something about him.
Another time, that cardinal having brought him with the rest of his retinue, to the same pope, that they might beg some favour of his holiness, Rabelais, being bid to make his demand, only begged that his holiness would be pleased to excommunicate him.
So strange a request having caused much surprise, he was ordered to say why he made it.14 Then addressing himself to that pope, who was doubtless, a great man, and had nothing of the moroseness of many others : " May it please your holiness," said he, " 1 am a Frenchman, of a little town called Chinon, whose inhabitants are thought some- what too subject to be thrown into a sort of unpleasant bonfires ; and, indeed, a good number of honest men, and, amongst the rest, some of my relations, have been fairly burned there already. Now, would your holiness but ex- communicate me, I should be sure never to burn. My reason is, that, passing through the Tarantese, where the cold was very great, in the way to this city, with my Lord Cardinal du Bellay, having reached a little hut, where an old woman lived, we prayed her to make a fire to warm us ; but she burned all the straw of her bed to kindle a faggot, yet could not make it burn ; so that at last, after many imprecations, she cried, * Without doubt, this faggot was excommunicated by the pope's own mouth, since it will not burn.' In short, we were obliged to go on without warming ourselves. Now, if it pleased your holiness but to excom- municate me thus, I might go safely to my country." By this he not only, in a jesting manner, exposed the Roman clergy's persecuting temper, but seemed to allude to the inefficacy of the former pope's excommunications in Eng- land, and chiefly in Germany, where they only served to warn our Henry VIII. , and, on the other side, the Luthe- rans, to secure themselves against the attempts of their enemies.
14 It is the same of whom Alstedius and others write, it was said in 1540, Paulo III. Optimo Maximo in Terris Deo.
8 THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
He, that would not spare the pope to his face,15 was doubtless not less liberal of his biting jokes to others ; inso- much that he was obliged to leave Rome without much pre- paration ; not thinking himself safe among the Italians, who, of all men, love and forgive raillery the least, when they are the subject of it.
So being come as far as Lyons, on his way to Paris, very indifferently accoutred, and no money to proceed, whether he had been robbed, or had spent all his stock, he, who had a peculiar love for ease and good eating, and no less zeal for good drinking, found himself in dismal circumstances. So he had recourse to a stratagem which might have been of dangerous consequence to one less known than Rabelais.
Being lodged at the Tower and Angel, a famous inn in that city, he took some of the ashes in the chimney, and having wrapped them up in several little papers, on one of them he writ " poison to kill the king;" in another, " poison to kill the queen ;" in a third, "poison to kill the duke of Orleans ;" and having on the Change met a young merchant, told him, that being skilled in physiognomy, he plainly saw that he had a great desire to get an estate easily ; therefore, if he would come to his inn, he would put him in a way to gain a hundred thousand crowns. The greedy merchant was very ready. So, when he had treated our doctor, he came to the main point ; that is, how to get the hundred thousand crowns. Then Rabelais, after the other bottle or two, pretending a great deal of caution, at last showed him the papers of powder, and proposed to him to make use of them according to their superscriptions, which the other promised, and they appointed to meet the next day, to take measures about it; but the too credulous, though honest trader, immediately ran to a judge, who having heard the information, presently sent to secure Rabelais, the dauphin having been poisoned some time before : so the doctor with his powder, was seized, and being examined by the judge, gave no answer to the accusation, save that he told the young merchant that he had never thought him fit to keep a secret, and only desired them to secure what was in the papers, and send him to the king, for he had strange things to say to him.
15 Particul. de la Vie de Rabelais, imprim. devant ses (Euvres.
THE LIFE OP RABELAIS. 9
Accordingly he is carefully sent to Paris, and handsomely treated by the way on free cost, as are all the king's pri- soners ; and being come to Paris, was immediately brought before the king, who knowing him, asked him what he had done to be brought in that condition, and where he had left the Cardinal du Bellay. Upon this the judge made his report, showed the bills with the powder, and the informa- tions which he had drawn. Rabelais, on his side, told his case, took some of all the powders before the king ; which being found to be only harmless wood ashes, pleaded for Rabelais so effectually, that the business ended in mirth, and the poor judge was only laughed at for his pains.
Though this story be printed before in many editions of Rabelais, somewhat otherwise than I here give it, I would not any more be answerable for its truth, than for that of many others which tradition ascribes to him. When a man has once been very famous for jests and merry adventures, he is made to adopt all the jests that want a father, and many times such as are unworthy of him. For this reason I will omit many stories which some indeed relate of Rabe- lais, but which few can assure or believe to be true. Yet since the witty sayings, merry triflings, and the accounts of the indifferent actions of great men, have found not only their historians but their readers, from Tully's puns, to the false witticisms, insipid drolling, and empty insignificant remarks, that make up the greatest part of the Scaligeriana, and some others of those unequal collections of weeds and flowers, whose titles end in ana ; we may with greater reason relate the jests of Rabelais, whose life as well as his writings have been thought a continual jest ; and this would not seem to be the life of Rabelais, did not some comical stories make a part of it.
Neither were his jests sometimes less productive of good, than the deep earnest of others.16 Of which the university of Montpellier furnishes us with an instance : none being admitted to the degree of doctor of physic there, who has not first put on the gown and cap of Dr. Rabelais, which are preserved in the castle of Morac in that city.17 The cause of this uncommon veneration for the memory of that learned man is said to be this :
16 Grand Diction. Historiq. n Voyage de 1'Europe. t. 1,
10 THE LIFE OF UABELAIS.
Some scholars having occasioned an extraordinary dis- order in that city,18 Anthony Duprat, Cardinal, archbishop of Sens, then Lord Chancellor of France, upon complaint made of it, caused the university to be deprived of part of its privileges. Upon this, none was thought fitter to be sent to Paris to solicit their restitution than our doctor, who by his wit, learning, and eloquence, as also by the friends which they had purchased him at court, seemed capable to obtain any thing. When he came to Paris about it, the difficulty lay in gaining audience of the chancellor, who was so incensed, that he refused to hear anything in behalf of the university of Montpellier. So Rabelais, having vainly tried to be admitted, at last put on his red gown and doctor's cap (some say a green gown and a long grey beard) and thus accoutred, came to the chancellor's palace, on St. Austin's key ; but the porter and some other servants mis- took him for a madman : so Habelais having, in a peremp- tory tone, been asked there who he was, let his impertinent querist know, that he was the gentleman who usually had the honour to flay bull-calves ; and that, if he had a mind to be first flayed, he had best make haste and strip imme- diately. Then being asked some other questions, he an- swered in Latin, which the other understanding not, one of the chancellor's officers that could speak that tongue was brought, who addressing himself to our doctor in Latin, was answered by him in Greek, which the other understanding as little as the first did Latin, a third was fetched who could speak Greek ; but he no sooner spoke in that language to Rabelais, but was answered by him in Hebrew ; and one, who understood Hebrew, being with much difficulty pro- cured, Rabelais spoke to him in Syriac : thus having ex- hausted all the learning of the family, the chancellor, who was told, that there was a merry fool at his gate who had out-done every one, not only in languages, but in smartness of repartees, ordered him to be brought in. It was a little before dinner. Then Rabelais, shifting the farcical scene into one more serious, addressed himself to the chancellor with much respect, and having first made his excuse for his forced buffoonery, in a most eloquent and learned speech, so effectually pleaded the cause of his university, that the 18 Partic. de la Vie de Rabelais.
THE LIFE OF RABELAIS. 11
chancellor, at once ravished and persuaded, not only pro- mised the restitution of the abolished privileges, but made the doctor sit down at table with him, as a particular mark of his esteem.
Much about that time, hearing with what facility, for the sake of a small sum of money, the faculty of Orange (some say Orleans) admitted ignorant • pretenders, as doctors of physic, not only without examining, but even without seeing them ; Rabelais sent the usual fees, and had one received doctor there unseen, by the name of Doctor Johannes Caballus, and let the wise professors and the world know- afterwards, what a worthy member they had admitted into their body, since that very doctor was his horse Jack ; or, as some say, his mule : for if there are various lections, there may well be also various traditions of the same pas- sage.
Though I know that it as little becomes a correct histo- rian to launch into large digressions, as to advance things without good authorities, I cannot forbear mentioning some- thing very particular concerning that very numerical doctor, I mean Johannes Caballus : and that I may not be thought to relate stories without authorities, I will make bold to quote that of a book written stylo maxime Rabelaesano, viz. " Le moyen de parvenir ;" I remember to have read the story in a less apocryphal author, but time hath blotted his name out of my memory.
Rabelais being at Paris, and more careful of himself than of his mule, had trusted it to the care of the printer's men, desiring them at least not to let it want water. But he having perhaps forgot to make them drink, they also easily, though uncharitably, forgot the poor brute. At three days end the creature having drank as little water as its master, a young unlucky boy took a fancy to get on its back, even like the miller's daughter, without a saddle ; another truant scholar begged to get behind him, so did a third, and eke a fourth. Thus these four being mounted like Aymond's four sons a horseback on a mule, without bridle or halter, the real and living emblem of folly, the grave animal walked leisurely down St. James's Street, till it came near a church, towards which it moved, drawn by the magnetic virtue of the water, which it smelt at a considerable distance, in the
12 THE LIFE OF KABELAIS.
holy water-pot, which is always near the porch. And in vain our four riders kicked and called ; in spite of them the headstrong thirsty beast made up to the holy element ; and though the church was almost full of people, it being Sunday and sermon-time, notwithstanding all opposition, the bold monster dipped its saucy snout in the sanctified cistern. The people that were near it were not a little amazed at the im- pudence of that sacrilegious animal, deservedly cursed with sterility, though it were but for this one crime ; many took him for a spectrum that bore some souls, formerly heretical, but now penitent, that came to seek the sweet refrigeratory of the saints, out of the more than hellish flames of purga- tory. So the unconcerned mule took a swinging draught of holy liquor, yet did not like it so well, there being always salt in it, as to take a second dose; 'but having somewhat allayed its raging thirst, modestly withdrew, with her two brace of youngsters. However, the thing did not end thus ; for the brute was seized, and Rabelais, being thought none of the greatest admirers of the Romish fopperies, was shrewdly suspected of having laid the design of that scandalous ad- venture. Nor was the rude four-legged Johannes Caballus released out of the pound, till its master had dearly paid for its drink.
As he ridiculed the superstition of priests, he also was extremely free in his reflections on the monks, and truly he knew them too well to love and esteem them ; he is said not to have been able to refrain his satirical temper, even while he was reading public service ; and instead of Qui mcechantur cum ilia, as the vulgate has it, to have said aloud Qui mona- chantur cum ilia.
It is also said, that as he was kneeling once at church, before the statue of King Charles VIII. a monk came and said to him, that doubtless he mistook that king's statue for that of some saint ; but Rabelais immediately replied, "I am not so much a monk (blockhead, I mean) as thou thinkest me ; nor yet so blind as not to know that I kneel before the representation of King Charles VIII., for whose soul I was praying, because he brought the pox out of Naples into this kingdom, by which means I and other physicians have been considerable gainers."
Several physicians being once assembled to consult about
THE LIFE OF RABELAIS. 13
an hypochondriac humour, which confined Cardinal du Bel- lay to his bed ; they at last resolved that an aperitive (open- ing) decoction should be prepared, to be frequently taken with some syrup by the patient. Now Rabelais, who was his physician, perhaps not being of their opinion, while the rest of our learned doctors were still discoursing in their scientific jargon, to deserve the large fee, caused a fire to be made in the yard, and on it to be set a kettle full of water, into which he had put as many keys as he could get : and while he was very busy in stirring them about with a stick, the doctors coming down, saw him, and asked what he was doing? " Following your directions," replied he. "How in the name of Galen ?" cried one of them. " You are for something that may be very aperitive," returned Rabelais, " and by Hippocrates, I think you will own that nothing can be more aperitive than keys, unless you would have me send to the arsenal for some pieces of cannon." This odd fancy, being immediately related to the sick cardinal, set him into such a fit of laughing, that it helped more to cure him than the prescription ; and what made the jest the more pertinent was, that keys are made of iron and steel, which with water are the chief ingredients in chalybeate medicines.
Hearing that the grave John Calvin, somewhat prejudiced against him for his biting jokes, had played on his name by the way of anagram; saying " Rabelsesius, Rabie laesus," Anglice" " mad man ;" he, with an admirable presence of mind, immediately returned the compliment in the same kind, saying, " Calvin Jan Cul," Anglice " Jack Arse," adding that there was anagram for anagram, and that a studied trifle only deserved to be paid back with one worse, extempore.
Thus while, like Democritus, he made himself merry with the impertinences of mankind, nothing was able to allay his mirth, unless it were the thought of a reckoning, at the time that he paid it ; then, indeed, he was thought somewhat se- rious, though probably it was partly that those who were to receive it, might not impose on him and the company, and because he generally found his purse not over full. How- ever, the time of paying a shot in a tavern among good fel- lows, or Pantagruelists, is still called, in France, le quart d'heure de Rabelais ; that is, Rabelais's quarter of an hour, (when a man is uneasy or melancholy.)
14 THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
Yet his enemies, the monks, and some others, tell us, that he seemed much less concerned when he paid the grand shot of life, than when he discharged a small tavern reckoning ; for they say that he faced death with an unconcerned and careless countenance ; and, in short, that he died just as he had lived. They relate the thing thus :—
Rabelais being very sick, Cardinal du Bellay sent his page to him, to have an account of his condition ; his answer was, " Tell my lord in what circumstances thou findest me ; I am just going to leap into the dark. He is up in the cock-loft, bid him keep where he is. As for thee, thou'lt always be a fool: let down the curtain, the farce is done."19 A little before this he called for his domino (so some in France call a sort of hood which certain ecclesiastics wear) saying, put me on my domino, for I am cold : besides, I will die in it, for Beati qui in Domino moriuntur. An author,20 who styles Rabelais a man of excellent learning, writes, that he being importuned by some to sign a will, whereby they had made him bestow on them legacies that exceeded his ability, he, to be no more disturbed, complied at last with their desires ; but when they came to ask him where they should find a fund answerable to what he gave ; "As for that," replied he, " you must do like the spaniel, look about and search ;" then, adds that author, having said, draw the curtain, the farce is over, he died. Likewise a monk,21 not only tells us that he ended his life with that jest, but that he left a paper sealed up, wherein were found three articles as his last will, " I owe much, I have nothing, I give the rest to the poor."
The last story, or that before it, must undoubtedly be false ; and perhaps both are so, as well as the message by the page : though Friegius22 relates also, that Rabelais said, when he was dying, draw the curtain, &cc. But if he said so, many great men have said much the same. Thus Au- gustus,23 near his death, asked his friends whether he had not very well acted the farce of life ? And Demonax, one
19 Je m'en vay chercher un grand peut-estre. II est au nid de la pie. Which, verbatim Englished, is, I am going to seek, or look for, a great may.be (doubt or uncertainty.) He is in the pye's nest, &c.
20 Thov. His. de Jean Clopinel. 21 P. de St. Romuald Rel. Feuillant. 22 Comment, in Orat. Cic. torn. 1. 23 Nunquid vitae mimum commode peregisset.
THE LIFE OF RAEELAIS. 15
of the best philosophers, when he saw that he could not, by reason of his great age, live any longer, without being a burthen to others as well as to himself, said to those that were near him, what the herald used to say when the public games were ended, you may withdraw, the show is over, and, refusing to eat, kept his usual gaiety to the last, and set himself at ease.24
I wave many other stories, concerning Rabelais, which seem as inconsistent and fabulous as the legends of Symeon the Metaphrast, St. Xavier's miracles, or the traditions of the monks, our witty satirist's irreconcilable enemies. We ought not easily to believe, that he, who even in the most licentious places of his merry compositions, is thought by the judicious to have generally a design to expose villany, and in the places that are graver, as also in his letters, dis- plays all the moderation and judgment of a good man ; we ought not, I say, to believe, that such a man, in his seven- tieth year, could have abandoned himself to those excesses ; being curate of a large parish near Paris, prebendary of St. Maur des fossez, in that city, and honoured and loved by many persons equally eminent for virtue, learning, and quality.
It was by a person, who, with those three advantages, was also a great statesman, and a very good Latin poet ; I mean John, Cardinal du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, who knew Rabelais from his youth, that he was taken from the profes- sion of physic, to be employed by that prelate in his most secret negotiations ; it was he that knew him best, yet he thought him not unworthy of being one of the prebendaries of a famous chapter in a metropolis, and curate of Meudon in his diocese.
It was, some say, in that pleasant retreat, that he com- posed his Gargantua and Pantagruel ; though more probably, it was at that house called Deviniere, already mentioned, and that the neighbouring abbey of Seville', whose monks lived not then according to the austerity of their rule, is partly the subject of it, which causes him, they say, to make so often mention of the monks, the staff of the cross, and the vineyard of Seville ; as also of Basch^, Lern£, Panzoust, &c., which are places near that abbey.
24 Lucian.
16 THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
The freedom, which Rabelais has used in this work, could not but raise it many enemies : which caused him to give an account in his dedicatory epistle of the fourth book, to Odet, Cardinal of Chatillon, his friend, of the motive that induced him to write the three former books. There he tells him, that though his lordship knew how much he was daily importuned to continue it by several great persons who alleged, that many who languished through grief or sickness, reading it, had received extraordinary ease and comfort ; yet the calumnies of a sort of uncharitable men, who said it was full of heresies, though they could not show any there, without perverting the sense, had so far con- quered his patience, that he had resolved to write no more on that subject. But that his lordship having told him that King Francis had found the reports of his enemies to be unjust, as well as King Henry II. then reigning ; who, therefore, had granted to that cardinal his privilege and par- ticular protection for the author of those mythologies : now, without any fear, under so glorious and powerful a patron- age, he securely presumed to write on.
And indeed it is observable, that in the book to which that epistle is prefixed, he has more freely than in the rest exposed the monks, priests, pope, decretals, council of Trent, then sitting, &c.
That epistle25 is dated the 28th of January, 1552, and some write that he died in 1553. By the following epigram, printed before his last book, Rabelais seems to have been dead before it was published :
Rabelais est il mort ? Voici encore un livre ! Non, sa meilleure part a repris ses esprits, Pour nous faire present de 1'un de ses ecrits Qui le rend entre nous immortel et fait vivre.
Nature quite.
The signature seems to be an anagram of Jean Turquet, father of the historian Louis Mayerin Turquet.
This satirical work employed our Rabelais only at his spare hours ; for he tells us that he spent no time in com- posing it, but that which he usually allowed himself for eating ; yet it has deserved the commendations of the best of serious writers ; and particularly of the great Thuanus, whose approbation alone is a panegyric. And if we have 25 Tkres. Clironol. de St. Romuald.
THE LIFE OF RABELAIS. 17
not many other serious, tracts by its author, the private affairs of Cardinal du Bellay, in which he was employed, and his profession as a physician and a curate, may be sup- posed to be the cause of it. Yet he published a Latin version of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and with them some of Galen's works, which, for its faithfulness and purity of style, has been much esteemed by the best judges of both : nor is Vorstius, who attempted the same, said to have succeeded so well. Rabelais also wrote several French and Latin epistles, in an excellent style, to several great and learned men, and particularly to Cardinal de Chatillon, the Bishop of Maillezais, and Andrew Tiraqueau, the famous civilian, who is said yearly to have given a book26 and, by one wife, a son to the world, during thirty years,27 though he never drank anything but water; in which he differed much from his friend Rabelais. Those epistles do not only show that he was a man fit for negotiations, but that he had gained at Rome the friendship of several eminent prelates. He likewise wrote a book, called Sciomachia, and of the feasts made at Rome, in the palace of Cardinal du Bellay, for the birth of the Duke of Orleans, printed at Lyons, in 8vo. by Sebast. Gryphius, 1549. And there is an Almanack for the year 1553, calculated by him for the meridian of Lyons, and printed there, which shows that he was not only a grammarian, poet, philosopher, physician, civilian, and theologian, but also an astronomer. Besides, he was a very great linguist, being well skilled in the French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew tongues ; and we see in his letters, that he also understood Arabic, which he had learned at Rome, of a Bishop of Caramith.
Some write, that Rabelais died at Meudon ; but Dom Pierre de St. Romuald says, that Dr. Guy Patin, royal pro- fessor at Paris, who was a great admirer of Rabelais, assured him, that he caused himself to be brought from his cure to Paris, where he lies buried in St. Paul's church-yard, at the foot of a great tree, still to be seen there (1660). He died in a house in the street called La Rue des Jardins, in
u Thresor. Chron. de St. Romuald. 27 Others, more probably, reduce the number to ten sons, at the birth of each of whom he pub- lished a learned folio.
VOL. i. c
18 THE LIFE OF RABELAIS.
St. Paul's parish at Paris, about the year 1553, aged 70 years. But his fame will never die.
Stephen Pasquier, advocate-general, one of the most learned and judicious writers of his age, Joachim du Bellay, Archdeacon of Paris, named to the archbishopric of Bour- deaux, Peter Boulanger, Peter Ronsard, once prince of the French poets, Jean Antoine de Baif, and many more of the best pens of his age, honoured his memory with epitaphs ; the two latter in French. That by Ronsard, being too long, I omit ; here is that by Baif :
O Pluton, Rabelais 1690! Afin que toi qui es le roi De ceux qui ne rient jamais Tu aies un rieur desormais !
Here are four others in Latin ; of which the tAvo first are to be found in Pasquier :
Ille ego Gallorum Gallus Democritus, illo
Gratius aut si quid Gallia progenuit. Sic homines, sic et coelestia Numiiia lusi,
Vix homines, vix ut Numina laesa putes.28
Sive tibi sit Lucianus alter, Sive sit cynicus, quid hospes ad te ? Hac unus Rabelaesius facetus, Nugarum pater, artifexque mirus, Quicquid is fuerit, recumbit urna.29
Somnus. et ingluvies, Bacchusque, Venusque, jocusque
Numina, dura vixi, grata fuere mihi. Caetera quis nescit ? Fuit ars mihi cura medendi,
Maxima ridendi sed mihi cura fuit. Tu quoque non lacrymas, sed risum solve, viator,
Si gratus nostris manibus esse velis.
Non Rabelaesius solus Sed aula, ecclesia, Et omnis mundus Agunt histrionem.
A great number of learned men have made mention of him in their writings ; as "VVm. Bude, master of the requests, alias Budaeus, in Epistolis Grsecis. Jac. Aug. de Thou, pre- sident in the court of parliament at Paris, alias Thuanus, Hist. lib. 38. et Commentar. de Vit& su&, lib. 6. Theod.
28 Pasq. Recueil des Portraits. 29 Pasq. Liv. des Tomb.
THE LIFE OF RABELAIS. 19
Beza. Clement Marot, who inscribed to him an imitation, in French, of the 21st epigram of Martial's fifth book, " Si te cum mihi, Chare Martialis, &c." Hugh Salel, that trans- lated Homer's Iliad into French. Stephen Dolet, a French and Latin poet, burned for being a protestant, at Paris, 1545. Peter Ronsard. Stephen Pasquier, in his Recherches de la France, and in the first and second books of his Lettres. Jean Cecile Frey. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, in his book of the Advancement of Learning. Andrew Du Chesne, in his book Des Antiquitez de France. Thevet, Hist, de Jean Clopinel : Gab. Mic. de la Roche Maillet, Vies des Illust. Per- sonnages. Fran. Grude', Seigneur de la Croix du Maine, in his Bibliotheque. Ant. du Verdier, Sieur de Vauprivas, Con- seiller du Roy. Franc. Ranchin, doctor of physic at Montpellier. Scaevola de SainteMarthe,Conseiller du Roy, &c. alias Samar- thanus, lib. primo Elog. Clarorum Virorum. Sir William Temple, in the second part of his Miscellan. C. Sorel, first Historiographer of France, in his Bibliotheque Fran9oise. Dr. Ant. Van Dale, de Oraculis et Consecrationibus. Monsieur Costar, dans son Apologie. M. Menage. Romuald, in the third part of his Thresor Chronologique ; and several others, named in a book called Floretum Philosophicum, that men- tions many particulars of his life, and the names of those that have spoke of him. A curate of Meudon, in honour of his predecessor, also caused to be printed whatever is writ in his praise, which books I have not been able to find. There is also a large account of Rabelais in the Grand Historical French Dictionary.
SOME LEARNED MEN'S OPINIONS
OF
DR. RABELAIS.
DK RABEL^SO, CLARORUM ALIQUOT SCRIPTORUM TESTIMONY. GTJILIELMUS BTJD-EUS IN EPISTOLIS GB^CIS.
O DEUM immortalem, et sodalitatis Praesulem, nostrseque amicitisePrincipem ! Quidnam est illud quod audivimus ? Te
o 9,
20 SOME LEARNED MEN'S OPINIONS
etinim 6 Caput mihi exoptatum, et Rabelaesum Theseum tuum intelligo ab istis elegantiae et venustatis osoribus so- dalibus vestris obturbatos propter vehemens circa literas Graecas studium, quam plurimus gravibusque mails vexari. Papae 6 infaustam virorum delirationem ! Qui usque ade6 sunt animo inelegant! ac stupido, ut, quibus cohonestari uni- versum Sodalitium vestrum convenerat, multtimque sapere, quippe qui exiguo temporis spatio ad doctrinae fastigium per- venerint, eosdem san£ calumniose insimulando, in ipsoque conjurando finem imponere conati sint ornatissimae exer- citationi. — Et post alia. Vale et salutato meo nomine quater Rabelaesum scitum et industrium, vel sermone si prsestd fit aut per Epistolas denuncians.
VIRI ILLT7STEISS. JAC. AUG. THUANI IN STJPKEMO GAL- LIARTJM SENATU PR^ESIDIS.
COMMENT AEIORT7M DE VITA SUA, LIB. 6.
CHINONE hospitium habebat (Thuanus) in domo oppidi amplissima, qu8B quondam Francisci Rabelaesi fuit, qui litteris Graecis, Latinisque instructissimus, et Medicinae quam profitebatur peritissimus, postremo omni serio studio omisso se totus Vitae solutse ac guise mancipavit et ridendi artem hominis, sicut ipse aiebat propriam, amplexus, Demo- critica libertate, et scurrili interdum dicacitate, scriptum ingeniosissimum fecit, quo Vitae regnique cunctos ordines quasi in Scenam sub fictis Nominibus produxit et populo deridendos propinavit. Hominis ridiculi qui tota vita ac scriptis, ridendi aliis materiam prsebuit, memoria & Thuano et Calignono hie renovata est, cum bell£ cum Rabelsesi Manibus actum uterque diceret, quod Domus ejus publico diversorio, in quo perpetuoe commessationes erant, Hortus adjacens ad ludum oppidanis per dies festos se exercentibus, projectum in Hortum despiciens, in quo, cum literis operam dabat, libros habere et studere solitus erat, vinariae cellse inserviret. Ex eaque occasionq Thuanus k Calignono invi- tatus, hoc Carmen extemporaneum fecit.
IPSE EABEL^SUS
Sic vixi, ut vixisse mihi jocus, atque legenti Q.UOS vivus scripsi, sit jocus usque jocos. Per risum atque jocos ho mini data Vita fruenda,
OF RABELAIS. 21
Inter amarescit seria felle magis. Et nunc ne placidos laedant quoque seria manes
Cavit Echionii provida cura Dei. Nam quae a patre domus fuerat Chinone relicta,
Qua vitreo Lemovix amne Vigenna fluit, Postquam abii, communis in usum versa tabernae,
Laetifico strepitu nocte dieque sonat. Ridet in hac hospes pernox, ridetur in Horto,
Cum Populus festo cessat in urbe die. Tibiaque inflato saltantes incitat utre,
Tibia Pictonicos docta ciere modos. Et quae Musaeum domino, quae cella libellis
Nectareo spumat nunc apotheca mero. Sic mihi post minimum Vitse tarn suaviter actum
Dent hodie ad priscos fata redire jocos ; Non alia patrias aedes mercede locare,
Vendere non alia conditione velim.
THEODORUS BEZA, DE FRANCISCO RABELJ2SIO.
Qui sic Nugatur, tractantem ut seria vincat, Seria cum faciet, die rogo quantus erit ?
SCJSVOLA SAMARTHANUS EX LIBRO PRIMO ELOGIOR17M GALLORUM DOCTRINA ILLUSTRIUM.
F. RABEL^ESIUS — Impulsu quorumdam procerum, qui urbana ejus dicacitate plurimum oblectabantur, Monasterii claustra juvenis transiliit, demumque in ridendis hominum actionibus totus fuit. Ciim enim, pro ea qua pollebat Lin- guarum et Medicinse Scientia, multa graviter et erudite posset scribere, quod et Hippocratis Aphorismi ab illo casta fide tranducti, et aliquot Epistolae nitido stylo conscript83 satis indicant, Lucianum tamen aemulari maluit, ad cujus exemplum ea Sermoni Patrio finxit, quse nugse esse videntur, sed ejusmodi tamen sunt ut Lectorem quemlibet eruditum capiant, et incredibili quadam voluptate perfundant. Neque solum erat in scribendo salis et facetiarum plenus, verum et eandem jocandi libertatem apud quemlibet et in omni sermone retinebat; ade6 ut Romam Joanne cum Bellajo Cardinale profectus, et in Pauli III. conspectum venire jussus ne ipsi quidem Pontifici Maximo pepercerit. Atque hanc intemperantiae suae causam ingeniose praetexebat, qu5d cum
22 SOME LEARNED MEN'S OPINIONS
sanitati conservandse nihil magis offieiat qukm mseror et aegri- monia, prudetitis Medici partes sint non minus in mentions hominum exhilarandis,qukm in corporibus curandis laborare.
ANTON. VAN DALE ; DE ORACULIS ET CONSECRATIONIBTJS.
DE Oraculis et Sortibus inter alia scripsit per lusum et jocum doctissimus et magnus ille Gallus Rabelaesius, cujus nugae saepius multorum doctorum seria vincunt, in vita et gestis Garagantuae et Pantagruelis, tarn doct6 meo judicio, quam lepide" ac salse.
SIR WM. TEMPLE IN HIS MISCELLANEA, SECOND PART.
THE great wits among the moderns have been, in my opinion, and in their several kinds, of the French Rabelais and Montaigne. — Rabelais seems to have been father of the ridicule, a man of excellent and universal learning, as well as wit ; and though he had too much game given him for satire in that age, by the customs of courts and of convents, of processes and of wars, of schools and of camps, of romances and legends, yet he must be confessed to have kept up his vein of ridicule, by saying many things so smutty and profane, that a pious man could not have afforded, though he had never so much of that coin about him. And it were to be wished, that the wits who have imitated him, had not put too much value upon a dress, that better understandings would not wear (at least in public) and upon a compass they gave themselves, which some other men cannot take.
M. I/ ABBE COSTAR, DANS SON APOLOGIE A M. MENAGE.
RABELAIS est autant a la mode qu'il fut jamais. Ses railleries sont agreables d'un agrement qui ne finera point tant qu'il y aura sur la terre d'habiles rieurs. Les modes et les habillements changeront totij ours, mais non pas celles des bons contes et des bons mots qui se soustiennent d' eux mesmes,etqui sont en effetde bonnes choses. Ceux dePlaute et de Lucien, quelques vieux qu'ils soient, ne laissent pas de conserver la feu et la grace qu'ils avoient dans leur nouveaute.
M. ESTIENNE PASQT7IER, CONSEILLER DU ROY, AVOCAT
GENERAL EN SA CHAMBRE DES COMPTES A PARIS.
AU LIVRE DE SES RECHERCHES DE LA FRANCE.
JE mettray entre les poetes du mesme temps Francis
OF RABELAIS. 23
Rabelais : car combien qu'il ait e*crit en prose les fails heroiques de Gargantua et Pantagruel, il estoit mis au rang cles poetes, comme 1'apprend la responce que Marot fit & Sagon sous le nom de Fripelipes son Valet :
Je ne voy point qu'un Saint Gelais,
Un Heroet, un Rabelais,
Un Brodeau, un Seve, un Chapuy.
Voisent escrivant centre luy.
Aux gayetez qu'il mit en lumiere, se mocquant de toute chose il se rendit le nompareil ! De ma part je recognoitray franchement avoir 1'esprit si folastre, que je ne me lassay jamais de le lire, et ne le leu jamais que je n'y trouvasse matiere de rire, et d'en faire mon profit tout ensemble.
COLERIDGE.
BEYOND a doubt Rabelais was among the deepest, as well as boldest, thinkers of his age. His buffoonery was not merely Brutus's rough stick, which contained a rod of gold : it was necessary as an amulet against the monks and legates. Never was there a more plausible, and seldom, I am persuad- ed, 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 show how fully he both knew and felt the danger in which he 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 truth, and nothing but the truth. I class Rabelais with the great cre- ative minds of the world, Shakspeare, Dante, Cervantes, &c.
THE
PREFACE,
WHEREIN IS GIVEN AN ACCOUNT OF THE DESIGN AND
NATURE OF THIS WORK, AND A KEY TO SOME
OF ITS MOST DIFFICULT PASSAGES.
THE History of Gargantua and Pantagruel has always been esteemed a master-piece of wit and learning, by the best judges of both. Even the most grave and reserved among the learned in many countries, but particularly in France, have thought it worthy to hold a place in their closets, and have passed many hours in private with that diverting and instructive companion. And as for those whose age and profession did not incline them to be reserved, all France can witness that there has been but few of them who could not be said to have their Rabelais almost by heart : since mirth could hardly be complete among those that love it, unless their good cheer were seasoned with some of Rabelais' s wit.
Fifty large editions of that book have not sufficed the world, and, though the language in which it is written be not easily understood now, by those who only converse with modern French books, yet it has been reprinted several times lately, in France and Holland, even in its antiquated style.
Indeed, some are of opinion that the odd and quaint terms used in that book, add not a little to the satisfaction which is found in its perusal ; but yet this can only be said of such of them as are understood ; and when a reader meets with many words that are unintelligible (I mean to him that makes it not his business to know the meaning of dark and obsolete expressions), the pleasure which what he under- stands yields him, is in a greater measure allayed by his disappointment ; of which we have instances when we read
PREFACE. 25
Chaucer, and other books, which we do not thoroughly understand.
Sir Thomas Urquhart has avoided that obscurity in this following translation of Rabelais, so that most English readers may now understand that author in our tongue, better than many of the French can do in theirs. To do Rabelais justice, it was necessary that a person, not only master of the French, but also of much leisure and fancy, should undertake the task. The translator was not only happy in these things, but also in being a learned physician, and having, besides, some Frenchmen near him, who under- stood Rabelais very well, and could explain to him the most difficult words ; and I think that, before the first and second books of Rabelais, which are all that was formerly printed of that author in English, there were some verses by men of that nation in praise of his translation.
It was too kindly received, not to have encouraged him to English the remaining three books, or at least the Third — the Fourth and Fifth being in a manner distinct, as being Pantagruel's Voyage. Accordingly he translated the Third Book, and probably would have finished the whole had not death prevented him. So, the said Third Book, being found long after in manuscript among his papers, some what incorrect, a gentleman who is not only a very great linguist, but also de- servedly famous for his ingenious and learned compositions, was lately pleased to revise it, as well as the two first, which had been published about thirty years ago, and are extremely scarce. He thought it necessary to make considerable alter- rations, that the translation might have the smartness, genuine sense, and the very style and air of the original ; but yet, to preserve the latter, he has not thought fit to alter the style of the translation, which suits as exactly with that of the author as possible, neither affecting the politeness of the most nice and refined of our modern English writers, nor yet the roughness of our antiquated authors, but such a me- dium as might neither shock the ears of the first, nor dis- please those who would have an exact imitation of the style of Rabelais.
Since the first edition of those two books of Rabelais was so favourably entertained, without the third, without any ac- count of the author, or any observations to discover that
26
PREFACE.
mysterious history ; it is hoped that they will not meet with a worse usage, now they appear again so much improved, with the addition of a third, never printed before in English, andalarge account of the author's life; but principally since we have here an explication of the enigmatic sense of part of that admirable mythologist's works, both of which have been so long wanted, though never till now published in any language.
THE ingenious of our age, as well as those who lived when Rabelais composed his Gargantua and Pantagruel, have been extremely desirous of discovering the truths which are hid under the dark veil of allegories in that incomparable work. The great Thuanus found it worthy of being men- tioned in his excellent history, as a most ingenious satire on persons who were the most distinguished in the kingdom of France by their quality and employments ; and without doubt he, who was the best of all our modern historians, and lived soon after it was writ, had traced the private design of Rabelais, and found out the true names of the persons whom he has introduced on this scene, with names, not only imagi- nary, but generally ridiculous, and whose actions he repre- sents as ridiculous as those names. But as it would have been dangerous, having unmasked those persons, to have exposed them to public view, in a kingdom where they were so powerful ; and as most of the adventures, which are mystically represented by Rabelais, relate to the affairs of religion, so those few who have understood the true sense of that satire, have not dared to reveal it.
In the late editions, some learned men have given us a vocabulary, wherein they explain the names and terms in it which are originally Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or of other tongues, that the text might thus be made more intelligible, and their work may be useful to those who do not understand those tongues. But they have not had the same success in their pretended explications of the names which Rabelais has given to the real actors in this farce ; and thus they have, indeed, framed a key, but, if I may use the allegory, it was without having known the wards and springs of the lock. What I advance will doubtless be owned to be true by those who may have observed that by that key, none can discover in those Pythagorical symbols (as they are called in
PREFACE. 27
the author's prologue to the first book) any event that has a relation to the history of those to whom the names, men- tioned by Rabelais, have been applied by those that made that pretended key. They tell us in it, that King Grangou- sier is the same as King Louis XII. of France, that Gargan- tua is Francis I. and that Henry II. is the true name of Pantagruel ; but we discover none of Louis XII. 's features in King Grangousier, who does none of the actions which history ascribes to that prince, so that the King of Siam, or the Cham of Tartary, might as reasonably be imagined to be Grangousier, as Louis XII. As much may be said of Gar- gantua and of Pantagruel, who do none of the things that have been remarked by historians as done by the Kings Francis I. and Henry II. of France.
This reason, which of itself is very strong, will much more appear to be such, if we reflect on the author's words in the Prologue to the first Book : " In the perusal of this treatise," says he, " you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose to you the most glorious doctrine, and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state and life economical ;" mys- teries which, as he tells us, are the juice and substantial n\arrow of his work. To this reason I add another as strong and evident. It is, that we find in Grangousier, Gargantua, ancl Pantagruel, characters that visibly distinguish them from the three Kings of France which I have named, and from all the other kings their predecessors.
In the first place, Grangousier's kingdom is not France, but a state particularly distinct from it, which Gargantua and Pantagruel call Utopia.
Secondly, Gargantua is not born in the kingdom of France, but in that of Utopia.
Thirdly, he leaves Paris, called back by his father, that he might come to the relief of his country, which was attacked by Picrochole's army.
And, finally, Francis I. is distinguished from Gargantua, in the 39th chapter of the first book, when Friar John des Entoumeures says, in the presence of Gargantua, and eating at his table, " Had I been in the time of Jesus Christ, I would have kept him from being taken by the Jews in the garden of
28 PREFACE.
Olivet, and the devil fail me, if I should have failed to cut off the hams of those gentlemen apostles, who ran away so basely after they had well supped, and left their good master in the lurch ; I hate that man worse than poison that offers to run away when he should fight and lay stoutly about him. Oh, if I were but King of France for fourscore or a hundred years, by God, I should whip, like cut-tail dogs, these runa- ways of Pavia : a plague take them," &c.
But if Francis I. is not Gargantua, likewise Pantagruel is not Henry II., and if it were needful, I could easily show, that the authors of that pretended key have not only been mistaken in those names, but in all the others, which they undertook to decipher, and that they only spoke at random, without the least grounds or authorities from history.
All things are right so far ; but the difficulty lieth not there : we ought to show who are the princes that are hid under the names of Grangousier, Gargantua, and Pantagruel, if yet we may suppose them to be princes. But such a dis- covery cannot be very easily made, because most of their actions are only described in allegories, and in so confused and enigmatic a manner, that we do not know where to fix. This must be granted ; yet it is not an impossible thing ; and if we can but once unmask Panurge, who is the ri- diculous hero of the piece, we may soon guess by the servant, and the air and figure of his master, who Pantagruel is.
We find these four characters in Panurge.
1. He is well skilled in the Greek, Hebrew, and Latin tongues ; he speaks High and Low Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Latin, See.
2. He is learned, understanding:, politic, sharrj, cuaaing, and deceitful in the highest degree.
3. He publicly professes the Popish religion, though he in reality laughs at it, and is nothing less than a papist.
4. His chief concern, next to that of eating, is a marriage, which he has a desire, yet is afraid to contract, lest he should meet with his match : that is, a wife even as bad as himself.
I do not know if those who, by the pretended key, have been induced to believe that Panurge was the Cardinal of Amboise in a disguise, have been pleased to observe these four qualities ; but I am sure that nothing of all this can be
PREFACE. 29
applied to that prelate, unless it be, that in general he was an able minister of state. But all four were found in John de Montluc, Bishop of Valence and Die, who was the eldest brother of the Marshal de Montluc, the most violent enemy which the Huguenots had in those days.
1. Historians assure us1, that he understood the Eastern tongues, as also the Greek and the Latin, the best of any man in his time ; and in sixteen embassies to many princes of Europe, to whom he was sent, in Germany, England, Scotland Poland, Constantinople, he doubtless learned the living tongues, which he did not know before.
2. He gained a great reputation in all those embassies, and his wit, his skill, his penetration, and his prudence, in ob- serving a conduct that contented all persons, were univers- ally admired. But he even outdid himself in the most diffi- cult of all those embassies, which was that of Poland, to the throne of which kingdom he caused Henry de Valois, Duke of Anjou, to be raised, in spite of the difficulties, which the msssacre of Paris, that was wholly laid to his charge in Poland (he having been one of the chief promoters of it), created concerning his election. His toils and his happy success, in those important negotiations, caused him to take this Latin verse for his motto —
Qnae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ?
3. The whole kingdom of France, and particularly the court, knew that he was a Calvinist, and he himself did not make a mystery of it, as appears by his preaching their doc- trine once before the queen in a hat and cloak, after the manner of the Calvinists, which caused the Constable de Montmorency to say aloud, " Why do not they pull that mi- nister out of the pulpit?" Nay, he was even condemned by Pius IV. as a heretic, but that pope having not assigned him judges in partibus, according to the laws of the kingdom, he kept his bishopric ; and the Dean of Valence, who had accused him of being a Calvinist, not being well able to make good his charge, Montluc, who had mighty friends, caused him to be punished for it ; also, after his death, his contract of marriage with a gentlewoman called Anne Mar- tin was found, yet he still kept in the Roman church, and
1 Brantosme. Beza Hist. Eccles. z Brantosme. Dupleix.
Sponde. Maimbourg. Beza.
30 PREFACE.
still enjoyed the revenues of his bishopric, as if he had been the most bigotted papist in that kingdom. The considera- tions that kept him from abjuring solemnly the errors of the church of Rome,were, that Calvin let him know, that accord- ing to his reformation there could he no bishops ; he owned that this obstacle would not, perhaps, have hindered him from leaving that communion, could his kitchen have followed him in the other ; excepting that particular, he was altogether for a reformation, and in all things favoured its professors, and it is what Rabelais has observed, when he makes him conclude all his discourses in many languages with saying, that "Venter famelicus auriculis carere dicitur :3 at this time, I am in a very urgent necessity to feed, my teeth are sharp, my belly empty, my throat dry, and my stomach fierce and burning; all is ready. If you will but set me to work, it will be as good as a balsamum for sore eyes, to see me gulch and raven it. For God's sake give order for it."
4. His chief concern, next to that of living plentifully, was that of his marriage, and as we have observed, he married, and had a son whom he owned, and who was afterwards legi- timated by the parliament; it is the same who is famous in history by the name of Balagny, and who was afterwards Prince of Cambray ; his father caused him to be sent into Po- land, about the Duke of Anjou's election, of which we have spoke, and he was very serviceable to that duke in it. Now, it is that marriage of the Bishop of Valence, that so much perplexes him by the name of Panurge, in Rabelais 's third book, and which is the occasion of Pantagruel's voyage to the Holy Bottle in the fourth and fifth.
It is much to be admired how a bishop, that openly sided with the Calvinists, who was also a monk, yet married, and living with his wife, whom he had regularly wedded, could enjoy one of the best bishoprics in France, and some of the chief employments at court. He must doubtless have been extremely cunning, and have had a very particular talent to keep those envied posts in the church and state, in spite of all those disadvantages, in the midst of so many storms raised against him and the reformation, by enemies that had all the forces of the kingdom in their power, and could do whatever they pleased.
3 Book ii. chap. 9.
PREFACE. 31
This prudence and craftiness is described to the life by our author, when he makes Panurge relate how he had been broached upon a spit by the Turks, all larded like a rabbit, and in that manner was roasting alive; when calling on God that he might deliver him out of the pains wherein they de- tained him for his sincerity in the maintenance of his law, the turnspit fell asleep by the divine will ; and Panurge, having taken in his teeth a fire-brand by the end that was not burned, cast it in the lap of his roaster ; with another set the house on fire, broached on the spit the Turkish lord who designed to devour him, and at last got away, though pursued by a great number of dogs, who smelled his lecherous half- roasted flesh ; and he threw the bacon, with which he had been larded, among them.
It is observable, that there he exclaims against the Turks about their abstaining from wine, which, perhaps, may refer to the Church of Rome's denying the cup in the eucharist to the laity, at which particularly Montluc was offended. To lard a man is a metaphor often used by the French, to sig- nify, to accuse and reproach, and so he was even before he had his bishopric ; throwing a fire-brand with his mouth on the turnspit's lap, may be the hot words which he used to clear himself, and with which he charged his adversaries ; and his spitting and burning the Turkish lord may, perhaps, mean the advantage which he had over them 4. The specta- cles which afterwards he wore on his cap, may signify the caution which he was always obliged to take to avoid a sur- prise ; and his having a flea in his ear, in French, signifies the same 5. His forbearing to wear any longer his magnifi- cent cod-piece, and clothing himself in four French ells of a coarse brown russet cloth, show that, as he was a monk, he could not wear a cod-piece, as was the fashion in those days for the laity; or, perhaps, it denotes his affecting to imitate the simplicity of garb, which was observable in Calvinist preachers.
This subaltern hero of the farce, now found to be the
Bishop of Valence, by the circumstances and qualifications
already discovered, that cannot properly belong to any other,
may help us to know, not only Pantagruel, to whom he had
* Book iii. chap. 7. 6 La puce a 1'oreillo.
32 PREFACE.
devoted himself, but also Gargantua and Grangousier, the father and grandfather of Pantagruel.
History assures us, that Montluc, Bishop of Valence, owed his advancement to Margaret de Valois, Queen of Navarre, and sister to King Francis I. She took him out of a monas- tery, where he was no more than a jacobin friar, and sent him to Rome, whereby he was raised to the rank of an am- bassador, which was the first step to his advancement.
Thus Pantagruel should be Anthony de Bourbon, Duke of Vendosme, King Henry IV.'s father, and Louis XIV.'s great grandfather. He was married to Jeanne d'Albret, the only daughter of the said Queen Margaret, and of Henry d'Albret, king of Navarre. Thus he became their son, and King of Navarre, after the death of the said Henry d'Albret, whom I take to be Gargantua : consequently his father, John d'Albret, King of Navarre, excommunicated by Pope Julius III. and deprived of the best part of his kingdom by Ferdi- nand king of Arragon, should be Grangousier.
The verses before the third book (printed in 1546) discover, that Pantagruel is Anthony de Bourbon, afterwards King of Navarre. The author dedicates it to the soul of the deceased Queen of Navarre, Margaret de Valois, who died in Britanny, in the year 1549 (and was therefore living at the time the verses were published). She had openly professed the pro- testant religion ; and in 1534, her ministers, of whom the most famous were Girard Huffy (since Bishop of Qleron6 in Na- varre), Couraud and Berthaud, preached publicly at Paris by her direction, upon which a fierce persecution ensued. Her learning and the agreeableness of her temper were so extraor- dinary, as weU^her virtue, that she was styled the tenth Muse, and the fourth Grace. She has written several books ; parti- cularly one of poetry called Marguerite des Marguerites, and another in prose called the Hexameron or Les Nouvelles Nou- velles : of which novels some might in this age seem too free to be penned by a lady, but yet the reputation of her virtue has always been very great, which shows, that though in that age both sexes were less reserved in their writings than we are generally in this, they were not more remiss in their actions. Among many epitaphs, she was honoured with that which follows :
6 Hist, de Jean Crespin.
PREFACE. 33
Quae fuit exemplum ccelestis nobile formae
In quam tot laudes, tot coiere bona, Margareta sub hoc tegitur Valesia saxo. I, mine atque mori numina posse nega ?
that princess, that lerstood.
A, J.J.UJLJLV Cfcbl|U.ls XAJ.WAA XA U.Jll.l.i.J.XC^ L/VOOV
I thought fit to premise this concerning the following verses might be better unde:
FRANCOIS RABELAIS. A L'ESPRIT DE LA REINB DB NAVARRE. ESPRIT abstrait, ravy, et ecstatic, Q,ui, frequentant les cieux, ton origine, As delaisse ton hoste et domestic, Ton corps concords, qui tant se morigine, A tes edits, en vie peregrine, Sans sentiment, et comme en apathie ! Voudrois tu point faire quelque sortie De ton manoir divin, perpetuel ; Et $a bas voir une tierce partie Des faits joyeux du bon Pantagruel.
FRANCIS RABELAIS, TO THE SOUL OF THE QUEEN OF NAVARRB.
ABSTRACTED spirit, rapt with ecstasies,
Soul, now familiar in thy native skies ;
Who didst thy flight from thy weak mansion take,
And thy kind mate, thy other self, forsake ;
Who, by thy rules himself so wisely guides,
And here, as in a foreign world, resides
From sense of its fantastic pleasures free,
Since thou his soul art fled, in apathy !
Would'st thou not leave a while the heavenly plain,
And with thy presence grace our world again,
To see this book, where a third part I tell.
Of the rare deeds of good Pantagruel.
This corps concords, this conjugate body, that grows so conformable to that queen's rules, and leads the life of a tra- veller, who only desires to arrive at his journey's end, being as it were in apathy : what should it be but Henry d'Albret, who had survived that queen, his consort, and could love nothing after her in this vor d, endeavouring at the same time to wean himself from its vanities, to aspire to a better,
YOL. t. D
34 PBEFACE.
according to that wise princess's pious admonitions ? Nor can the good Pantagruel be any other than Anthony de Bour- bon, whom we have already named.
To this proof I add another, which admits of no reply ; it is, that the language, which Pantagruel owns to be that of Utopia and his country, is the same that is spoken in the provinces of Beam and Gascony, the first of which was yet enjoyed by the King of Navarre. Panurge having spoken to him in that language, " Methinks I understand him," said Pantagruel ; " for either it is the language of my country of Utopia, or it sounds very much like it."7 Now those who are acquainted with the different dialects of the French tongue, need but read to find that Panurge had spoken in that of Gascony. " Agonou dont oussys vous desdaignez algarou" &c.
Besides, Gargantua, who is King of Utopia, is said to be born in a state near the Bibarois, by which the author, per- haps, does not only allude to bibere (drinking,) but to Bigorre, a province, which was still possessed by the King of Navarre, or at least to the Vivarez, which may be reckoned among the provinces that are not far distant from that of Foix, which also belonged to that king, his mother being Catherine de Foix. That in which Gargantua was born is Beusse, which, though it also alludes to drinking, yet, by the transmutation of B into V (generally made by those nations as well as by many others), seems to be the ancient name of Albret, viz., Vasates. I might add, that Grangousier is described as one that was well furnished with hams of Bayonne, sausages of Bigorre and Rouargue, &c.,8 but none of Bolognia ; for he feared the Lombard Boconne (or poisoned bit, the pope being indeed his enemy). We are told that he could not endure the Spaniards ;9 and mention is made also by Grangousier of the wine that grows, " not," says he, " in Brittany, but in this good country of Verron," which seems to be Beam.10 I might instance more of this ; but as I know how little we ought to .rely upon likeness of names to find out places and colonies, I will only insist upon the word Utopia, which is the name of Grangousier' s kingdom, and by which the author means Navarre, of which Gargantua was properly only titular king, the best part of that kingdom, with Pampelune,
7 Book ii. chap. 9. 8 Book i. chap. 3. 9 Book i. chap. 8. 10 Book i. chap 13.
PHKFACE. 35
its capital city, being in the king of Spain's hands : so that state was, as it were no more on earth, as to any benefit he enjoyed by it ; and it is what the word Utopia, from ov and rdcro^ signifies, viz., what is not found, or a place not to be found. We have, therefore, here four actors in the Panta- gruelian farce, three Kings of Navarre and the Bishop of Va- lence bred up and raised in that house : we might add two persona mutte, Catherine de Foix, Queen of Navarre, married to John d'Albret ; and she, therefore, should be Gargamelle, as Margaret de Valois, married to his son, Henry King of Navarre, should be Badebec.
Picrochole is doubtless the King of Spain, who deprived John d'Albret of that part of Navarre which is on the side of the Pyrenean mountains that is next to Spain. This ap- pears by the name of Picrochole, and by the universal monarchy of which he thought himself secure.
The word Picrochole is made up of two crttpoc bitter, and xo\j) choler, bile, or gall, to denote the temper of that king, who was nothing but bitterness and gall. This doubly fits Charles V. ; first with relation to Francis I., against whom he con- ceived an immortal hatred ; and to Henry d'Albret, whose kingdom he possessed, and whom he lulled with the hopes of a restitution which he never designed ; which was one of the chief causes of the war that was kindled between that king and the Emperor Charles V., which lasted during both their reigns. Besides, Charles V. was troubled from time to time with an overflowing of bile ; so that finding himself de- caying, and not likely to live much longer, after he had raised the siege of Mets, as he had done that of Marseilles before, being commonly as unfortunate as his generals were success- ful, he shut himself up in a monastery, where that distemper was the chief cause of his death. The hope of universal monarchy, with which that emperor flattered himself, was a chimera that possessed his mind till he resigned his crown, and which he seemed to have assigned with it to Philip II. his son and successor.
This phrensy, which in his thirst of empire possessed him wholly, is very pleasantly ridiculed by Rabelais.11 The Duke of Small-trash, the Earl of Swash-buckler, and Captain Durtail, make Picrochole (in Rodomontade) conquer all the
11 Book i. chap. 33.
D2
38 PREFACE.
nations in the universe. I suppose that our satirist means by these three, some grandees of Spain ; for their king, Picrochole bids them be covered. After many imaginary victories, they speak of erecting two pillars to perpetuate his memory, at the Straits of Gibraltar ; by which he ridicules Charles V.'s devise, which was two pillars, with plus ultra for the motto. Then they make him go to Tunis and Algiers (which Charles V. did), march to Rome, and cause the pope to die with fear ; whereat Picrochole is pleased, because he will not then kiss his pantoufle, and longs to be at Loretto. Accordingly we know that, in 1527, his army had taken Home by storm, plundered it and its churches, ravished the nuns, if any would be ravished, and having almost starved the pope, at last took him prisoner ; which actions of a catholic king's army, Sandoval, a Spanish author, only terms Opera non santa. Then Picrochole, fancying himself master already of so many nations, most royally gratifies those who so easily made him conquer them ; to this he gives Caraina- nia, Suria to that, and Palestine to the third ; till at last a wise old officer speaks to him much as Cyneas did to Pyrrhus, and with as little success as that philosopher.
As it was not our author's design to give us a regular his- tory of all that happened in this time, he did not tie himself up to chronology, and sometimes joined events which have but little relation to each other. Many times also the charac- ters are double, as perhaps is that of Picrochole. In the Menagiana, lately published, which is a collection of sayings, repartees, and observations by the learned Menage, every one of them attested by men of learning and credit, we are told that Messieurs de Sainte Marthe assured him that the Picrochole of Rabelais was their grandfather, who was a physician at Frontevraut. These M. de St. Marthe are the worthy sons of the famous Samarthanus, who gave so high a character of Rabelais among the most celebrated men of France, and who themselves have honoured his letters with large notes, and showed all the marks of the greatest respect for his memory ; so that I am apt to believe that they would not fix such a character on their grandfather, had there not been some grounds for it. Much less would they have said this to Monsieur Menage, who doubtless understood Rabelais very well ; since I find, by the catalogue of his works in
PREFACE. 37
manuscript, that he has written a book of observations on Rabelais, which I wish were printed, for they doubtless must be very curious : no less ought to be expected from that learned author of the Origines de la Langue Franchise, and of the Origini della Lingua Italiana, as also of the curious ob- servations on the Aminta of Tasso, not to speak of his Diogenes Laertius, and many others. As he was most skilled in etymologies, and a man of the greatest reading and memory in France, he had doubtless made too many dis- coveries in our author, to have believed what Messieurs Sainte Marthe said to him, were there not some grounds for it. We may, then, suppose that Rabelais had the wit so to describe pleasant incidents that passed amongst men of learning, or his neighbours in or near Chinon, as that, at the same time, some great action in church or state should be represented or satirized ; just as Monsieur de Benserade, in his verses for the solemn masks at the French court, has made his king, representing Jupiter, say what equally might be said of that heathen god, or of that monarch.
Thus the Astrea of the Lord d'Urfe, which has charmed all the ingenious of both sexes, and is still the admiration of the most knowing, merely as a romance, has been discovered, long ago, by some few, to have throughout it a foundation of truth : but, as it only contains the private amours of some persons of the first quality of that kingdom, and even those of its noble author, he had so disguised the truths which he describes, that few had the double pleasure of seeing them reconciled to the outward fictions; till, among the works of the greatest orator of his time, the late Monsieur Patru,18 of the French Academy, they had a key to a part of that incomparable pastoral, which he says he had from its author : and none that have known Patru, or read his works, or Boi- leau's, will have any reason to doubt of what he says. He tells us, that the author of Astrea, to make his truths more agreeable, has interwoven them with mere fictions, which yet are generally only the veils that hide some truths, which might otherwise not so properly appear in such a work ; sometimes he gives us a part of the chief intrigues of a person, such actions as that person transacted at another time, or on another occasion ; and, on the other hand, he 12 QEuvres De. de Patru, v. 2, 1692.
38 PREFACE.
sometimes divides one history, so that under different names still he means but one person: thus Diana and Astrea, Ce- ladon and Silvander, are the same.
We ought not to forget that Barclay, in his Argenis, which is the history of France in Henry IV.'s time, does the same ; Polyarchus and Archombrotus being but one.
As in Astrea, when two lovers marry, the author only means that they love each other, so when, in ours, Panurge desires to marry, and consults about it, we may suppose him already married, and afraid of being prosecuted about it.
And if our author has changed the places and order of times, and set before what should go after, and that last which should have been first, it is no more than what the judicious Patru allows to his, " as a thing," says he, " that is always used in all those sorts of works ;" and thus he makes that last but six months, which held out fifteen years ; and with him Chartres, in France, and Malta, are but one.
Rabelais, who had more reason to write mystically than any, may then be allowed equal freedom in his allegories ; and with- out fixing only the character of Picrochole on Charles V., we may believe that it refers as well to his predecessor, Ferdi- nand, King of Arragon and of Castile, by Queen Isabella, his wife, that deprived John d' Albret of his kingdom of Navarre ; for that Spaniard was as bitter an enemy, as cunning, and at least as fatal to the house of Navarre as his successor.
John d' Albret was an open-hearted, magnificent, generous prince, but easy, and relying wholly on his ministers ; being given to his pleasures, which often consisted in going pri- vately to eat and drink with his subjects, and inviting him- self to their houses ; however, he loved books, and was a great lover of heraldry, nicely observing the pedigrees, coats and badges of honour of families, which perhaps makes Rabelais open his scene with referring us to the great Pan- tagruelian Chronicle (by which he begins his second book) for the knowledge of that genealogy and antiquity of race by which Gargantua is descended to us, how the giants were born in this world, and how from them, by a direct line, issued Gargantua : then he bids us not to take it ill, if he for the present passes it by, though the subject be such, that the oftener it were remembered, the more it will please your worships; by which he exposes that prince's and some gentle-
PBEFACE. 39
men's continual application to a vain search into the dark and fabulous times for pedigrees, as Rabelais says, from the giants ; for many would be derived from something greater than man. Then he makes his kings giants, because they are so in power ; and sometimes what serves the whole court and attendants is by him applied wholly to the king, as eat- ing, clothing, strength : and then by that he ridicules the ro- mances of those days, where giants are always brought in, as well as magicians, witches, single men routing whole armies, and a thousand other such fabulous stories. He has also ridiculed the variety of doubtful though ancient originals, in the odd discovery of the manuscript ; and, in the 9th chapter, the distinction of colours and liveries, which took up that prince's time, due to higher employments, as worthily as the rest of heraldry. There he tells us that Gargantua's colours or liveries were white and blue ; by which his father would give to understand, that his son was to him a heavenly joy. Thence, with as much fancy as judgment, he takes an opportunity to laugh at the lame and punning devices or impresses of those days, in which, how- ever, Paulus Jovius had already given rules to make better ; yet, after all, I believe that by Gargantua's colours, Rabelais also alludes to King Henry d'Albret, and Marguerite his queen, who were sincerely for a reformation ; so the white may signify innocence, candour, and sincerity ; and the blue, piety or heavenly love. Perhaps also as Godefroy d'Estisac,13 Bishop of Maillezais, in his coat, gave paled, argent and azure of six pieces, he had a mind to celebrate th'e colours of his patron.
The account of Gargantua's youthful age, chap. 11, agrees very well with that which historians give us of the way of bringing up Henry IV. of France, by his grandfather, Henry d'Albret, who is the same with Gargantua.14 That great monarch was in his tender age inured by that old prince to all sorts of hardships, for he caused him to be kept in the country, where he ordered they should let him run among the poor country boys, which the young prince did, some- times without shoes or hat, being fed with the coarsest fare ; so that, having by those means contracted a good habit of body, he was afterwards so hardened to fatigues, so vigilant 1J Epist. de Rabelais. " Mezeray. Hardouin de Prefix. H ist. Henry IV.
40 PREFACE.
and active, and so easily pleased with the most homely diet, that it did not a little contribute to the advantage which he had over the league, whose chief, the Duke de Mayenne, was of a disposition altogether different. Now it is very probable that Henry d'Albret was himself brought up much after the manner which he chose for his grandson ; for we read that he was not only an ingenious and understanding prince, generous and liberal even to magnificence, but also very warlike and hardy.
/ The education of Gargantua by the sophisters, is a satire on those men,15 and the tedious methods of the schools, showing the little improvement that was made in Henry d'Albret's studies as long as he was under Popish governors, and the ill life that the young gentlemen of the Roman church led ; as, on the contrary, the benefit of having good tutors, and the difference between the Romans and the Pro- testants,16 carefully and piously educated at the dawn of the reformation ; for there is no doubt that, though Henry d'Albret did not dare to profess it, the people in Navarre being all papists, and there being obstacles enough to the recovery of that kingdom, lost by his father, without raising more, yet he heartily hated the popish principles, and the King of Arragon and Castile, who, merely on the pretence of John d'Albret's alliance with Louis XII., at the time of his excommunication, had seized his country, and held it by the pope's gift ; so we find that the reformers no sooner preached against bulls and indulgences, the taking away the cup in the eucharist, and transubstantiation, but that Marguerite, the wife of King Henry d'Albret, and sister to Francis I., owned herself to be one of the new opinion, and as power- fully defended its professors as she could. Any one may see, by the two chapters of Gargantua's education by Ponocrates, that the author treats of a protestant prince, and of Gargan- tua's being brought to a reformed state of life : for he says, that when Ponocrates knew Gargantua's vicious manner of living, he resolved to bring him up in a much different way, and requested a learned physician of that time, called Master Theodorus, seriously to prepend how to bring him to a better course : he says, that the said physician purged him canoni- cally, with anticyrian hellebore, by which medicine he cleared 15 Book i. ch. 21. 16 Book i. ch. 23.
PREFACE. 41
all that foulness and perverse habit of his brain, and by this means Ponocrates made him forget all that he had learned under his ancient preceptors. Theodorus is a very proper name for a divine, signifying " gift of God," from $t£ and S&pov, and that great master of thought, Father Malebranche, gives it to the divine who is one of the interlocutors in the ad- mirable metaphysical dialogues, which he calls Conversations Chrestiennes ; so that, as Rabelais tells us, Theodorus was a physician for the mind, that is, one of the new preachers, and perhaps Berthaud, that of Queen Marguerite.
By the anticyrian hellebore,17 with which he purged Gar- £ gantua's brain, may be meant, powerful arguments, drawn from reason and the scripture, opposed to the authority of the popish church. After this purge we find Gargantua awak'd at four in the morning, and, while they were rubbing him, some chapter of the holy scripture aloud, and clearly, with a pronunciation fit for the matter, read to him, and, ac- cording to the purpose and argument of that lesson, often- times giving himself to worship, adore, pray, and send up his supplications to that good God, whose word did show his majesty and marvellous judgment. That chapter and the next are admirable, as well as many more ; nor can we ever have a more perfect idea of the education of a prince, than is that of his Gargantua, whom he represents all along as a man of great honour, sense, courage, and piety ; whereas under his other masters, in the chapters before, we find him idle, and playing at all sorts of games. Nothing can better demonstrate the great genius and prudence of our author, who could submit to get together so many odd names of trifling things, to keep himself out of danger, and grace the counterpart which is so judicious and so grave. He had told us first, that Gargantua, under his former pedagogues, after a good breakfast, went to church, a huge greasy bre- viary being carried before him in a great basket ; that there he heard twenty-six or thirty masses ; that this while came his matin-mumbler (chaplain) muffled about the chin (that is, with his cowl), round as a hoop, and his breath pretty well antidoted with the vine-tree syrup ; that with him he mumbled all his kyriels, and, as he went from the church, sauntering along through the cloisters, ridded more of St. 17 AvTiKvpia, potestas, apud Suidam.
42 PREFACE.
Claude's pater-nosters tlian sixteen hermits could have done. So that there we find him a papist, and in the following chapter, as I have said, a protestant.
Without doubt, the sophisters, under whom Gargantua 1S did not improve, were some noted men in his age. I have not yet discovered who they were.
As for Don Philip of Marais, Viceroy of Papeligosse,19 who advises Grangousier to put his son under another disci- pline, he may perhaps be Philip, son to the Mareschal of Navarre ; the title of Don being taken by the Navarrois, and Marais seems Mareschal.
Gargantua is sent with Ponocrates to Paris by his father, " that they might know," says he, " what was the study of the young men in France."20 This shows that Grangousier was not king of it, and that Gargantua was a stranger there.
Many who take him to be Francis I. think that his huge great mare is Madame d'Estampes, that king's mistress, and explain that mare's skirmishing with her tail, whereby she overthrew all the wood in the county of Beauce, by a gift which, they say, he made her of some of its forests. They say also that the king was desirous to buy her a necklace of pearls, and that, partly on that account, he would have got some money of the citizens of Paris ; but they being unwill- ing to comply with his demand, the king and his mistress threatened to sell the bells of our lady's church (the cathe- dral) to buy his lady a necklace ; and that this has given occasion to say, that Gargantua designed to hang those bells at his mare's neck.21
Though, as I have said, Gargantua be not Francis I. I might believe that Rabelais had a mind to make us merry with the recital of such an adventure, were it not certain that the said king had read his book, and would hardly have liked such a passage, had he been himself an actor there; but, besides, history relates nothing of this nature of him, nor has the story of the bells the resemblance of truth.
As for the blow with the mare's tail, it might as well be- long to Henry d'Albret, who had not lived without a mis- tress. Had I been able to get some certain books, and had the bookseller not been impatient, by reason of the term, I
" Book i. ch. 14. 19 Book i. ch. 15. 2° Ch. 15 and 16. 21 Book i. ch. 17.
PREFACE. 43
would have done my endeavour to unriddle that enigma ; but, having hardly a fortnight's time to make my observa- tions, and finish the author's life and this preface, I must put off that inquiry till some other opportunity, and then what farther discoveries I may make may be published with those on the fourth and fifth books, which contain Pantagruel's Voyage to the Holy Bottle, as beautiful at least as these three.
I will, however, offer here a conjecture on that story of the bells : we find, in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nine- teenth chapters of the first book, that Master Janotus de Bragmardo, a sophister, is sent to Gargantua to recover the bells, and makes a wretched speech to him about it : I am sensible that it was partly his design to ridicule the Univer- sities, which at that time deserved no better, in France. But in particular, I believe he aimed at Cenalis, a doctor of Sor. bonne, and afterwards Bishop of Arvanches ; for I find that this prelate had wrote a treatise, wonderfully pleasant,22 con- cerning the signs whereby the true church may be distin- guished from the false ; in it he waves the preaching of the gospel, and administration of the sacraments, and pretends to prove that bells are the signs which essentially distinguish the church of Rome from the reformed, who at that time had none, but used to assemble privately at the letting off of a musket in the High Street, which was a sign by which they knew that it was time to meet to perform divine service. Cenalis on this triumphs, as if he had gained his point, and runs on in a long antithesis, to prove that bells are the signs of the true church, and guns the mark of the bad. " All bells," says he, " sound ; but all guns thunder : all bells have a melodious sound ; all guns make a dreadful noise : bells open heaven ; guns open hell : bells drive away clouds and thunder ; guns raise clouds, and mock the thunder." He has a great deal more such stuff, to prove that the church of Rome is the true church, because, forsooth, it has bells, which the other had not.
The taking away the bells of a place implies its conquest,
and even towns that have articled are obliged to redeem their
bells : perhaps the taking away the great bells at Paris was
the taking away the privileges of its university, or some
22 Hist de Jean Crespin.
44 PBEFACE.
other ; for Paris may only be named for a blind. Thus the master beggar of the friars of St. Anthony, coming for some hog's purtenance (St. Anthony's hog is always pictured with a bell at his neck) who, to be heard afar off, and to make the bacon shake in the very chimnies, had a mind to filch and carry those bells away privily, but was hindered by their weight ; that master beggar, I say, must be the head of some monks, perhaps of that order in the Fauxbourg St. Antoine, who would have been substituted to those that had been deprived ; and the petition of Master Janotus is the pardon which the university begs, perhaps for some af- front resented by the prince ; for those that escaped the flood, cried, " We are washed Par m;" that is, for having laughed. Rabelais, en passant, there severely inveighs against the grumblers and factious spirits of Paris ; which makes me think that, whether the scene lies there or elsewhere, as in Gascony, some people of which country were Henry d'Al- bret's subjects, still this was a remarkable event. In the prologue to the fourth book, Jupiter, busied about the affairs of mankind, cries, " Here are the Gascons cursing, damning, and renouncing, demanding the re-establishment of their bells." I suppose that more is meant than bells, or he would not have used the word re-establishment.
But it is time to speak of the great strife and debate raised betwixt the cake-bakers of Lerne', and those of Gargantua's country ; whereupon were waged great wars.23 We may easily apply many things concerning these wars to those of Navarre, between the house of d'Albret, and King Ferdinand and Charles V. Thus Les Truans, or, as this translation renders it, the inhabitants of Lerne', who, by the command of Picrochole their king, invaded and plundered Utopia, Gargantua's country, are the Spanish soldiers, and Lerne is Spain. The word truand, in old French, signifies an idle lazy fellow, which hits pretty well the Spaniards' character ; the author having made choice of that name of a place near Chinon, because it alludes to the Lake Lerna, where Her- cules destroyed the Lernaean hydra, which did so much hurt in the country of Argos ; that thence came the proverb, \epvrj tcaicwv, malorum Lerna. Thus Spain was a Lerna of ills to all Europe, while, like France now, it aspired to uni- 23 Book i. ch 25.
PREFACE. 45
versal monarchy ; but it was so more particularly to Navarre, in July 1512, when King John d'Albret and Queen Catharine de Foix, the lawful sovereigns, were dispossessed by Ferdi- nand, King of Arragon, almost without any resistance. The said King John, desirous of peace, sent Don Alphonso Carillo, Constable of Navarre, in the quality of his ambassador, to Ferdinand, to prevent the approaching mischief; "But he was so ill received," says the History of Navarre,84 dedicated to King Henry IV. and printed with his privilege, " that he was glad to return to his king with speed, and related to him that there was no hope left to persuade the King of Arragon to a peace, and that Louis de Beaumont, Earl of Lerins, who had forsaken Navarre, daily encouraged Ferdinand to attack that kingdom." So that this embassy resembles much that of Ulric Gallet to Picrochole, who swears by St. James, the saint of the Spaniards. In November 1512, Francis Duke of Angouleme, afterwards king, was sent with King John d'Albret, by Lewis XII. to recover Navarre, having with him several of the great lords in France, and a great army, which possessed itself of many places, but the rigour of the season obliged them to raise the siege of Pampeluna. And in 1521, another army, under the command of Andrew de Foix, Lord of Asperault, entered Navarre, and wholly regained it,25 but it was lost again soon after by the imprudence of that gene- ral, and the avarice pf Saint Colombo, one of his chief officers.
Those that will narrowly examine history will find that many particulars of the wars, in the first of Rabelais, may be reconciled to those of Navarre ; but I believe that he means something more than a description of the fights among the soldiers, by the debate raised betwixt the cake-sellers or fouassiers of Lerne, and the shepherds of Gargantua. Those shepherds, or pastors, should be the Lutheran and Calvinist ministers, whom John and Henry d'Albret favoured, beir.g the more disposed to adhere to the reviving gospel which they preached, by the provoking remembrance of the Pope's and King of Spain's injurious usage ; and for that reason Queen Marguerite did not only profess the protestant reli-
24 Hist, de Navarre par C. Secretaire et Interpret, du Roy. v* Me- inoires de Martin du Bt-llay.
46 PfiEFACE.
gion, but, after the death of Henry d'Albret, Queen Jane, their daughter, married to Anthony de Bourbon, was a zeal- ous defender of it till she died ; and her son Henry, after- wards raised to the throne of France, publicly owned himself a protestant, till his impatient desire of being peaceably seated on it made him leave the better party to pacify the worse.
The cake-sellers of Lome" are the priests, and other eccle- siastics of Spain ; as also all the missificators, of the church of Rome. Rabelais calls them cake-mongers, or 'fouassiers, by reason of the host, or sacramental wafer, which is made of dough, between a pair of irons, like the cakes or fouasses in Poitou, where Rabelais lived, and is said to be transub- stantiated into Christ's body, when consecrated by the priest.
The subject of the debate, as Rabelais terms it, between those cake-sellers and the shepherds, is the first's refusal to supply the latter with cakes, to eat with the grapes which they watched. " For," as Rabelais observes, " it is a celes- tial food to eat for breakfast fresh cakes with grapes ;" by which he alludes to the way of receiving the communion among the protestants, who generally take that celestial food fasting, and always with the juice of the grape, that is, with wine, according to the evangelical institution. Now the cake-mongers, or popish priests, would not consent to give cakes, that is to say, bread, but would only give the acci- dents of the cakes, or, to speak in their own phrase, the accidents of the bread ; and it is well known that this was the chief occasion of our separation from the church of Rome.
Upon the reasonable request of the shepherds, the cake- sellers, instead of granting it, presently fell to railing and reviling, adding, after a whole litany of comical, though de- famatory epithets, that coarse, unraung'd bread, or some of the great brown household loaf, was good enough for such shepherds, meaning that the gross notions of transubstanti- ation ought to satisfy the vulgar. The shepherds reply modestly enough, and say that the others used formerly to let them have cakes, by which must be understood the times that preceded the doctrine of transubstantiation. Then Mar- quet, one of the cake-merchants, treacherously invites For- gier to come to him for cakes, but, instead of them, only
PREFACE. 47
gives him a swinging lash with his whip over thwart the legs, whereupon he is rewarded by the other with a broken pate, and falls down upon his mare, more like a dead than a living man, wholly unfit to strike another blow.
These two combatants are the controvertists of both parties ; the papist immediately begins to rail and abuse his adversary. The Lutheran confounds him in his replies, and, for a blow with a whip, treacherously given, very fairly dis- ables his enemy.
This is the judgment that Rabelais, a man of wit and learning, impartially passes on both parties. If any would seek a greater mystery in that grand debate, as Rabelais calls it, which term, I believe, he would hardly have used for a real fight, let them imagine that he there describes the con- ference at Reinburgh, where Melancthon, Bucer, and Pis- torius debated of religion against Eccius, Julius Pflug, and John Gropper, and handled them much as Forgier did Marquet.
But this exploit of Forgier being inconsiderable, if com- pared to those of Friar John des Entomeures, or of the fun- nels•, as some corruptly call him, we should endeavour to discover who is that brave monk that makes such rare work with those that took away the grapes of the vineyard. By the pretended key, which I think fit to give you after' this, since it will hardly make up a page, we are told that our Friar John is the Cardinal of Lorraine, brother to the Duke of Guise : but that conjecture is certainly groundless : for though the princes of his house were generally very brave, yet that cardinal never affected to show his courage in mar- tial achievements, and was never seen to girt himself for war, or to fight for the cause which he most espoused ; besides, had he been to have fought, it would have been for Picro- chole. It would be more reasonable to believe that Friar John is Odet de Coligny Cardinal de Chatillon, Archbishop of Tholouse, Bishop and Earl of Beauvais, Abbot of St. Benign, of Dijon, of Fleury, of Ferrieres, and of Vaux de Cernay : for that prelate was a man of courage, no ways inferior to his younger brothers, the* Admiral and the Lord d'Andelot.26 Besides, he was an enemy to Spain, and a
26 Vide Thuan. Samarthan. Ciacon. Du Bouchet. d'Aubigne, lib. 4. Sponde in Annal. Hist. Eccles. Beza. Petrameller.
48 PREFACE.
friend to Navarre ; then he was a protestant, and helped his brothers, doing great service to those of his party, and was married to Elizabeth de Hauteville, Dame de Thore*, a lady of great quality. Pope Pius IV. in a private consistory, de- prived him for adhering to his brothers, but he neither valu- ed the pope nor his censures ; he died in England in 1571, and lies interred in Canterbury Cathedral, having been made a Cardinal by Clement VII. at his and Francis I.'s interview at Marseilles in 1533. I own that what he did for the pro- testant cause was chiefly after the death of Rabelais, and that some have represented him as a man wholly given to his ease ; but Rabelais, whose best friend he was, knew his in- clinations even when he composed this work, which made him dedicate the fourth part of it to him ; and it is chiefly to that brave cardinal that we are obliged for that book and the last of this mysterious history ; 27 since, without the king's protection, which he obtained for Rabelais, he had resolved to write no more, as I have already observed. And for his being addicted to his pleasures, that exactly answers the name of his abbey of Theleme, of which those that are members do what they please, according to their only rule, Do what thou wilt, and to the name of the abbey, SeXijpa, Vo- luntas. Perhaps Rabelais had also a regard to S-JXa/ioc, which often signifies a nuptial chamber, to show that our valiant monk was married : thus the description of the abbey shows us a model of a society free from all the ties of others, yet more honest by the innate virtues of its members ; there- fore its inscription excludes all monks and friars, inviting in all those that expound the holy gospel faithfully, though others murmur against them. Indeed, I must confess that he makes his friar swear very much ; but this was to expose that vice, which, as well as many others, reigned among ecclesiastics in his age. Besides, the cardinal had been a soldier ; and the men of that profession were doubtless not more reserved then than they are now. I will give an in- stance of it that falls naturally into this subject, and is the more proper, being of one who was also a cardinal, a bishop, a lord, an abbot, married, a soldier, a friend to the house of Navarre, engaged in its wars, and who, perhaps, may come in for his share of Friar John. I speak this of Caesar Borgia, 27 Lib. 4, Epist. Dedicat.
PREFACE. 49
the son of Pope Alexander VI. who, having made his escape out of prison at Medina del Campo, came in 1506 to his brother-in-law, John d'Albret, King of Navarre. Being Bishop of Pampehma, its capital, he resigned it, as well as his cardinal's cap and other benefices, to lead a military life ; and, after many engagements in other countries, was killed, being with King John at the siege of the Castle of Viane, which held for Louis de Beaumont, Earl of Lerins, Con- stable of Navarre, who had rebelled against King John.28 That earl having thrown a convoy into the castle, Csesar Borgia, who desired to fight him at the head of his men, cried, " Oil est, oti est ce comtereau ? Je jure Dieu, qu'au- jourd'huy je le feray mourir oti le prendray prisonier : je ne cesseray jusqu'& ce qu'il soit entierement destruit, et ne par- donneray ny sauveray la vie & aucun des siens : tout passera par 1'epee jusqu'aux chiens et aux chats." — That is — " Where is, where is this pretty earl ? By G — I will this day kill or take him : I will not rest till I have wholly de- stroyed him : nor will I spare one creature that is his ; all to the very dogs and cats, shall die by the sword." It can- not be supposed that Rabelais drew his Friar John by this man, but it is not unlikely that he had a mind to bring him in, by giving some of his qualifications to his monk; for there is no doubt that our author made his characters double as much as he could, as if it were stowing three, and perhaps five, in the place of one, for want of room ; not altogether like an actor who plays three different parts in the same piece, nor like Scaramouch, who acts various parts in the same clothes, but like that pantomime in Lucian, who repre- sented several things at once, and was said to have five dif- ferent souls in one body. Thus, if Picrochole, besides the characters of King Ferdinand of Arragon, and of Charles V. includes that of Dr. de St. Marthe, of Frontevraut, as his grandsons said to Menagius, Brother John may also be some monk of the abbey where Rabelais had lived.
I presume to say more, though, as*all that I have said al- ready, I humbly offer it as bare and uncertain conjecture : why may we not suppose that our author has a mind to give us, after his manner, a sketch of the great Luther ? He was also a monk, and a jolly one too ; " being" as Rabelais 28 Hist, de Navarre,
VOL. i. E
in Germany. The prior,
: : v .. -_ — _
rt an o away te g hisoppoKis; and their
of ttsovDosers: and their bein^ out of order,
t
->_ -: 7rlir"-::.i-. ^1 -1:.
at the eouefl of Tent flie after the wine ia the enehamt, and that
'--• : - "- ^ -..:.-.-.- :: '^v to the laity. They «sed to hare the words of our Sarkmr,
i- i- . - - . -- _ - ••"-"-- - •'-_---•- — - --_'
of the
« they called them. They had abo a design to
tore of the c«p in all the churches of their
Tot tint cafices BdKSftcnni tena wr nfees, Ut^te lfa«M— i« Mfe «t
what is said%f Friar Join, chap. 41, 42, and 43, ewto beliere, that the »am who has the ol flbc •*•& tt ^^:
csTsos frotk, hwt fi» from it, we see Oat the fear kept
V--"-r: ^L.-i-.--. . ----- ---: ^^ -^: ^''-:-:-~- --'-•-. :..-
52 PKEFACE.
months ; then he talks of a friar that is become a hard stu- dent, then says, that for his part he studies not at all, justify- ing himself for this conduct in false Latin ; after this he abruptly starts a new matter, and lets his fancy run after hares, hawks, and hounds, and thus he goes on by sallies, and admirably humours the way of talking of the young court abbots in France. Now probably the cardinal, who did not set up for a man of learning, being of great quality, allowed himself liberty accordingly, making hunting one of his re- creations ; and indeed what Gargantua says concerning Friar John, in the next chapter,29 hits Cardinal Chatillon's charac- ter exactly : there having taxed most monks with mumbling out great store of legends and psalms, which they understand not at all, and interlarding many pater-nosters, with ten times as many ave-maries without thinking upon, or apprehending the meaning of what they say, which he calls mocking of God, and not prayers ; he says, " that all true Christians, in all places, and at all times, send up their prayers to God, and the spirit prayeth and intercedes for them, and God is gracious to them: now such a one," adds he, "is our Friar John, he is no bigot," &c.
What Grangousier says to the French pilgrims, shows that he was no bigot, and was not King of France ; when speaking of some superstitious preachers, one of whom had called him heretic, he adds, " I wonder that your king should suffer them in their sermons to publish such scandalous doctrine in his dominions. Then Friar John says to the pilgrims, that while they are thus upon their pilgrimage, the monks will have a fling at their wives. After that, Gran- gousier bids them not be so ready to undertake those idle and unprofitable journeys, but go home and live as St. Paul directs them, and then God will guard them from evils which they think to avoid by pilgrimages.
What has been observed puts it beyond all doubt, that our jesting author was indeed in earnest when he said, that he mystically treated of the most high sacraments, and dreadful secrets, in what concerns our religion. I know that immediately after this, he passes off with a banter, what he had assured very seriously ; but this was an admira- ble piece of prudence; and whoever will narrowly examine his 29 Book i. chap. 40.
PREFACE. 53
writings, will find, that this virtue is inseparably joined with his wit, so that his enemies never could have any advantage over him.
But not to comment upon several other places in his first book, that the ingenious may have the pleasure of unriddling the rest of it themselves, I will only add, that his manner of ending it is a master-piece surpassing the artful evasion, which, as I have now observed, is in its introduction.
It is an enigma, as indeed is the whole work : I could only have wished that it had been proper to have put it into a more modish dress (for then doubtless it would more gene- rally have pleased.) But I suppose that the gentleman, who revised this translation, thought it not fit to give the graces of our modern enigmas to the translation of a prophetical riddle in the style of Merlin. Gargantua piously fetches a very deep sigh, when he has heard it read, and says, that he per- ceives by it, that it is not now only that people called to the faith of the gospel are persecuted ; but happy is the man that shall not be scandalised, but shall always continue to the end, in aiming at the mark, which God by his dear Son has set before us, &c. Upon this the monk asks him, what he thought was signified by the riddle ? What ? says Gar- gantua, the decrease and propagation of the divine truth. That is not my exposition, says the monk, it is the style of the prophet Merlin ; make as many grave allegories and tropes as you will ; I can perceive no other meaning in it ; but a description of a set at tennis in dark and obscure terms. By this riddle, which he expounds, he cunningly seems to insinuate that all the rest of his book, which he has not ex- plained, wholly consists of trifles ; and what is most re- markable, is, that he illustrates the truths which he had con- cealed, by the very passages wherewith he pretends to make them pass for fables, and thus blinds, with too much light, those enemies of truth, who would not have failed to have burned him alive in that persecuting age, had he had less wit and prudence than they showed ignorance and malice.
I need not enlarge much on the other books, by reason of the discoveries made in the first that relate to them. The first chapter of the second gives us Pantagruel's pedigree from the giants : it has been observed by a learned man some years ago, that the word giant, which the interpreters
54 PEEFACE.
of the scripture have set in their versions, stands there for another, that means no more than prince in the Hebrew ; so perhaps our author was the more ready to make his princes giants, though, as I have said, his chief design was tacitly to censure, in this, John d'Albret and such others as (like one in Brittany, that took for his motto, Antequam Abraham esset, sum) were too proud of an uncertain empty name. His description of the original of giants, and the story of Hurtali's bestriding the ark, is to mock those in the Tal- mud and other legends of the Rabbins ; for he tells us, that when this happened, the calends were found in the Greek al- manacks, and all know that ad Graecas Calendas, is as much as to say never ; for the Greeks never reckoned by calends. Yet what he tells of the earth's fertility in medlars, after it had been imbrued with the blood of the just, may be allegorical ; and those who, by feeding on that fair large delicious fruit, became monstrous, may be the converts of that age, who, by the popish world, were looked upon as monsters. The blood of martyrs, which was profusely spilt in that age, has always been thought prolific even to a proverb; and the word mesles in French, and medlars in English, equally imports meddling. Thus in French, " II se mesle de nos affairs," he meddles with our business ; so the medlars may be those who busied themselves about the reformation.
The great drought at the birth of Pantagruel, is that almost universal cry of the laity for the restitution of the cup in the sacrament, at the time that Anthony de Bourbon Duke of Vendosme was married to the heiress of Navarre, which was in October 1548, the council of Trent then sitting. For thence we must date his birth, since by that match he after- wards gained the title of King, besides Beam, Bigorre, Albret, and several other territories ; and we are told, Book III. Chap. 48, that Pantagruel, at the very first minute of his birth, was no less tall than the herb Pantagruelian (which unquestionably is hemp); and a little before that, it is said, that its height is commonly of five or six feet. The death of Queen Marguerite, his mother-in-law, that soon followed, made our author say, that when Pantagruel was born, Gargan- tua was much perplexed, seeing his wife dead, at which he made many lamentations. Perhaps this also alludes to the birth of King Edward VI. which caused the death of his
PREFACE. 55
mother, Queen Jane Seymour. King Henry VIII. is said to have comforted himself, with saying, that he could get ano- ther wife, but was not sure to get another son. Thus, here we find Gargantua much grieved and joyful by fits, like Tal- boy in the play, but at last comforting himself with the thoughts of his wife's happiness and his own, in having a son, and saying, that he must now cast about how to get ano- ther wife, and will stay at home and rock his son.
In the 6th chapter, we find Pantagruel discoursing with a Limousin, who affected to speak in learned phrase. Rabe- lais had, in the foregoing chapter, satirized many persons, and given a hint of some abuses in the Universities of France ; in this he mocks some of the writers of that age, who, to ap- pear learned, wholly filled their works with Latin words, to which they gave a French inflection. But this pedantic jargon was more particularly affected by one Helisaine of Limoges, who, as Boileau says of Ronsard, en Fra^ois parlantGrec et Latin (speaking Greek and Latin in French), thought to have refined his mother tongue. So Rabelais, to prevent the spreading of that contagion, has not only brought that Limousin author on his Pantagruelian stage, but wrote a letter in verse, all in that style, in the name of the Limou- sin scholar, printed at the end of the Pantagruelian prognos- tication. Pasquier, who lived at that time, has made the like observation on that chapter, when in his second book of letters, p. 53, he says, " Pour 1'ornement de nostre langue, et nous aider mesmes du Grec et du Latin, non pour les eschorcher ineptement comme fit sur nostre jeune age, Heli- saine, dont nostre gentil Rabelais s'est mocque" fort k pro- pos en la personne de Pescolier Limosin qu'il introduct par- lant & Pantagruel en un language escorche' Latin.
The 7th chapter, wherein he gives a catalogue of the books in St. Victor's library, is admirable, and would require a large comment, it being a satire against many writers and great affairs in that age, as well as against those who either make collections of bad books, or seek no others in libra- ries ; but I have not leisure to read over a great number of books that ought to be consulted for such a task.
The cause which was pleaded before Pantagruel by the Lords Suck-fizie and Kiss-breech 30, seems to be a mock of 30 Book ii. chap. 10,11, 12, 13.
56 PREFACE.
the famous trial concerning two duchies, four counties, two viscounties, and many baronies, and lordships, to which Loyse de Savoye, the mother of Francis I. laid claim. Charles de Bourbon, Constable of France, was possessed of them; but because he had refused to marry her, she made use of some titles which she had to them to perplex him ; and though she could not, even with the king her son's favour, cast the con- stable, yet they were sequestered into the king's hands, and the final determination put off. Pasquier, in his Recherches, observes, that when Guillaume Poyet, afterwards chancellor, and Fra^ois de Monthelon, afterwards lord keeper, then the two most famous counsellors of the age, pleaded the cause ; the first for the plaintiff, the other for defendant, " They armed themselves with a pedantic jurisprudence borrowed from a parcel of Italian school boys, which some call doctors at law, true hatchers of law suits — such was the rhetoric of that time : and as it is easy to stray in a thick wood, so, with a confused heap of various quotations, instead of explaining the cause, they perplexed it, and filled it with darkness." Upon this, by the united voice of the people, the name of the plaintiff was owned to contain the truth of the case ; that is, Loyse de Savoye, Loy se des avoye — The law goes astray : which is perhaps the happiest anagram that ever was, for it is made without changing the order of the letters, and only by dividing the words otherwise than they are in the name. The 18th, 19th, and 20th chapters treat of a great scholar in England, who came to argue by signs with Pantagruel, and was overcome by Panurge. I do not well know on whom to fix the character of Thaumast that scholar, whose name may not only signify an admirer, but an admirable person, or one of those schoolmen, who follow the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, in opposition to that of Scotus : and I find as little reason to think, that any would have come to confer with Anthony de Bourbon of geomancy, philosophy, and the ca- balistic art. Indeed, Sir Thomas More went ambassador to Francis I. ; and Erasmus, who lived some time in Eng- land, also came to Paris ; but I cannot think that either may pass for the Thaumast of Rabelais. Perhaps he hath made him an Englishman, merely on purpose to disguise the story; and I would have had some thoughts of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa who came to France and died there ; but I will
PKEFACE. 57
prove, when I examine the third book, that he has brought him on the stage by the name of Her Trippa. So it is not impossible but that he may have meant Hieronoymus Cardan of Milan, who nourished in that age, and was another dark cabalistic author. The first has said, Occult. Philos. 1. i, c. 6, that he knew how to communicate his thoughts by the spe- cies of sight in a magical way, as Pythagoras was said to do, by writing any thing in the body of the moon, so as it should be legible to another at a vast distance ; and he pre- tends to tell us the method of it in his book, De Vanitate Scientiarum. Cardan also has writ concerning private ways of imparting our thoughts, Subtilit. 1, 17, and De Variet. Rerum, lib. 12; but these ways of signifying our thoughts by gestures, called by the learned Bishop Wilkins, Semaeo- f logy, are almost of infinite variety ; according as the several fancies of men shall impose significations upon such signs as are capable of sufficient difference. And the venerable Bede has made a book only of that, commonly styled Arthologia I or Dactylologia, which he calls Lib. de Loquela par Gestum ! Digitorum, sive de Indigitatione. So that perhaps our author / made his Thaumast an Englishman, not to reflect on Bede, but because that learned father is the most ancient and famous author that has written a book on that subject.
I have read of a public debate, much like that of Thaumast and Panurge, and as probable, said to have been held at Ge- neva. The aggressor lifted up his arm and closed three of his fingers and his thumb, and pointed with the remaining finger at his opponent; who immediately pointed at him again with two. Then the other showed him two fingers and one thumb ; whereupon his antagonist shook his closed fist at him. Upon this the aggressor showed him an apple; and the other looking into his pocket found a bit of bread, and in a scornful way let him see it ; which made him that begun the dispute yield himself vanquished. Now when the con- queror was desired to relate what their signs signified : he with whom I disputed, said he, threatened first to put out one of my eyes, and I gave him to understand that I would put out both his : then he threatened to tear both mine, and take off my nose ; upon which I showed him my fist, to let him know that I would knock him down : and as he per- ceived that I was angry, he offered me an apple to pacify me
58 PREFACE.
as they do children; but I showed him that I scorned his present, and that I had bread, which was fitter for a man.
After all, Montluc, who is our Panurge, may have had some dispute about the signs of the true religion, or the two sacraments of the protestants, and the seven of the Romans, they being properly called signs ; and such a thing not being recorded by historians, like many others that relate to this work, it may not be possible to discover it.
The Dipsodes,31 that had besieged the city of the Amau- rots, are the Flemings, and other subjects of the Emperor Charles V. that made inroads into Picardy, and the adjacent territories, of which Anthony of Bourbon was not only go- vernor, but had considerable lordships in those parts. The Flemings have always been brisk topers ; and for this reason are called Dipsodes, from St^do* sitio, Si-^wdrjQ thirsty: and he calls Picardy and Artois, the land of the Amaurots, from the word apavpoc obscurus or evanidus ; perhaps because they are in the north of France ; or that part of them were in the hands of the enemy. Terouenne may well be called now dpavpd, as that word is taken for being vanished and obliterated : for Charles V. utterly destroyed it. San- doval tells us, that the Spaniards took it by escalade ; that is, having scaled the walls; and that they flew over them like the swiftest and most towering birds. Yet, as he says that they went up with ladders, this must be reckoned a very odd way of flying.
In 1543,32 which was some years before that fine city was ruined, Anthony de Bourbon Duke of Vendosme, hearing that it was ill stored with provisions, assembled his army, and with Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Aumale, the Duke of Guise's eldest son, the Duke de Nevers, Marshal du Bitz, and several other lords, marched to its relief with good success ; having, in spite of the enemy, supplied the place with all manner of necessaries.
In the meantime, several of the lords and other officers in his camp used to skirmish ; and once particularly having long tried to draw the Flemings out, these at last engaged them. They were much more numerous, yet the French got the better, and cut off a great number of their enemies. This,
31 Book ii. chap. 23. 32 Mem. de Guil. de B allay.
PKEFACE. 59
perhaps, may be the victory which the gentlemen attendants of Pantagruel obtained over six hundred and threescore horsemen, chap. 25 : and a trophy was raised, chap. 27, for a memorial of those gentlemen's victory.
The next exploit is that in the 29th chapter, where we find how Pantagruel discomfited the three hundred giants armed with freestone, and Loupgarou, the^r captain. The death of Loupgarou, in the presence of his giants, may relate to the taking of Liliers, a town between Bapaume and Aire : it molested very much the country that belonged to the French, and was seated near a marsh ; yet notwithstanding the advan- tage of the season and its resolute garrison, the Duke of Vendosme, having caused a large breach to be made, and being ready to storm the place, the besieged desired to capi- tulate, and after many parleys, surrendered the town on dis- honourable terms.
By accident the ammunition of the besiegers had taken fire, and even some of the carriages of the artillery were burned ; which may perhaps have made our author say, in the foregoing chapter, that Carpalim having set on fire the enemy's ammunition, the flame having reached the place where was their artillery, he was in great danger of being burned ; or, perhaps, this alludes to the Duke of Vendosme's setting Liliers on fire, and destroying it quite, after he had taken it. For our author writes not like an historian, but like a poet, who ought not to be blamed for anachronisms ; nor have the best critics censured Virgil for that about Dido and ./Eneas, between the time of whose lives whole ages are reckoned by chronologists. However, it is certain, that the relief of Terouenne, and then the surrender of Liliers, were Anthony de Bourbon's two first exploits ; the one soon after the other. Then the 300 giants armed with freestone, which Pantagruel struck down like a mason, by breaking their stony armour, mowing them down with the dead body of Loupgarou, are a great number of castles about Liliers, Te- rouenne, Saint Omer, Aire, and Bethune, which Anthony of Bourbon demolished, immediately after he had taken Liliers, and then passed through Terouenne, which is the city of the Amaurots, which he went to relieve ; by whose inhabitants Pantagruel is so nobly received in the 31st. We may also suppose, that by King Anarchus, Rabelais means the plun-
60 PREFACE.
dering lawless boors that sheltered themselves in those castles, who were afterwards reduced to sell herbs. This is, Anarchus's being reduced to cry green sauce in a canvas jacket.
The Duke of Vendosme marched next, without any resist- ance, through the Upper Artois, took Bapaume in his way, which is doubtless the AJmyrods, called so from d\nvpwdr)Q1 Salsuginosus,33 or salted people, who resolved to hold out against Pantagruel ; yet only to have honourable conditions. It seems to me, that this is meant of the castle of that town, which held out against the duke only for terms ; all the in- habitants of the town having retired into that small place, where there was but one well, whose water had been alto- gether exhausted in two days (to which, perhaps, relates the salt which Pantagruel put into the mouths of his enemies), and they were ready to submit to mercy, with halters at their necks ; 34 but the king, who had already sent many ex- presses to the duke, ordering him to march to join him with all speed, and neither kTstop at Bapaume or any where else, sent him angrily fresh orders, wherein he charged him of his allegiance to join him that day at Chasteau in Cambrezis, on pain of incurring his displeasure. So the duke, to the great joy of the besieged, and his greater sorrow, raised his camp, and came to the king. Neither does our author speak of the surrender of the Almyrods ; but makes Pantagruel's forces be overtaken with a great shower of rain, and then tells us how Pantagruel covered a whole army with his tongue. For they began, says he, to shiver and tremble, to crowd, press, and thrust close to one another ; which when he saw, he bid his captains tell them, that it was nothing; however, that they should put themselves into order, and he would cover them ; and he drew out his tongue only half way, and co- vered them all. I find that the duke, before he took Liliers, and besieged the castle of Bapaume, sent to the king to de- sire him to send him a month's pay to his forces, and then he could take some frontier towns, and even Bapaume ; but the king sent him no money, and, on the contrary, ordered him to march on to meet him ; but before he had that an- swer, he had taken Liliers. So his soldiers, who wanted their pay and clothes, being also vexed for having, by the
33 Book ii. chap. 32. 34 Memoires de Guil. du Bellay, Liv. 10.
PREFA.CE. 61
king's fault, missed taking the booty in the castle of Ba- paume, were displeased, and in bad circumstances; but upon this the duke spoke to the king, and got them their arrears and clothes. And this is what Rabelais calls covering an army with his tongue. As for what follows, it seems an imitation of Lucian's whale in his true history ; as the news which Epistemon brings from hell, in the 30th chapter, is also a copy of that author ; and what ours says he saw in Pantagruel's mouth, is only to blind the rest, which seems to me so plain, like most of the discoveries I here publish, that I wonder that none ever gave an account of any of them in the space of above one hundred and forty years.
The sickness of Pantagruel, chap. 33, is his disgust upon this disappointment at Bapaume ; or some real sickness that seized him.
There the author concludes his second book, that was published some time after the first, which we may perceive by what he tells us of the monks, and their bigoted cullies, who had already tried to find something in it that might render him obnoxious to the law : which caused him to be somewhat more reserved in matters of religion in that and the following, than he was afterwards in the fourth and fifth . Yet we find a prayer in the twenty-ninth chapter, which shows that his Pantagruel, Anthony de Bourbon, was for the Protestant religion, but did not openly profess it. Accord- ingly historians grant that he was a Calvinist, even long be- fore Rabelais died : and though for his interest, as he thought, he afterwards sided with the French court against the Protestant party, yet after he had been mortally wounded at the siege of Roan35 he complained of being deceived ; and ordered one of his servants, who was a Protestant, to bring a minister to him. But the other not being able to do it in those persecuting times, he commanded him to pray by him after the manner of the reformed churches ; which the other did to that unfortunate king's satisfaction. Cardinal de Bourbon his brother being then present.
Panurge is the chief actor in the third act of our Panta- gruelian play. We find him there much perplexed with un- certainties ; his mind fluctuating between the desire of en- tering into a matrimonial engagement, and the fear of having 35 Beza Hist. Ecclcs.
62 PREFACE.
occasion to repent it. To be eased of his doubt, he consults several persons, all famous for some particular skill in re- moving anxieties of mind ; and there our learned and inge- nious satirist displays his knowledge and his fancy to admi- ration, as has been observed by the learned Van Dale, in the passage which I have given you out of his book De Oraculis, after the account of our author's life.
But before that, we find Pantagruel, in the first chapter, transporting a colony of Utopians into Dipsodie ; for which Rabelais gives a very good reason, and proves himself a master at politics as well as at other things. To explain that passage, we must know that the Duke of Vendosme garrisoned out of Picardy some of the places that had been taken in Artois, fixing also there some of his vassals and tenants, who were very numerous thereabouts ; and as he was born among them, viz. at La Fere, in 1518, he had a particular love for them.
In the second chapter Panurge is made Laird of Salmy- gondin in Dipsodie, and wasteth his revenue before it comes in. I can apply this to nothing but the gift of some benefice to Montluc by the Duke of Vendosme or the Queen of Na- varre, afterwards his mother-in-law ; which benefice not being sufficient to supply him in his extravagancies, some- thing more considerable was bestowed on him ; which, hav- ing set him at ease, gave him occasion to reflect on his for- mer ill conduct, and grow more thrifty : so that afterwards he entertained some thoughts of marriage, and probably was married, when Rabelais wrote.
Among those whom Panurge consults, the Sybil of Pan- zoust is the first whose right name is difficult to be dis- covered. The pretended key in the French makes her a court lady ; but its author seems never to have read Rabe- lais, or at least not to have understood him, if we may judge of it by the names which he, in spite of reason, has set against some of those in our author. Among four or five short explanations of as many passages in Rabelais, also printed in the French, one of them tells us, that by the Sybil of Panzoust, our author means a gentlewoman of that place, near Chinon, who died very old, and always lived single, though importuned by her friends to marry when she was young. But Rabelais having in this book very artfully
PBEFACE. 63
made his Panurge consult men of different professions fa- mous in his time, to be eased of his doubt, I do not believe that he would have begun by a woman altogether unknown to the learned world : yet not but that he may have made choice of the name of Panzoust to double the character, if he knew that such an antiquated she-thing lived there. I have endeavoured to discover who might be that Sybil, but dare not positively fix that character on any. St. Theresa, a Spanish nun, who lived in that age, might come in for a share ; she has writ several books, and was already famous when Rabelais lived ; she had very odd notions ; and disco- vered perhaps as much madness as sanctity. I find another noted cracked-brain bigot, who was old at that time, and lived at Venice : it is one whom several great men have men- tioned by the name of Virgo Veneta. Guillaume Postel, amongst the rest, a very learned Jesuit, and very famous in that age for philosophy, calls her mother Joan, and had such a veneration for her, that he thought the reparation of the female sex not yet perfected, and that such a glorious work was reserved for her. But Florimond de Raymond excuses him in this, and says, that he only designed to praise her for the great services which she had done him in his travels. There is another for whom I could certainly believe the sybil's character made, were I sure that our author and she were contemporaries : her name is Magdalen de la Croix ; she was a nun, and had so well gained the reputation of being a saint, that she was consulted as a sybil by the greatest kings and princes in Europe ; but at last she proved a sorceress, and was burned. If I am not mistaken, Dr. Henry More has made mention of her, and I have read her history among several others in a book called Histoires Tra- giques. But as I am forced to quote those books by memory, like many others, which I cannot conveniently procure, I must refer the reader to them for further satisfaction.
In the one and twentieth chapter Panurge consulteth with Raminagrobis, an old French poet, who was almost upon the very last moment of his life. This poet was William Cretin, treasurer of the king's chapel, who had lived under Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I., as may be seen by his works. Never was man more celebrated by the writers of his age. John le Maire dedicated to him his three first books of
64 PREFACE.
the illustrations of France, and speaks of him as of the man to whom he owed all things. Geoffrey Tore', in his Champ Fleury, says, that Cretin in his chronicles of France had out- done Homer and Virgil. And even Marot inscribed to him his epigrams. Here are the four first verses of Marot to him :
L'homme sotart et non scavant
Comme un rotisseur, qui lave oye,
La faute d'autruy nonce avant
Qu'il la cognoisse, ou gui'l la voye, &c.
All their beauty (if they can be said to have any) consists in their rich, or rather punning rhymes ; and truly that epi- gram is unworthy of Marot. It is probable, that as Cretin was then old, he was respected by the young fry, who yet out-lived their error; for never did man sooner lose, after his death, the fame which he had gained during his life. And the reason which caused Marot to write to him in such equivocal rhymes, was, doubtless, because Cretin affected much that way of writing. Here are four of Cretin's lines, which in his book are followed by a hundred and twenty-two more such :
Par ces vins verds Atropos a trop os
Des corps humains ruez, envers en vers
Dont un quidam aspre aux pots a propos
A fort blasme ses tours pervers par vers, &c.
I never saw more rhyme with so little sense. For this reason, Rabelais, who, as Pasquier says, had more judgment and learning than all those that wrote French in his time, has exposed that rhyming old man. And to leave us no room to doubt of it, the Rondeau, which Raminagrobis gives to Panurge upon his resolution as to his marriage, Prenez la ne la prenez pas, &c., that is, Take, or not take her, off or on, &c., is taken out of Cretin, who had addressed it to Guillaume de Refuge, who had asked his advice, being in the same perplexity. However, Rabelais makes him die like a good Protestant, and afterwards turns off cunningly what the other had said against the popish clergy, who would not let him die in peace. And to show more plainly that this is said of Cretin, Rabelais says, at the beginning of the four and twentieth chapter, Laissans 1& Villaumere, that is, hav- ing left Villaumere, which relates to William, that poet's name.
PREFACE. 65
I ought not to omit a remark printed in the last Dutch edition of this book, concerning what Panurge says of Cretin : he is by the virtue of an ox, an arrant heretic ; a thorough-paced, rivetted heretic. I say, a rooted combus- tible heretic ; one as fit to burn, as the little wooden clock at Rochelle ; his soul goeth to thirty thousand carts full of devils. Rabelais there reflects on the sentence of death passed on one of the first that owned himself a protestant at Rochelle. He was a watchmaker, and had made a clock all of wood, which was esteemed an admirable piece ; but because it was the work of one condemned for heresy, the judges ordered, by the said sentence, that the clock should be burned by the common hangman, and it was burned ac- cordingly. We must also observe that the adjective clavele*, that is full of nails or rivetted, is brought in because that watchmaker, who was very famous for his zeal, was named Clavele.
In the 24th chapter Panurge consults Epistemon, who perhaps may be Guillaume RufFy, Bishop of Oleron, one of Queen Marguerite's ministers, who had been some time in prison for preaching the reformation, and was afterwards made bishop in the king of Navarre's territories, having with- out doubt dissembled like many others. Thus his descent into hell, in the second book, may be his prison : I own that he is with Pantagruel in the wars, but so is Panurge, and this is done to disguise the characters ; I am the more apt to believe him a clergyman, because he understands Hebrew very well, which few among the laity do, and none else in our author, besides Panurge, who calls him his dear gossip. Then his name denotes him to be a thinking, considering man, and as he was Pantagruel's pedagogue, so probably Ruffy initiated or instructed the duke in the doctrine of the new preachers.
Enguerrant, whom Rabelais taxes with making a tedious and impertinent digression about a Spaniard, is Enguerrant de Monstrelet, who wrote La Chronique et Annales de France.
In the same chapter, he speaks of the four Ogygian islands near the haven of Sammalo ; by this he seems to mean Jersey, Guernsey, Sark, and Alderney. As Queen Margu- erite lived a while, and died in Brittany, our actors may be thought sometimes to stroll thither. Calypso was said to
VOL. i. i-
66 PREFACE.
live at the island Ogygia ; Lucian, amongst the rest, places her there, and Plutarch mentions it in the book of the face that appears in the circle of the moon.
Her Trippa, is undoubtedly Henricus Cornelius Agrippa burlesqued. Her is Henricus or Herricus, or perhaps alludes to Heer, because he was a German, and Agrippa is turned into Trippa, to play upon the word tripe. But for a farther proof, we need but look into Agrippa' s book, de Occult. Philosoph. lib. 1, cap. 7. De Quatuor Elementorum Divina- tionibus, and we shall find the very words used by Rabelais of Pyromancy, Aeromancy, Hydromancy, &c.; besides, Agrip- pa came to Francis I, whom our author calls the great king, to distinguish him from that of Navarre.
Friar John des Entomeures, or, of the Funnels, as he is called in this translation, advises Panurge to marry; and whether by that brave monk we understand Cardinal Cha- tillon, or Martin Luther, the character is kept, since both were married ; neither was the latter wholly free from Friar John's swearing faculty, if it be true that being once reproved about it, he replied, " Condonate mini hoc qui fui Mona- chus." Entomeures has doubtless been mistaken for enton- noir, a funnel, but the true etymology, is from Ivro^y tv- Tknviiv to cut and make incisions, which was our monk's de- light, who is described as a mighty trencher-man.
In the following chapters, a theologian, physician, lawyer, and philosopher are consulted.
Hippothadeus the theologian may perhaps be Philip Shwartzerd, alias Melancthon ; for he speaks too much like a protestant to be the king's confessor ; neither could Mont- luc be supposed to desire his advice.
Rondibilis, the physician, is doubtless Gulielmus Ronde- letius. Thuanus remarks, in the thirty-eighth book of his history, that Gul. Rondelet of Montpellier died 1566, and that though he was a learned physician, Rabelais had sati- rized him ; he adds, that indeed the works of Rondelet do not answer the expectation which the world had of him, nor the reputation which he had gained ; and his treatise of fishes, which is the best that bears his name, was chiefly the work of Gul. Pelissier, Bishop of Montpellier, who was cast into prison for being a protestant. However, Rabelais makes him display much learning in his discourse to Panurge.
PREFACE. 67
I am not so certain of the man whom Trouillogan per- sonates ; he calls him an Ephectic and Pyrrhonean philo- sopher. I find that Petrus Ramus, or de la Rame"e, after- wards massacred at Paris, had written a book against Aristotle, and we have also his logic ; but as he is mentioned by Jupiter in the prologue to the fourth book, by the name of Rameau, where his dispute with Petrus Galandius, and his being named Peter are also mentioned, I am in doubt about it. Moliere has imitated the scene between Trouillo- gan and Pan urge, in one of his plays, and M. de la Fontaine, the story of Hans Carvel, and that of the devil of Pope- Feagueland, in his inimitable Contes et Nouvelles.
There was a jack-pudding in France in that age, called Triboulet, but I believe that the fool, whom our author describes in the 38th chapter, is one more considerable, though less famous. I cannot guess why he has heaped up so many adjectives on that fool, unless it be to show the excess of his folly, and to mock some of the authors of that age, who often bestowed a large train of such unnecessary attendants on a single noun substantive.
Marotte is a word very much used by the French, signify- ing a fool's bauble or club, and the word Fou, given by Rabelais to Triboulet, implies a mad, crack-brained, or in- considerate man, and also a jester; the word idiot being more used in French, for what we properly call a fool : now Clement Marot, the best poet in the reign of Francis I., whose valet de chambre he was styled, was a notable jester, and is said to have played many merry tricks that bordered somewhat on extravagance ; besides, many among the Vulgar mistaking the enthusiasm of poets for madness, have but a small opinion of the wisdom of most of them. But these considerations do not seem to me strong enough to make me believe that Rabelais would have passed so severe a censure on that poet, who was then but lately dead, an exile for his religion, and had made honourable mention of him in his works, they being undoubtedly intimate friends.
Judge Bridlegoose, who decided causes by the chance of dice ; and was arraigned for prevarication at the bar of the parliament of Mirelingois, resembles much a judge of Mont- martre, who they say could neither write nor read, yet had been a judge many years ; and being once called into ques-
F 2
68 PREFACE.
tion in a superior court, owned his ignorance as to the point of writing and reading, but affirmed that he knew the law ; and desiring that the cause of which an appeal had been made from his jurisdiction might be examined, he was found to have done justice, and his sentence and authority were confirmed. Rabelais takes notice of such a story, as is that of his Bridlegoose, vulgarly reported of the provost of Montlehery : but though he may allude to it, and to that of the bailiff of Montmartre, which perhaps may be the same, I believe that his Bridlegoose is a man of greater conse- quence. Considering the strong intercession made for him by Pantagruel and the others whom he shows on this stage, he may be Guillaume Poyet, who, by the favour of Loyse de Savoye, the king's mother, his client, had been made Lord Chancellor of France, and in 1545, being convicted of several abuses and prevarications, was deprived of his office.
I have said before, that the herb Pantagruelion is hemp ; Rabelais makes Pantagruel load a great quantity of it on board his ships, and indeed it is one of the most useful things in the world, not only at sea, but also at land. The curious and pleasing description of that plant makes up the rest of this third book.
Had not the following translation of the three first books of Rabelais been ready to be published before I was desired to give an account of them and of his life, I might have printed my observations at the end of each chapter, and have given a more exact commentary. However I hope that I have said enough to show that what appears trivial and foolish in that work is generally grave and of moment when seriously examined. Yet as I dare not offer my conjectures as certainties, principally on a book which has been so uni- versally read and admired, and never till now attempted to be explained, I humbly submit all I have said to the judg- ment of the learned ; to whom I will esteem myself much obliged, if they will be pleased either to let me know where- in I have erred, or communicate to me their remarks on this work, which may be printed with the two remaining books with their names if they please, and a thankful acknowledg- ment of the favour.
Having first done my endeavour to satisfy the reader con- cerning the meaning of that mysterious history, I hope to be
PREFACE. 69
now the more patiently suffered to give some account of the nature of the fable, the style, and the design of it.
Mankind is naturally addicted to the love of fables. Long before learning had been brought into Greece and Italy, the Egyptians, Persians, Arabians, and other eastern nations, to enhance the value of truths, which they did not think fit to be prostituted to the vulgar, hid them under the veils of allegories and apologues ; 36 they also used sometimes to lay aside the study and speculation of high mysteries, to divert themselves with framing stories which had nothing of truth in them, and no other design than most of our romances. Also in the decay of learning, which followed that of the Roman empire, for want of true history and solid know- ledge, men fed their minds with gross fictions, such as are the legends of monks, and the old sorts of romances. Thus two opposite ways, barren ignorance and luxuriant learning, leading men often to the same end, that is, the study of fables, their number is as great as their original is ancient.
Herodotus says, that the Greeks had from Egypt their mythologic theology. Homer brought from thence that in- clination to fables, which made him invent many things about the original and employments of his gods ; and Py- thagoras and Plato learned also there to disguise their philo- sophy.
Thus our author calls his writings Pythagorical symbols in the prologue to his first book ; and not without reason, since as I have made it appear, the chief part of them is mysteri- ously written. But what those ancient philosophers did through a reverence of nature, ours did through necessity; being forced to keep such a medium as that he might be un- derstood by all readers in most parts of his book, yet by few persons in others, and might secure himself from the attacks of his enemies by the ambiguity of his sense.
Lucian tells us, that fables were so much in vogue in As- syria and Arabia, that there were persons whose only profes- sion it was to explain them to the people ; and Erpenius as- sures, that all the world together never produced so many
36 Quia sciunt inimicam esse naturae apertfim nudamque expositio- nem sui; quse sicut vulgaribus hominum sensibus intellectum sui vario rerum tegmine operimentoque subtraxit, ita, a prudentibus arcana sua voluit per fabulosa tractari. Macrob. in Somn. Scip. lib. i.
70 PBEFACE.
poets as the latter. As for Persia, Strabo says, that teachers there used to give to their disciples precepts of morality wrap- ped up in fictions. The Gymnosophists of India are said, by Diogenes Laertius, to have delivered their philosophy in enig- mas. So that the learned Huetius thinks, that when Horace said, fabulosus Hydaspes, it was chiefly because its spring is in Persia, and its mouth in India, countries through which it flows, whose inhabitants were lovers of fables : and indeed it was from the Persians, as that prelate observes, that those of Miletum in Ionia learned first to frame those amorous fictions which were afterwards famous through Greece and Italy, by the name of Milesian fables, which, with millions more of insignificant voluminous lies, are lost and forgotten, as well as their authors ; the name of the best of whom, called Aristides, hardly survives his writings. He lived doubtless before Marius and Sylla's wars ; for Sisenna, a Roman historian, had latinised his fables, which were very obscene, yet long the delight of the Romans. Photius, in his Bibliotheque, has given an extract of a fabulous story composed by Antonius Diogenes, whom he thinks to have lived some time after Alexander. It treats in prose of the loves of Dinias and Dercyllis, in imitation of Homer's Odysseis, and relates many incredible adventures ; its author also makes mention of one Antiphanes, who before had written in that nature, and who, perhaps, may be a comic poet, whom the geographer Stephanus says to have written some such relations.
These are thought to have been the models of what Lucius, Lucian, Jamblichus, Achilles Tatius, and Damasius have written in that kind, not to speak of Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca, who, under Arcadius and Honorius, wrote the adven- tures of Theagenes and Chariclea, some passages of which have been copied by Guarini, and the author of Astrea.
Our Britons about that time have not been behind-hand with other nations in writing such books. Theleisin, whom some place among the bards, because he made some prophe- cies in verse, lived about the middle of the sixth century^ and, as well as Melkin, wrote fabulous histories in Welsh, of Britain, King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. Those of Geoffrey of Monmouth have not much more the appearance of truth ; and as much may be said
PREFACE. 71
of what Gildas, a Welsh monk, writ of King Arthur, Per- ceval, and Lancelot.
The French,37 some time after, had also their famous ro- mance of the heroic deeds of Charles the Great and his Paladins, said to be the work of Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims : but it was written about two hundred years after him : and was followed by many more as false, which yet pleased the people of those times, more simple and ignorant yet than those who wrote them. Then none endeavouring to get good memoirs to write true history, and men finding matter more easily in their fancy, historians degenerated into romancers, and the Latin tongue fell into as much con- tempt as truth had done before. Then the Troubadours38 comics and contours of Provence, who were the writers that practised what is still called, in the southern parts of France, " le guay saber," or the gay science, spread all over that kingdom their stories and new sort of poetry of all kinds, composed in the Romanz language, which was a mixture of the Gallic, Teutonic, and Latin tongues, in which the latter was superior, so that, to distinguish it from that usually spoken through the other parts of the Gauls, it kept the name of Romanz.
The Germans, as Tacitus relates, used to sing the heroic deeds of Hercules, when they went to fight. The ancient inhabitants of Denmark, Sweden and Norway had fabulous stories, which they engraved in old Runic characters upon large stones, of which some are still to be seen. The most usual diversion at their feasts was to sing in rhyming verse the brave deeds of their ancient giants. These stories used to draw tears from the eyes of the company ; and after that being well warmed with good cheer, to their tears succeeded cries and howlings, till all at last fell in confusion under the table. The kings and princes of Denmark, Norway, and the neighbouring countries, had always their Scaldri ; thus were called their poets, who used extempore to make verses in rhyme, embellished with fictions and allegories,39 upon all memorable events ; and those were immediately learned and sung by the people. Even some of the kings and queens of those countries were Scaldri, as Olaus Warmius tells us.
37 Huet Orig. des Romans. 38 Jean de Nostredame vie des Poetes Provencaux. 39 Appendix de Literatura Runica.
72 PREFACE.
The Indians, Japanese, and Chinese, have an infinite num- ber of poets and fables, and the latter esteem almost rustic, any other way than that of apologues in their conversation.
Even the Turks, to fit themselves for love or war, have not only the Persian romances, but fables of their own de- vising, and will tell you that Roland was a Turk, whose sword they still preserve at Bursa with veneration, relating the particulars of his life, and the great things he did in the Levant.
The Americans are great lovers of fables ; and near Canada, the most wild among them, after their feasts, generally desire the oldest, or the greatest wit of the company, to invent and relate to them some strange story. Beavers, foxes, racoons, and other animals, generally come in for a share in the fiction, aud the hearers are very attentive to their adventures, the relation of which they never interrupt but by their applause, and thus days and nights are passed with equal satisfaction to the speaker and the hearers. The people of Florida, Cu- bana, and Peru, excite themselves to work, and to martial exploits, by songs, and fabulous narrations of the great achievements of their predecessors. Whatever they relate of their origin is full of fictions ; but in this, those of Peru far out-lie the rest, and have their poets, to whom they give a name that answers to that of inventors. Also those of Madagascar have men, who stroll from house to house to recite their composures ; and those of Guinea have their tellers of fables, like those of the northern parts of America.
Thus, as observes Huetius, from whom I have borrowed part of these historical observations on fables, no nation can well attribute to itself the original of them, since all equally have been addicted to invent some, in the most ancient times. There is only this difference, that what was the fruit of the ignorance of some nations, even in Europe, has been that of the politeness of the Persians, the lonians, and the Greeks.
When Rabelais lived, all the foolish romances that had been made in the barbarous ages that preceded his, were very much read ; therefore, as he had a design to give a very great latitude to his satire, he thought he could not do better than to give it the form of those lying stories, the better to secure himself from danger, and at once show their ab-
PEEFA.CE. 73
surdities ; also to cause his book to be the more read, having perceived that nothing pleased the people better than such writings ; the wise and learned being delighted with the mo- rality under the allegories, and the rest by their oddness. This was a good design, and it proved as effectual to make those who had any sense throw away those gross fables, stuffed with wretched tales of giants, magicians, and adven- turous knights, as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote proved in his country, to root out knight-errantry.
Thus Lucian, before him, in the story of the ass, enlarged afterwards by the philosopher Apuleius, had ridiculed Lucius of Patras ; and, to make it the more obvious, called that fable by the name of that mythologist, who had written a book of strange metamorphoses, which he foolishly believed to be true. Rabelais seems also to have imitated Lucian's true history, called so by its author by antiphrasis ; though some have thought that he had joined it to the treatise in which he gives precepts to write history well, as an example of his rules : but he declares, at the beginning of that incredible history, that his only design was to expose many poets, historians, and philosophers, who with impunity, re- lated false things as truth, and used, upon unfaithful relations, to treat of foreign countries, as Ctesias and lambulus had done.
But our history is not altogether an imitation of that of Lucian, though it participates of its nature. It is dramatic also, as that Greek author says of some of his works ; a mixture of dialogue and comedy ; of serious matter, and of the ridicule ; of plays of all sorts, whether Trabeatse. Pretextatae, Palliatae, Togatse, Attellanae, Tabernarise, &c. It is the Satyrica of the Greek ; the Archsea, the Media, and the Nova Comcedia ; for sometimes great things are treated by our author in a manner equal to their grandeur ; at others they are brought down to the level of the Planipedia: now and then little more than mirth is meant ; often, also, particular persons are reflected on by name ; at others they appear masked and disguised ; and frequently, as in the new comedies of the Greeks, the characters are general.40 It is likewise Hilaro- tragoedia ; that sort of dramatic composures which Rhinthon, of Taras, about the reign of the first Ptolemy, is said to have invented ; which doubtless got him that name of $Xva£ 40 Suidas in
74 PREFACE.
given him by Stephanus Bysantius, which some render Jo- cator, but is thought by Hesychius to signify Scurra. This Rhinthon's fables, of which Donatus41 makes mention in his notes on Terence, and which Suidas says were thirty- eight in number, still in being when Stephanus wrote, were imitated at Rome. And, as that geographer says that Rhin- thon turned tragic things into ridicule, an Italian critic42 thinks that the Hilarotragoedia was only una tragedia contrafatta e di grave ridotta al piacevole ; e di tragedia, per dir cosi, fatta comedia ; that is, a tragedy turned into a comedy or a farce. But the learned Spanheim43 more properly thinks that Rhinthonhad joined the comic mirth of the Greek satiric plays and interludes to the gravity of tragedy, which may by that have got the name of mixta.
Our Rabelais's work is also a satire of the kind of those which, from Menippus, were called Menippaean by his imi- tator Varro, the most learned among the Romans ; having given that name to that which he made, because, like that Cynic philosopher, in it he had treated of grave matters in a merry joking style. That satire, or, as Tully calls it, that poema varium et elegans, was at once a mixture of prose and several sorts of verse ; of Greek and of Latin ; of philology and of philosophy. That orator44 makes him give some ac- count of its design and variety ; and without doubt that work was far more estimable than the examples which he followed, if, as Diogenes Laertius says, those of Menippus were made merely to excite men to laugh, consisting chiefly of parodise, or verses out of famous authors, and generally Homer, Euripides, and such others, inverted and tagged to- gether, sometimes like the cento of Ausonius, and often in the nature of our mock songs. Yet, since Strabo says that by them he got the name of <rira5oyi\oloc, or Joco-serius,46 we may believe that there was morality in them ; but that, as in our Rabelais, not being obvious, some thought them trifling ; like many in our age, who find it much easier to judge and find fault than to understand.
41 Ad Prolog. Adelph. 4* Ragion. della Academ. Aldean.
*J Preface sur les Caesars de Jul. ** Et tamen in illis veteribus nostris, quse Menippum imitati, non interpretati, quidam hilaritate conspersimus, multa admista ex intima philosophize multa dialectice dicta. Academ. Qucest. lib. 1. 45 Lib. 16.
PBEFACE. 75
I could wish that among the other sorts of writing which, in some things, have been imitated by our author, I might not reckon Petronius Arbiter ; yet I only say this as to his im- modesty ; for otherwise, as that consul, under some amorous fictions, has concealed a close and ingenious satire on the vices that reigned in Nero's court, and was as nice and good a judge of polite learning as of dissolute pleasures, without doubt he is to be followed and admired : and, indeed, his fable was esteemed to be like the Greek satiric poems, which Plato says consisted of fictions whose hidden sense differed very much from the superficial signification of the words ; since Macrobius, while he distinguishes fables made barely to please from those that at once divert and instruct, has placed that of Petronius among the latter.
Our author's works are also an imitation of Democritus and of Socrates, if we may compare writings with actions ; for those two philosophers used to be still merry, and freely ridiculed whatever was a fit subject of raillery : for this rea- son Quintilian says of the latter, " Etiam vita universa iro- niam habere videtur, qualis est vita Socratis ;" and that great philosopher, who had deserved the name of the wisest of men, was called Scurra by Zeno, as Tully renders it: yet Plato and Xenophon, his scholars, have not only transmitted to us some of his admirable expressions,4? but also imitated them. And we may apply to Rabelais what Vavassor said of that wise man, " Constans ac perpetuus irrisor mortalium."
In this, his work somewhat differs from the greatest part of the satires of the Romans ; for he seldom leaves his ridi- culing for their angry railing. Their chief design is less to rally than excite either indignation or hatred, facit indignatio versum.47 Which caused an ancient grammarian to say, " Satyra dicitur carmen apud Romanos nunc quidem maledi- cum ;" thus calling Satire48 a railing or a slandering poem ; and Ovid, excusing himself for not having written any, gives it the epithet of biting.
" Non ego mordaci distrinxi carmine quemquam j Nee meus ullius crimina versus habet."
Accordingly, the authors of the Roman satires generally kept the character of censors. Horace has given the gayest
46 De Dictione Ludicra. 47 Juven. Sat. 1. 4S Diomed. Lib. 5. Gram.
76 PREFACE.
air of them all to his satires ; and in that of Nasidienus, the description of the fight between Sarmentus and Messius, as also in some others, has affected a comic style. He also tella us, that satire ought to be sometimes treated gaily, and at others sullenly or gravely; " Et sermone opus est, modo tristi, ssepe jocoso." Yet in other places he speaks of the sharp- ness of his satires, and owns that they were an ill-natured or malicious kind of writing :
" Tristi laedere versu, Pantolabum scurram, nomentanumque nepotem." Sat. 1 . Lib. 2.
Then he takes notice of the complaint of some against him :
" Lividus et mordax videor tibi."
He also observes, that it is not enough to make a hearer laugh :
" Ergo non satis est risu diducere rictum Auditoris." Sat. 10. Lib. 1.
Far from this, he saith it is a commendable thing to fill a man with shame, and, as he calls it, to bark at him if he deserves it :
" Si quis opprobriis dignum latraverit."
This causes another satirist, speaking of Lucilius, whose imitator he was, as well as Horace to say,
" Ease velut stricto, quoties Lucilius ardens Infremuit, rubet auditor cui frigida mens est Criminibus." Juvenal. Sat. 1.
The same, in another place, reflecting on the depraved manners of his age, cries, " Difficile est satyram non scribere." By which he sufficiently shows what was the object and de- sign of those sorts of poems.
Now Rabelais chiefly pursues his subject by jesting and exposing, ridiculing and despising what he thinks deserves such an usage ; and it is but seldom that he makes use of railing, or sullen biting reproofs. Yet as he has done it in some places, we may well say that his work hath something of the Roman satire.
In short, it is a mixture, or, if I may use the expression, an olio, of all the merry, serious, satirical, and diverting ways of writing, that have hitherto been used. But still mirth is predominant in the composition, and, like a pleasing tartness, gives the whole such a relish, that we ever feed on
PHEFACE. 77
it with an eager appetite, and can never be cloyed with it. It is farce, as our laureat, in his late curious preface 49 con- cerning that way of writing, judiciously observes of some of Ben Jonson's, but such farce as bequeaths that blessing (pro- nounced by Horace) on him that shall attempt the like.
" Sudet multum frustraque laboret
Ausus idem."
For, as it is there observed, the business of farce extends beyond nature and probability. But then there are so few improbabilities that will appear pleasant in the representa- tion, that it will strain the best invention to find them out, and require the nicest judgment to manage them when they are conceived. Extravagant and monstrous fancies are but sick dreams, that rather torment than divert the mind ; but when extravagancy and improbability happen to please at all, they do it to purpose, because they strike our thought with greatest surprise.
Pasquier, the most judicious critic that France had in his time, was very apprehensive of this, and illustrates it with two examples that concern too much our author, and the point in question, not to be inserted here. It is in one of his letters to the poet Ronsard50 — " II n'y a celui de nous qui ne S9ache combien le docte Rabelais en folastrant sage- ment sur son Gargantua et Pantagruel gaigna de grace parmi le peuple. II se trouva peu apres deux singes qui se per- suaderent d'en pouvoir faire tout autant ; 1'un sous le nom de Leon 1'Adulfy en ses Propos Rustiques. L'autre sans nom en son livre des Fanfreluches. Mais autant y profita 1'un que 1'autre ; s'^tant la memoire de ces deux livres perdue."
That is, " All knew to what degree the learned Rabelais gained the esteem of the nation by his wise drolling on his Gargantua and Pantagruel ; soon after started up a couple of apes, who conceived that they could do as much ; viz. Leon 1'Adulfy in his Propos Rustiques, and the anonymous author of Fanfreluches. But as ill did the one succeed as the other; the memory of those two books being lost."
This work of Rabelais is doubtless an original, by imita- ting and joining in one so many others. To imitate it, is not
49 Mr. Tate, Preface to " A Duke or no Duke." «° Lettr. de
Pastier, liv. 1 .
78 PREFACE.
only periculosae plenum opus alese, but almost an impossible task ; nor is it easily to be defined. We see that it is his- torical, romantic, allegorical, comical, satirical ; but as some- times all these kinds of writing are united in one passage, at others they appear severally.
I might say that it is partly dramatic ; for there appears in it a great deal of action: the dialogues, of which it is full, are as many lively scenes. Europe is the stage, and all mankind is the subject. The author, with his witty, droll- ing prologues, comes in between every act, as the Sileni and the Satiri did in the Greek satiric plays. Or, if you had rather have it so, he supplies the place of the chorus in some of the old comedies. The five books answer exactly the five acts : and it might perhaps as easily be made appear by a Dacier, that he has managed his drama regularly, as by a Bossu, that the father of epic poetry has observed a just conduct in his Iliads.
It has the form of an history, or rather of romances, which it tacitly ridicules ; I mean such of them as those ages pro- duced which preceded the restoration of learning. That chiefly happened when our author lived ; your Amadis de Gaule, Lancelot du Lac. Tristan, Kyrie Eleison of Montauban, &c. For then Kyrie Eleison and Paralipomenon, were taken for the names of saints; somewhat like the epitomisers of Gesner's Bibliotheque, who have ascribed Amadis to one Acuerdo Olvido, not knowing that these two words, which they found on the title-page of the French version of that book were the translator's Spanish motto, that signifies remem- brance, oblivion. Our author seems to have mimicked those books, even in their titles, in their division into chapters and in the odd accounts of their contents. I am much mistaken if in many places he has not also affected their style ; though in others he displays all the purity and elegance which the French tongue, which he has much improved, had at that time.
As for the mixture of odd, burlesque, barbarous, Latin, Greek, and obsolete words, which is seen in his book, it is justifiable, as it serves to add to the diversion of the reader, pleased generally the more, the greater is the variety, prin- cipally in so odd a work.
About twenty years before it was composed, Theophilus
PREFACE. 79
Folengi, a monk born at Mantua, of a noble family who is hardly known now otherwise than by the name of Merlinus Coccaius, had put out his Liber Macaronicorum, which is a poetical rhapsody, made up of words of different languages, and treating of pleasant matters in a comical style. The word macarone in Italian, signifies a jolly clown, and macca- roni a sort of cakes made with coarse meal, eggs, and cheese, as Thomasin51 observes. He published also another work, which he called, II Libro della Gatta, in the same style, and another, only macaronic in part, called, Chaos del Tri per Uno.
A learned critic53 has esteemed that sort of writing to be a third kind of burlesque. Nor was Folengi only followed by his countrymen, as Gaurinus Capella in his Macarone de Rimini against Cabri Re de Gogue Magogue, in 1526 ; and Caesar Ursinus, who calls himself Stopinus, in his Capriccia Macaronica, 1536 ; for the learned William Drummond, author of the History of Scotland, and of some divine poems, has left us an ingenious macaronic poem, called, Polemo- Middinia, printed at the Theatre, at Oxford, 1691.
Rabelais has imitated and improved some fine passages of that of Coccaius, as well as his style ; though M. Baillet, in his Jugement des S9avans, thinks that it would be an impos- sible task to preserve its beauties in a translation.
The Italians affect those mixed sorts of languages in their burlesque poetry. They have one sort which they call Pedantesca, from the name of the persons of whom it most treats and whom it imitates ; Greek, Latin, and Italian making up the composition with an Italian termination. Some have celebrated the amours of grammarians and of others in that Italo-greco-latin tongue : and I have seen a book in prose in that idiom of idioms, intituled Hipneroto- machia di Polifilo ; cioe, Combattimento di Amore in Sogno ; or, the Fight of Love in a Dream.
Dante is full of Latin and Provenzale, of which he boasts, saying, Namque locutus sum in lingua trina ; and Petrarch, though more sparing of Latin, has many French and Pro- venzale words, even whole lines of the latter, ponendovene anche de i versi interi, says one of his countrymen ; and be- sides a great number of books of burlesque poetry and prose, which they have in Lingua Bergamesca, Bolognese, Pa-
61 Eleg. p. 72. 53 Naude Jugement des Pieces centre Mazarin.
80 PEEFACE.
duana, Venetiana, Bresciana, Veronese, Genouese, Napo- litana, Romana, Siciliana, Sarda, &c., they sometimes have mixed several of those dialects together.
This mixture of languages, and of odd and fantastic terms, has been censured by Vavassor, chiefly, because he pretends that the ancients never used it, though none will deny that they mixed words and verses of different kinds that has read of their Satura Lanx, or the tlptaiwvr). Diomedes says, Satyra est carmen quod exvariis poematibus constat; and Lucilius,whom Pliny says to have first found out stylum nasi, the way of speak- ing used in plays, wrote in a low and vulgar style, mixed sometimes with Greek. Plautus has Punic words, and Cicero has Greek, particularly in his epistles. But to show that odd words, such as are found in our author's burlesque writings, have been used by the ancients, we need but consult Dio- genes Laertius, and we shall find that Democritus allowed himself as great a liberty in using odd expressions, as in laughing at mankind. For he had so many particular words, that a Greek author made a dictionary of them ; his biographer relates some of them, and Hesychius has pre- served also one or two, which he had probably out of that dictionary that has been lost. Vavassor himself, owns that Aristophanes has Verba inusitata, composita ex multis verbis et sonantibus, and that in his plays, Persae, Triballi, Scythse, patria et barbara voce utuntur, Laco et Thessalus. That comic poet has indeed many words as strange as Ra- belais, as j3,o£(C£K£/cE£ KodZ, Koa£, from which the Latins have
made "coaxare;" then ITTOTTOI, TTOTTOI, TTOTTOI; /w, tw, iYo>, Iria ; rio, rto, rio, rio, rt'o, rio, rio, rio, rpioro, roppiZ, ; Topo ropo ropo Topo ropo roporiy£, KiKKafiav, ropo roporopoAt\iXiy£ ; roporiy£, roporiy£ ; 7ro7ro7T07ro7ro7ro7ro7roi ; ririririririrpovi, which are the various voices of birds. Then he has diminutives, as SoKpan'- £tov, Xavriciiov, viraptov, ftdnov ; and if Rabelais has very long words, so has Aristophanes, as his /co/iTro^aiceXoppTj/iova, and many others; amongst which the longest is made up of twenty- eight, and begins by \o7rodoTefiaxofft\axoya\eo, &C. Also in the Anthologia, grammarians are called $tipoZ,vyoKap- Xi/x€ro7roi ; and there is an epigram by an ancient poet, all in «uch burlesque, against philosophers, which begins thus, O Qpvavatriraaidai, pivtyKaTcnrvZoytvuoiy SaKKoyej/eiorpo^oi, icat XoratfapTrapi'o'ai, &c.
A great number of long decomposites are found in Greek
PKEFACE. 81
authors, and if the Latins have used them less, it is because their tongue was not so happy in linking words together, as Quintilian observes. Yet we have many in Plautus that are downright burlesque of the same kind, as Ferritribaces, Ser- vilicolse, Plagipatide, Cluninstaridysarchides, &c.
What shall we think of the Parodise, of which Aristopha- nes and Lucian are full, and which Julian has used in his Caesars, as many more among the Greeks have done ; those witticisms being a part of the salt, which they so much de- sired in all jocose and satirical composures.
As for the puns, clenches, conundrums, quibbles, and all such other dregs or bastard sorts of wit, that here and there have crept in among the infinite number of our author's in- genious and just conceptions, I will not apologize in their behalf, otherwise than by showing that Aristophanes and Plautus have strewed them more lavishly through their works, which are partly of the nature of this. Nor is it necessary to mention the great Tully, and many more among the ancients, that allowed themselves the freedom of using them ; many of those dropped in conversation by that orator having been thought worthy to be made public. They were doubtless better liked in those times than they are now, and we find them in as great a number in almost all the writers of the last age that pretended to wit ; nor have rhetoricians refused to teach or use the figure antanaclasis. So, though we may mislike the pun, we may admire the author, since these are but so many small spots, which, far from darken- ing him, illustrate the beauties by which they are placed.
None can mislike the great number of various images which he gives of the same things, or the long train of verbs, or substantives, which he often sets together ; indeed, in another work they might be thought redundant ; Am- bitiosa ornamenta rescindenda sunt ; but here those terms, though they are often technical, and therefore instructing, are only used to cause mirth ; and they become our author so well, that we seldom read them over without laughing.
Mirth being so desirable a thing, so beneficial to the body and to the mind, and laughing one of the distinguishing characters of mankind, our author may be said not to have advantaged the world a little, in composing this merry treatise. He justifies himself in his dedication to Cardinal
YOL. I. G
82 PREFACE.
Chatillon, for his comical expressions, by representing the ease which many disconsolate and sick persons had received by them ; and he says before his first book, Le rire est le propre de rhomme; or, as it has been Englished, "To laugh is proper to the man." Even Caesar had writ a whole book of merry and witty sayings ; and Balsac, a great enemy to burlesque, has said, Que ce n'e"toit pas peu meriter du genre humain, que de rejouir quelquefois Auguste ; " That man- kind was not a little obliged to the man who sometimes could make Augustus merry." That emperor, as Macrobius tells us, did not think it below him sometimes to write lam- poons, and made one on Pollio, who, knowing it, said, " At ego taceo, non est enim facile in eum conscribere qui potest proscribere."
Horace, after he has said that it is not enough to make a hearer laugh, adds, " Et est quaedam hsec quoque virtus."
Nor has our author only aimed at mirth, though he has partly made it subservient to his chief design. He knew that the learned and the ignorant, by different motives, de- light in fables, and that the love of mirth being universal, the only way to cause his sentiments to be most known and followed, was to give them a merry dress. The council of Trent began to sit in 1545, and then our author began to write. The restoration of learning had made the most knowing among the clergy and the laity desire that primi- tive Christianity might also be restored. Accordingly I find, that when Rabelais was at Rome,53 in 1536, the Car- dinal of Trent, who was a German, came thither to press the pope to a council, and, in our author's presence, said to Cardinal du Bellay, that the pope refused to grant a coun- cil, but that he would repent it, for the Christian princes would take away what they had given to the church. The universal cry was for the restitution of the cup to the laity, and of marriage to the clergy ; against indulgences, pardons, &c. This caused Rabelais to put out these Pythagorical symbols, as he calls them : that while some of the great ones, privately, and the protestants, publicly, were endea- vouring a thorough reformation, he might insinuate a con- tempt of the church of Rome's fopperies, chiefly in the clergy of France, and those that were at the council of 63 Lettres de Rabelais a TEvesque de Maillezais.
PREFACE. 83
Trent ; as also in such of the laity as had wit enough to find out his meaning. And this is what he means, in the prologue to his third book, by the comical account which he gives of Diogenes ; who, seeing the inhabitants of Corinth all very busy in their preparations for the war, and himself not invited to help them, rolled and tossed about his tub, that he might not be said to be idle. " For," says Rabelais, " I held it not a little disgraceful to be only an idle spec- tator of so many valorous, eloquent, and warlike persons, who, in the view and sight of all Europe, act this notable interlude, or tragi-comedy." By the word eloquent, we may easily judge that this notable interlude is the coun- cil then sitting. He knew that, in 1534, Calvin having dedicated his Institutions to Francis I., the bigots about him cunningly persuaded that king not to read that excellent work, nor its incomparable preface; though he was otherwise not very religious, having made a league with the Turks, and joined his fleet to that of Bar- barossa, as also charged his children, in 1535, on pain of incurring his curse, to revenge his wrongs on Charles the Fifth, whom he used to call Satan's eldest son.54 So, partly that his book might not have the same fate, he made it mysterious ; and, indeed, that king had it read to him, in spite of those who told him it was heretical. But he was so embroiled in wars, that, perhaps, he dared not favour the reformed, for fear of being served by the pope like the king of Navarre. However, even his mother, Loyse de Savoye, what devotion soever she showed to popish fopperies, seems to have had but little respect for them ; for in her journal, writ with her own hand, and kept' still in the Chambre des Comptes at Paris, are found these words concerning St Francis de Paule : " Frere Fra^ois de Paule fut par moi canonise" ; a tout le moins j'en payay la taxe." That is, *' Friar John de Paule was sainted by me ; at least I paid the fees for making him a saint." — Yet our author wrote not so darkly, but that the ingenious of that age could know his meaning ; for the very antidoted fanfreluches, which are the second chapter of his first book, show that he treated of religion, as he had said in the prologue before it. The first stanza may perhaps be only designed to make the rest pass 54 Memokes de Castelnau.
G 2
84 PREFACE.
for a banter ; but the second mentions the pope and Calvin plainly ; the first, " whose slipper it is more meritorious to kiss than to gain pardons ;" and the other, " from the depth issued where they fish for roaches," (the lake at Geneva,) a chuff who said, " Sirs, for God's sake let us forbear doing this ; " in the French, " Qui dit, Messieurs, pour Dieu nous en gardens." I have not the leisure to examine now the other stanzas, though I can explain some of them. But to show that Rabelais was understood when he writ, we need but read the verses printed in the French before his second book ; they are by Hugues Salel, a man of great wit and learning, who, as I have said, had translated Homer's Iliads : in them he encourages the author to write on, and tells him that, under a pleasing foundation, he had so well described useful matters, that, if he was not rewarded here below, he should be rewarded in heaven.
Gross superstition proceeds from ignorance ; so next to the first he exposes the latter : but I need not come to par- ticulars. I may say that he has satirised all sorts of vice, and consequently all sorts of men : we find them all pro- miscuously on his scene, as in Bays's grand dance in the Rehearsal, kings, cardinals, ladies, aldermen, soldiers, &c.
He saw that vice was not to be conquered in a declama- tory war, and that the angry railing lectures of some well- meaning men were seldom as effectual to make it give ground, as the gay yet pointed railleries of those who seem uncon- cerned ; the latter convincing us effectually, while the others, with their passionate invectives, persuade us of nothing, but that they are too angry to direct others.
This gay way of moralizing has also nothing of the dry mortifying method of those philosophers who, striving to de- monstrate their principles by causes and a long series of arguments, only rack the mind ; but its art and delicacy is not perceived by every reader : consequently many people will not easily find out the inward beauties of the works of Rabelais ; but he did not intend that every one should per- ceive them, though every one may be extremely diverted by the outward and obvious wit and humour. We may say of those hidden graces, what a learned man says of those in Horace's Satires,55 " Quae cum animse plebeise percurrunt, 65 Heinsius de Satira Horaliana.
PREFACE. 85
nec venustatem vident, nee necessitatem argument! intelli- gunt. Eruditi, praeter incredibilem leporem, ad principium quo nititur recurrunt." The figure oxymorum, by which things at first appear foolish, though they are sharp and witty, is such a master-piece in rhetoric as can be perceived by none but the skilful. Painting has its grotesque and bold touches, which seem irregular to the vulgar, only pleased with their oddness ; while masters, through the antic features and rough strokes, discover an exact propor- tion, a softness and a boldness together, which charm them to an unspeakable degree. So in artful jests and ironies, in that lusus animi and judicious extravagance, what seems mean and absurd is most in sight, and strikes the vulgar ; but better judgments under that coarse outside discover exqui- site wit, just and sublime thoughts, vast learning, and the most profound reasonings of philosophy. Our author's first prologue has led me to this observation, by that which he makes concerning Socrates. Sorbiere,56 who was a man not much given to praise the living, and much less the dead, applies this to Rabelais, owning that his satire is the most learned and universal that ever was writ ; and that it also so powerfully inclines our minds to mirth, that almost all those whom he had known, that had been much conversant with it, had gained by its means a method of thinking agreeably on the most profound and melancholic matters. Thus it teaches us to bear adversities gallantly, and to make them our diversion rather than attack them directly, and with a concern which they are not worthy to cause. " Ridiculum acri plenius ac melius magnas plerumque secat res," says Horace. It is true, that those whose temper inclines them to a stoical severity will not have the same taste ; and, indeed, rallying seldom or never becomes them ; but those who would benefit themselves by the perusal of Rabelais need not imitate his buffoonery ; and it is enough if it inwardly move us, and spread there such seeds of joy as will produce on all sorts of subjects an infinite number of pleasant reflec- tions. In those places that are most dangerous, a judicious reader will curb his thoughts and desires, considering that the way is slippery, and thus will easily be safe ; with wise reflections moderating his affections. It is even better to 56 Sorberiana.
86 PREFACE.
drink some too strong wines, tempering them with water, which makes them but the more pleasant, than to confine ourselves to flat and insipid liquors, which neither affect the palate nor cheer us within. The Roman ladies used to view the wrestlers naked in the cirque, and one of them discreetly said, that a virtuous woman was not more scandalized at their sight, than at that of a statue, of which great numbers were naked in all places.
Thus the sight of those females at Sparta, who danced naked, being only covered with the public honesty, made no ill impression on the beholders. We may pass over, with as much ease, the impurities of our historian, as we forgive to excellent painters nudities, which they too faithfully re- present ; and we may only admire and fix our eyes on the other parts of the piece. Omnia sana sanis. The wise can benefit themselves even by the worst of books, like those ducks of Pontus, to whom, as Aulus Gellius says,57 poisons are rather wholesome than hurtful, or those bees of Pliny, that, being gifted by nature with the virtue of the psilli,68 could usefully feed on the juice and substance of the most venomous weeds. The learned Jesuit, who, in favour of his friend Balsac, writ a treatise against burlesque, cannot for- bear granting as much, since he says,59 " Scriptores nostri quovis £ genere librorum, etiam non optimorum, aucupantur utilitatem aliquam, et omnes undique flosculos delibant : quo fere pacto princeps olim poetarum legere se gemmas ex Enniano stercore dicebat."
The age in which our author wrote was not so reserved in words as this, and perhaps he has not so much followed his own genius in making use of gross or loose expressions, as he has endeavoured to accommodate his way of writing to the humour of the people, not excepting a part of the clergy of those times. Now we ought not to blame those authors who wrote in former ages for differing from us in several things ; since they followed customs and manners which were then generally received, though now they seem to us improper or unjust. To discover all the beauties in their works, we must awhile lay aside the thoughts of our prac- tice, if it contradicts theirs ; otherwise all books will be very
87 Lib. 17. cap. 16. ss Lib. 21. cap. 13 59 F. Vavassor de Ludicra Dictione.
PREFACE. 87
short lived, and the best writers, being disheartened with the thoughts of the speedy oblivion or contempt of their works, will no longer strive to deserve an immortal fame, which fantastic posterity would deny them.
Some would altogether forbid the perusal of our author. Du Verdier, in his Bibliotheque, which gives an account of all those that had written in French, till about the year 1585, has inserted a large invective made against Rabelais, by an author whom I have discovered to be Schoock :M these are his words : " Utinam vel apud illos sit Rabelesus cum suo Pantagruelismo, ut scurrilis hominis scurrili voce abutar. Certe, si quid callet bonaB artis, cogatur in eas tan- dem se exercere alioqui tarn impius homo quarn public^ suis nefariis libellis pestilens, &c. Neque semel deploravi homi- nis sortem, qui in tanta literarum luce tarn densis sese viti- orum tenebris immergit." Others, principally of the papist clergy, have not been more kind to him, of which he him- self complains in some places of his book, much like an au- thor whom he accuses of filching, in his first prologue. It is Angelus Politian, a famous Latin poet who lived a little before him, and was also a priest and a prebend ; he was a great admirer of Plautus, whose perusal the Florentine preachers would not allow in the universities. So, partly on that account, he expresses himself in these terms.
" Sed qui nos damnant, histriones sunt maximi, Nam Curios simulant, vivunt Bacchanalia. Hi sunt praecipue quidam clamosi, leves, Cucullati, lignipedes cincti funibus, Superciliosum, incurvicervicum pecus ; Qui, quod ab aliis et habitu et victu dissentiunt, Tristique vultu vendunt sanctimonias, Censuram sibi quandam, et tyrannidem occupant, Pavidamque plebem territant minaciis."
Epist. lib. 7.
In which verses, by the way, he has made use of a word which an ancient critic, also an admirer of Plautus, mentions as burlesque.61 But to show that our author's way of writ- ing is not of the kind of those which ancient philosophers have condemned, we need but consider that there is at least
60 In Fab. Hamel. p. 31. 61 Cum KvpravKtva mirati sumus,
incurvicervicum vix a risu defendimus. — Quintilian.
88 PREFACE.
as much boldness and impurity in that very Plautus, and the ancient Greek comedy. Yet Cicero, whom all must grant to be a great judge of good writing and morality, speaking of the merry or ridiculing way of writing which was to be condemned, opposes to it that of Plautus, the ancient comedy, and the books of the disciples of Socrates. These -are his words : " Duplex omnino est jocandi genus : unum, illiberale, petulans, flagitiosum, obscoenum : alterum, elegans, urbanum, ingeniosum, facetum. Quo genere non modo Plautus noster et Atticorum antiqua como3dia, sed etiam philosophorum Socraticorum libri referti sunt."
After all, as I could wish that some expressions, which I will not only call too bold and too free, but even immodest and profane, had not been in this book, I would not have those persons to read it whose lives are so well regulated, that they would not employ a moment of which they might not give an account without blushing ; nor those whose minds, not being ripened by years and study, are most susceptible of dangerous impressions. Doubtless they may do much better than to read this book.
Some, therefore, will think, that either it was not to be translated, or ought to have been translated otherwise ; and that, as in the most handsome faces there are always some lines which we could wish were not there ; so, if those things, which here may shock some persons, had been omitted or softened, it would more justly and more generally have pleased : I suppose that the translator would have done so, had he not been afraid to have taken out some ma- terial thing, hid under the veil of some unhappy expression, instead of taking away a bare trifle.
But as what