re full of
ambergris and myrrh and all manner of precious odours.

And the picture of the banquet "when they fell to the chat of the
afternoon's collation and began great goblets to ring, great bowls to
ting, great gammons to trot; pour me out the fair Greek wine, the
extravagant wine, the good wine, Lacrima Christi, supernaculum!"
And, above all, the most holy Abbey of Thelema, over the gate of
which was written the words that are never far from the hearts of
wise Utopian Christians, the profound words, the philosophical
words, the most shrewd Cabalistic words, and the words that
"lovers" alone can understand--"Fay que ce Vouldray!" Do as Thou
Wilt!

Little they know of Rabelais who call him a lewd buffoon--the
profanest of mountebanks. He was one of those rare spirits that
redeem humanity. To open his book--though the steam of the
grossness of it rises to Heaven--is to touch the divine fingers--the
fingers that heal the world.

How that "style" of his, that great oceanic avalanche of learning and
piety and obscenity and gigantic merriment, smells of the honest
earth!

How, with all his huge scholarship, he loves to depend for his
richest, most human effects, upon his own peasant-people of
Touraine! The proverbs of the country-side, the wisdom of tavern-wit,
the shrewdness and fantasy of old wives tales, the sly earthly
humors of farmers and vine-tenders and goat-herds and goose-girls--these
are things out of which he distils his vision, his oracles, his courage.

There is also--who could help observing it?--a certain large and
patriarchal homeliness--a kind of royal domesticity--about much that
he writes. Those touches, as when Gargantua, his little dog in
advance, enters the dining hall, when they are discussing Panurge's
marriage, and they all rise to do him honor; as when Gargantua bids
Pantagruel farewell and gives him a benediction so wise and tender;
remain in the mind like certain passages in the Bible. These are the
things that aesthetic fools "with varnished faces" easily overlook and
misunderstand; but good simple fellows--"honest cods" as Rabelais
would say--are struck to the heart by them. How proud the man
might be, who in the turmoil of this troublesome world and beneath
the mystery of "le grand Peut-etre" could answer to the ultimate
question, "I am a Christian of the faith of Rabelais!"

Such a one, under the spell of such a master, might indeed be able to
comfort the sick and sorry, and to wh