brainless
and wholly bloodless teachers whose doctrine he himself on the one hand,
and Luther on the other, arose together to smite severally--to smite them
hip and thigh, even till the going down of the sun; the mock sun or
marshy meteor that served only to deepen the darkness encompassing on
every side the doubly dark ages--the ages of monarchy and theocracy, the
ages of death and of faith. To Panurge, therefore, it was unnecessary
and it might have seemed inconsequent to attribute other gifts or
functions than are proper to such intelligence as may accompany the
appetites of an animal. That most irreverend father in God, Friar John,
belongs to a higher class in the moral order of being; and he much rather
than his fellow-voyager and penitent is properly comparable with
Falstaff. It is impossible to connect the notion of rebuke with the sins
of Panurge. The actual lust and gluttony, the imaginary cowardice of
Falstaff, have been gravely and sharply rebuked by critical morality; we
have just noted a too recent and too eminent example of this; but what
mortal ever dreamed of casting these qualities in the teeth of his
supposed counterpart? The difference is as vast between Falstaff on the
field of battle and Panurge on the storm-tossed deck as between Falstaff
and Hotspur, Panurge and Friar John. No man could show cooler and
steadier nerve than is displayed in either case--by the lay as well as
the clerical namesake of the fourth evangelist. If ever fruitless but
endless care was shown to prevent misunderstanding, it was shown in the
pains taken by Shakespeare to obviate the misconstruction which would
impute to Falstaff the quality of a Parolles or a Bobadil, a Bessus or a
Moron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in the
crowning interlude of _La Princesse d'Elide_ shows once more, I may
remark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly as
Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympian
incontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and less
exuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well-
spring of the _Dive Bouteille_.

It is needless to do over again the work which was done, and well done, a
hundred years since, by the writer whose able essay in vindication and
exposition of the genuine character of Falstaff elicited from Dr. Johnson
as good a jest and as bad a criticism as might have been expected. His
argument is too t