are alone. Caricatured as his types purposely are, they are
all easily reducible to natural dimensions and properties; while
occasionally, though all too rarely, the author drops his mask and
speaks gravely, seriously, and then always wisely. These latter passages
are, it may be added, unsurpassed in mere prose style for many long
years after the author's death.

Altogether, independently of the intrinsic interest of Rabelais' work,
we go to him as we can go to only some score or half score of the
greatest writers of the world, for a complete reflection of the
sentiment and character of his time. As with all great writers, what he
shows is in great part characteristic of humanity at all times and in
all places, but, as also with all great writers except Shakespeare, more
of it is local and temporary merely. This local and temporary element
gives him his great historical importance. Rabelais is the literary
exponent of the earlier Renaissance, with its appetite for the good
things of the world as yet unblunted. Yet even in him there is a
foretaste of satiety, and the Oracle of the Bottle has something, for
all its joyousness, of the conclusion of the Preacher.

The popularity of Rabelais was immense, and of itself sufficed to
protect him against the enmity which his hardly veiled attacks on
monachism, and on other fungoid growths of the Church, could not have
failed to attract. In such a case imitation was certain, and, long
before the genuine series of the Pantagrueline Chronicles was
completed, spurious supplements and continuations appeared, all of them
without exception worthless. A more legitimate imitation coloured the
work of many of the fiction writers of the remaining part of the
century, though the tradition of short story writing, on the model of
the Fabliaux and of the Italian tales borrowed from them, continued and
was only indirectly affected by Rabelais. In this latter class one
mediocre writer and two of the greatest talent--of talent amounting
almost to genius--have to be noticed. In 1535, Nicholas of Troyes, a
saddler by trade, produced a book entitled _Grand Parangon de Nouvelles
Nouvelles_, in which he followed rather, as his title indicates, the
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_ than any other model. His sources seem to
have been the _Decameron_ and the _Gesta Romanorum_ principally, though
some of his tales are original. Very different books are the _Contes_ of
Marguerite de Navarre, usually termed the 'H