iage
are the happiest outcome. Panurge, for whom the suggestion was derived
from the macaronic poet Folengo, is the fellow of Shakespeare's
Falstaff, in his lack of morals, his egoism, his inexhaustible wit;
he is the worst and best of company. We would dispense with such a
disreputable associate if we could, but save that he is a "very wicked
lewd rogue," he is "the most virtuous man in the world," and we cannot
part with him. Panurge would marry, but fears lest he may be the victim
of a faithless wife; every mode of divination, every source of
prediction except one is resorted to, and still his fate hangs
threatening; it only remains to consult the oracle of La Dive
Bouteille. The voyaging quest is long and perilous; in each island
at which the adventurers touch, some social or ecclesiastical abuse
is exhibited for ridicule; the word of the oracle is in the end the
mysterious "Drink"--drink, that is, if one may venture to interpret
an oracle, of the pure water of wisdom and knowledge, and let the
unknown future rest.

The obscenity and ordure of Rabelais were to the taste of his time;
his severer censures of Church and State were disguised by his
buffoonery; flinging out his good sense and wise counsels with a
liberal hand, he also wields vigorously the dunghill pitchfork. If
he is gross beyond what can be described, he is not, apart from the
evil of such grossness, a corrupter of morals, unless morals be
corrupted by a belief in the goodness of the natural man. The graver
wrongs of his age--wars of ambition, the abuse of public justice,
the hypocrisies, cruelties, and lethargy of the ecclesiastics,
distrust of the intellectual movement, spurious ideals of life--are
vigorously condemned. Rabelais loves goodness, charity, truth; he
pleads for the right of manhood to a full and free development of
all its powers; and if questions of original sin and divine grace
trouble him little, and his creed has some of the hardihood of the
Renaissance, he is full of filial gratitude to _le bon Dieu_ for His
gift of life, and of a world in which to live strongly should be to
live joyously.

The influence of Rabelais is seen in the writers of prose tales who
were his contemporaries and successors; but they want his broad good
sense and real temperance. BONAVENTURE DES PERIERS, whom Marguerite
of Navarre favoured, and whose _Nouvelles Recreations_, with more
of the tradition of the French fabliaux and farces and less of the
Italia