tatues at Rome, called Pasquino and Marforio,
were used as billboards to which the people affixed squibbs and
lampoons against the government and public men. Erasmus laughed at
everything; {694} Luther and Murner belabored each other with ridicule;
a man like Peter Aretino owed his evil eminence in the art of
blackmailing to his wit.

[Sidenote: Rabelais, c. 1490-1553]

But the "master of scoffing," as Bacon far too contemptuously called
him, was Rabelais. His laughter is as multitudinous as the ocean
billows, and as wholesome as the sunshine. He laughed not because he
scorned life but because he loved it; he did not "warm both hands"
before the fire of existence, he rollicked before its blaze. It cannot
be said that he took a "slice of life" as his subject, for this would
imply a more exquisite excision than he would care to make; rather he
reached out, in the fashion of his time, and pulled with both hands
from the dish before him, the very largest and fattest chunk of life
that he could grasp. "You never saw a man," he said of himself, "who
would more love to be king or to be rich than I would, so that I could
live richly and not work and not worry, and that I might enrich all my
friends and all good, wise people." Like Whitman he was so in love
with everything that the mere repetition of common names delighted him.
It took pages to tell what Pantagruel ate and still more pages to tell
what he drank. This giant dressed with a more than royal lavishness
and when he played cards, how many games do you suppose Rabelais
enumerated one after the other without pausing to take breath? Two
hundred and fourteen! So he treated everything; his appetite was like
Gargantua's mouth. This was the very stamp of the age; it was
gluttonous of all pleasures, of food and drink and gorgeous clothes and
fine dwellings and merry-making without end, and adventure without
stint or limit. Almost every sixteenth-century man was a Pantagruel,
whose lust for living fully and hotly no satiety could cloy, no fear of
consequences {695} dampen. The ascetic gloom and terror of the Middle
Ages burned away like an early fog before the summer sun. Men saw the
world unfolding before them as if in a second creation, and they hurled
themselves on it with but one fear, that they should be too slow or too
backward to garner all its wonder and all its pleasure for themselves.

[Sidenote: Tales of vagabonds]

And the people were no longer cont