all the future. This done, they turned to their rest.

[Sidenote: The war.]

It is only after this serious training that the first important division
of what may be called the action begins--the "War of the Cakes," in
which certain outrageous bakers, subjects of King Picrochole of Lerne,
first refuse the custom of the good Grandgousier's shepherds, and then
violently assault them, the incident being turned by the choleric
monarch into a _casus belli_ against the peaceful one. Invasion, the
early triumph of the aggressor, the triumphant appearance of the
invincible Friar John, and the complete turning of the tables by the
advent of Gargantua and his terrible mare, follow each other in rapid
and brilliant telling, and perhaps no parts of the book are better
known. The extraordinary felicity with which Rabelaisian irony--here
kept in quieter but intenser activity than almost anywhere else--seizes
and renders the common causes, excuses, manners, etc., of war can never
have escaped competent readers; but it must have struck more persons of
late than perhaps at any former time. It would be impertinent to
particularise largely; but if the famous adaptation and amplification of
the old Pyrrhus story in the counsel of Spadassin and Merdaille to
Picrochole were printed in small type as the centre of a fathom-square
sheet, the whole margin could be more than filled with extracts, from
German books and newspapers, of advice to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Nor is
there anything, in literature touching history, where irony has bitten
more deeply and lastingly into Life and Time than the brief record of
Picrochole's latter days after his downfall.

He was informed by an old hag that his kingdom would be
restored to him at the coming of the Cocqsigrues: since then
it is not certainly known what has become of him. However, I
have been told that he now works for his poor living at
Lyons, and is as choleric as ever. And always he bemoans
himself to strangers about the Cocqsigrues--yet with a
certain hope, according to the old woman's prophecy, that at
their coming he will be reinstated in his kingdom.

Edward FitzGerald would have called this "terrible"; and perhaps it is.

But there is much more humour than terror in the rest, and sometimes
there are qualities different from either. The rescue of the sacred
precincts of the Abbey of Seuille from the invaders by that glorious
monk (a personage at no gre