court of intellectual fantastry present to this picture of
intellectual materialism.

[Sidenote: Short view of the sequels in Book II.]

It was impossible that such a figure should not to a certain extent
dwarf others; but Rabelais, unlike some modern character-mongers, never
lets his psychology interfere with his story. After a few episodes, the
chief of which is the great sign-duel of Thaumast and Panurge himself,
the campaign against the Dipsodes at once enables Pantagruel to display
himself as a war-like hero of romance, permits him fantastic exploits
parallel to his father's, and, by installing Panurge in a lordship of
the conquered country and determining him, after "eating his corn in
the blade," to "marry and settle," introduces the larger and most
original part of the whole work--the debates and counsellings on the
marriage in the Third Book, and, after the failure of this, the voyage
to settle the matter at the Oracle of the Bottle in the Fourth and
Fifth. This "plot," if it may be called so, is fairly central and
continuous throughout, but it gives occasion for the most surprising
"alarums and excursions," variations and divagations, of the author's
inexhaustible humour, learning, inventive fertility, and never-failing
faculty of telling a tale. If the book does sometimes in a fashion "hop
forty paces in the public street," and at others gambade in a less
decorous fashion even than hopping, it is also Cleopatresque in its
absolute freedom from staleness and from tedium.

[Sidenote: _Pantagruel_ II. (Book III.)

The marriage of Panurge and the consultations on it.]

The Third Book has less of apparent variety in it, and less of what
might be called striking incident, than any of the others, being all but
wholly occupied by the enquiries respecting the marriage of Panurge. But
this gives it a "unity" which is of itself attractive to some tastes,
while the delightful sonnet to the spirit Of Marguerite,

Esprit abstraict, ravy et ecstatique,

(perhaps the best example of _rhetoriqueur_ poetry), at the beginning,
and the last sight (except in letters) of Gargantua at the end, with the
curious _coda_ on the "herb Pantagruelion" (the ancestor of Joseph de
Maistre's famous eulogy of the Executioner), give, as it were, handle
and top to it in unique fashion. But the body of it is the thing. The
preliminary outrunning of the constable--had there been constables in
Salmigondin, but they probably knew the sto