ble. Pantagruel's own serious
wisdom supplies not a few of them, and the long and very characteristic
episode of Judge Bridoye and his decision by throw of dice is very
loosely connected with the main subject. But the most noteworthy of
these excursions comes, as has been said, at the end--the last personal
appearance of the good Gargantua, and the famous discourse, several
chapters long, on the Herb Pantagruelion, otherwise Hemp.

[Sidenote: _Pantagruel_ III. (IV.) The first part of the voyage.]

The Fourth Book (Third of _Pantagruel_) starts the voyage, and begins to
lead the commentator who insists on fixing and interpreting the
innumerable real or apparent double, treble, and almost centuple
meanings, into a series of dances almost illimitable. As has been
suggested more than once, the most reasonable way is probably to regard
the whole as an intentional mixture of covert satire, pure fooling, not
a little deliberate leading astray, and (serving as vehicle and
impelling force at once) the irresistible narrative impulse animating
the writer and carrying the reader on to the end--any end, if it be only
the Other End of Nowhere. The "curios," living and other, of Medamothi
(Nowhere to begin with!), and the mysterious appearance of a shipful of
travellers coming back from the Land of Lanterns, whither the
Pantagruelian party is itself bound; the rather too severely punished
ill-manners of the sheep-dealer Dindenault; the strange isles of various
nature--such, especially, as the abode of the bailiffs and
process-servers, which gives occasion to the admirably told story of
Francois Villon and the Seigneur of Basche; the great storm--another of
the most famous passages of the book--with the cowardice of Panurge and
the safe landing in the curious country of the Macreons (long-livers);
the evil island where reigns Quaresmeprenant, and the elaborate analysis
of that personage by the learned Xenomanes; the alarming Physeter
(blowing whale) and his defeat by Pantagruel; the land of the
Chitterlings, the battle with them, and the interview and peace-making
with their Queen Niphleseth (a passage at which the sculduddery-hunters
have worked their hardest), and then the islands of the Papefigues and
the Papimanes, where Rabelais begins his most obvious and boldest
meddling with the great ecclesiastical-political questions of the
day--all these things and others flit past the reader as if in an actual
voyage. Even here, however, h