e rather skirts than actually invades the
most dangerous ground. It is the Decretals, not the doctrines, that are
satirised, and Homenas, bishop of Papimania, despite his adoration of
these forgeries, and the slightly suspicious number and prettiness of
the damsels who wait upon him, is a very good fellow and an excellent
host. There is something very soothing in his metaphorical way of
demanding wine from his Hebes, "_Clerice_, esclaire icy," the necessary
illumination being provided by a charming girl with a hanap of
"extravagant" wine. These agreeable if satiric experiences--for the
Decretals do no harm beyond exciting the bile of Master Epistemon (who,
it is to be feared, was a little of a pedant)--are followed by the once
more almost universally known passage of the "Frozen Words" and the
visit to "Messer Gaster, the world's first Master of Arts"; by the
islands (once more mysterious) of Chaneph (hypocrisy) and Ganabin
(thieves); the book concluding abruptly with an ultra-farcical
_cochonnerie_ of the lower kind, relieved partially by a libellous but
impossible story about our Edward the _Fifth_ and the poet Villon again,
as well as by the appearance of an interesting but not previously
mentioned member of the crew of the _Thalamege_ (Pantagruel's flagship),
the great cat Rodilardus.

[Sidenote: _Pantagruel_ IV. (Book V.) The second part of the voyage. The
"Isle Sonnante."]

[Sidenote: The "Chats Fourres."]

One of the peculiarities of the Fifth Book, and perhaps one of those
which have aroused that suspicion about it which, after what has been
said above, it is not necessary further to discuss, is that it is more
"in blocks" than the others.[105] The eight chapters of the _Isle
Sonnante_ take up the satire of the Fourth Book on Papimania and on the
"Papegaut," who is here introduced in a much fiercer tone--a tone which,
if one cared for hypothetical criticism, might be attributed with about
equal probability to a genuine deepening of hostile feeling, to absence
of revision, and to possible sophistication by some one into whose hands
it fell between the author's death and its publication. But a perfectly
impartial critic, who, on the one hand, does not, in Carlyle's admirable
phrase, "regard the Universe as a hunting-field from which it were good
and pleasant to drive the Pope," and, on the other, is content to regard
the extremer Protestants as singularly unpleasant persons without
pronouncing Ernulphus-curses