e been said. But the abstract has been given, and the
further comment is now added, with the purpose of showing, in a little
detail, how immensely the resources and inspirations of future
practitioners were enriched and strengthened, varied and multiplied, by
_Gargantua_ and _Pantagruel_. The book as a whole is to be classed, no
doubt, as "Eccentric" fiction. But if you compare with Rabelais that one
of his followers[108] who possessed most genius and who worked at his
following with most deliberation, you will find an immense falling off
in richness and variety as well as in strength. The inferiority of
Sterne to Master Francis in his serious pieces, whether he is whimpering
over dead donkeys and dying lieutenants, or simulating honest
indignation against critics, is too obvious to need insistence. Nor can
one imagine any one--unless, like Mackenzie and other misguided
contemporaries or juniors, he himself wanted to whimper, or unless he
also aimed at the _fatrasie_--going to Sterne for pattern or
inspiration. Now Rabelais is a perpetual fount of inspiration, an
inexhaustible magazine of patterns to the most "serious" novelist whose
seriousness is not of the kind designated by that term in dissenting
slang. That abounding narrative faculty which has been so much dwelt on
touches so many subjects, and manages to carry along with it so many
moods, thoughts, and even feelings, that it could not but suggest to any
subsequent writer who had in him the germ of the novelist's art, how to
develop and work out such schemes as might occur to him. While, for his
own countrymen at least, the vast improvement which he made in French
prose, and which, with the accomplishment of his younger contemporaries
Amyot and Montaigne, established the greatness of that prose itself, was
a gain, the extent of which cannot be exaggerated. Therefore it has
seemed not improper to give him a chapter to himself, and to treat his
book with a minuteness not often to be paralleled in this
_History_.[109]

FOOTNOTES:

[90] A complete argument on this much vexed subject can hardly be wished
for here: but it may be permitted to say that nearly fifty years'
consideration of the matter has left less and less doubt in my mind as
to the genuineness of the "_Quart_" or "_Quint_" _Livre_ as it is
variously called--according as _Gargantua_ is numbered separately or
not. One of the apparently strongest arguments against its
genuineness--the constant presence of