turn from the dust and din and chatter of
modern life, with its growing trade in heroes and its poverty of men, its
innumerable regrets and ambitions and desires, to this immense
tranquillity, this candid and shining calm. They had no Irish Question
then, you can reflect, nor was theology invented. Men were not afraid of
life nor ashamed of death; and you could be heroic without a dread of
clever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for no
hope of illuminated scrolls. Odysseus disguised as Irus is still
Odysseus and august. How comes it that Mr. Gladstone in rags and singing
ballads would be only fit for a police-station? that Lord Salisbury
hawking cocoa-nuts would instantly suggest the purlieus of Petticoat
Lane? Is the fault in ourselves? Can it be that we have deteriorated so
much as that? Nerves, nerves, nerves! . . . These many centuries the
world has had neuralgia; and what has come of it is that Robert Elsmere
is an ideal, and the bleat of the sentimentalist might almost be mistaken
for the voice of living England.

RABELAIS

His Essence.

Rabelais is not precisely a book for bachelors and maids--at times,
indeed, is not a book for grown men. There are passages not to be read
without a blush and a sensation of sickness: the young giant which is the
Renaissance being filthy and gross as Nature herself at her grossest and
her most filthy. It is argued that this is all deliberate--is an effect
of premeditation: that Rabelais had certain home-truths to deliver to his
generation, and delivered them in such terms as kept him from the fagot
and the rope by bedaubing him with the renown of a common buffoon. But
the argument is none of the soundest in itself, and may fairly be set
aside as a piece of desperate special pleading, the work of counsel at
their wits' end for matter of defence. For Rabelais clean is not
Rabelais at all. His grossness is an essential component in his mental
fabric, an element in whose absence he would be not Rabelais but somebody
else. It inspires his practice of art to the full as thoroughly as it
informs his theory of language. He not only employs it wherever it might
be useful: he goes out of his way to find it, he shovels it in on any and
every occasion, he bemerds his readers and himself with a gusto that
assuredly is not a common characteristic of defensive operations. In
him, indeed, the humour of Old France--the broad, rank, unsavoury