_esprit
gaulois_--found its heroic expression; he made use of it because he must;
and we can no more eliminate it from his work than we can remove the
quality of imagination from Shakespeare's or those of art and intellect
from Ben Jonson's. Other men are as foul or fouler; but in none is
foulness so inbred and so ingrained, from none is it so inseparable. Few
have had so much genius, and in none else has genius been so curiously
featured.

His Secret.

It is significant enough that with all this against him he should have
been from the first a great moral and literary influence and the delight
of the wisest and soundest minds the world has seen. Shakespeare read
him, and Jonson; Montaigne, a greater than himself, is in some sort his
descendant; Swift, in Coleridge's enlightening phrase, is 'anima
Rabelaesii habitans in sicco'; to Sterne and Balzac and Moliere he was a
constant inspiration; unto this day his work is studied and his meanings
are sought with almost religious devoutness; while his phrases have
passed into the constitution of a dozen languages, and the great figures
he scrawled across the face of the Renaissance have survived the movement
that gave them being, and are ranked with the monuments of literature.
Himself has given us the reasons in the prologue to the first book, where
he tells of the likeness between Socrates and the boxes called Sileni,
and discourses of the manifest resemblance of his own work with Socrates.
'Opening this box,' which is Socrates, says he, 'you would have found
within it a heavenly and inestimable drug, a more than human
understanding, an admirable virtue, matchless learning, invincible
courage, inimitable sobriety, certain contentment of mind, perfect
assurance, and an incredible disregard of all that for which men
cunningly do so much watch, run, sail, fight, travel, toil, and turmoil
themselves.' In such wise must his book be opened, and the 'high
conceptions' with which it is stuffed will presently be apparent. Nay,
more: you are to do with it even as a dog with a marrowbone. 'If you
have seen him you might have remarked with what devotion and
circumspection he watches and wards it; with what care he keeps it; how
fervently he holds it; how prudently he gobbets it; with what affection
he breaks it; with what diligence he sucks it.' And in the same way you
'by a sedulous lecture and frequent meditation' shall break the bone and
suck out the marrow of these bo