raught of excellent white wine. The pilgrims, thus devoured, made
shift to save themselves, as well as they could, by drawing their
bodies out of the reach of the grinders of his teeth, but could
not escape from thinking they had been put in the lowest dungeon of
a prison. And, when Gargantua whiffed the great draught, they
thought to have drowned in his mouth, and the flood of wine had
almost carried them away into the gulf of his stomach.
Nevertheless, skipping with their bourbons, as St. Michael's
palmers used to do, they sheltered themselves from the danger of
that inundation under the banks of his teeth. But one of them, by
chance, groping, or sounding the country with his staff, to try
whether they were in safety or no, struck hard against the cleft of
a hollow tooth, and hit the mandibulary sinew or nerve of the jaw,
which put Gargantua to very great pain, so that he began to cry for
the rage that he felt. To ease himself, therefore, of his smarting
ache, he called for his tooth-picker, and, rubbing towards a young
walnut-tree, where they lay skulking, unnestled you my gentlemen
pilgrims. For he caught one by the legs, another by the scrip,
another by the pocket, another by the scarf, another by the band of
the breeches; and the poor fellow that had hurt him with the
bourbon, him he hooked to him by [another part of his clothes]....
The pilgrims, thus dislodged, ran away.

Rabelais closes his story with jocose irreverent application of
Scripture,--a manner of his which gives some color to the tradition of a
biblical pun made by him on his death-bed.

The closest English analogue to Rabelais is undoubtedly Dean Swift. We
probably never should have had "Gulliver's Travels" from Swift, if we
had not first had Gargantua and Pantagruel from Rabelais. Swift,
however, differs from Rabelais as well as resembles him. Whereas
Rabelais is simply monstrous in invention, Swift in invention submits
himself loyally to law. Give Swift his world of Liliput and Brobdingnag
respectively, and all, after that, is quite natural and probable. The
reduction or the exaggeration is made upon a mathematically calculated
scale. For such verisimilitude Rabelais cares not a straw. His various
inventions are recklessly independent one of another. A characteristic
of Swift thus is scrupulous conformity to whimsical law. Rabelais is
remarkab