1826.4 Memoirs and Writings of Rabeldit. 519 
rambles over every known’ branch of literature, His imagination—a 
véty rare faculty among’ those who possess what is called wit—is fruitful 
and at command, and withal so prodigally expended, that, like the 
fabled cornucopia, the reader would suppose it exhaustless. _ One great 
wit—no matter how quaint or antiquated—will invariably generate a 
prodigious number of minor ones; and to Rabelais’ luxuriant oddities 
we owe the best, and worst parts of Swift vz. his Gulliver,* his Tale of 
a Tub, and ‘his obscenities. ‘Sterne’ borrowed unblushingly from his 
pages; as also did Arbuthnot, Pope, Prior; and in his own language 
Voltaire, the latter of whom has manifestly derived his conception of 
Micromegas from Gargantua. Unlike most men of imagination, Rabe- 
lais was personally courageous; and, at a period when the spiritual 
thunders of the Vatican yet rolled in all their grandeur over Europe, 
dared to expose the iniquities of the priesthood under the very nose of 
his Holiness. “Like Fontaine and our own Goldsmith, he was, worldlily 
speaking, negligent: more however, we conceive, from an indifference 
to popular opinion than from any innate frivolity of character. His 
learning, at a time when the most abstruse and severe sciences were 
cultivated ; when no one ever thought of appearing in print until years 
of disciplined reflection had qualified him for the task, was even then 
astonishingly profound. The “ sermones utriusque lingue” were 
engrained into his very soul, forming “ part and parcel” of his nature ; 
so much so, that he travestied and turned to account the ethics of Aris- 
totle, Plato, and Xenophon, with as much felicitous tact as the humour 
of Lucian and the imaginative splendour of /Eschylus. Throughout 
the satirical allegory of Gargantua, Pantagruel, and the Voyage to the 
Holy Bottle, we may trace the choicest sentiments of the classics, 
expressed in language that every where rivals the originals. Rabelais, 
be it here observed, ‘is better adapted to the comprehension of an 
Englishman’ than a’ Frenchman. The reason of this is obvious: the 
Indigetes of a country seldom pay any minute attention to the niceties of 
their own tongue, but learn all foreign ones grammatically ; and the 
vicissitudes of ‘time, ‘though here and there they may remodel ‘the 
diction, can have but little effect on the leading principles of a language. 
This ‘Chaucer,’ Spenser, Gower, and our earlier writers, are in general 
more easily mastered by foreigners, who have studied the language in 
which they wrote grammatically, than by Englishmen, who understand 
the verbal varieties of their own tongue more from habitual usage, than 
from the laws either of syntax or etymology. 
“To resume: in the use to which Rabelais applied his learning he 
bears no indistinct resemblance to the English authors of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. Like Ben Jonson and Butler, his varied 
> i - - Tita? ; 
* We pause hereto express our astonishment, that Dr. Johnson, in his Life of 
Swift, should have bestowed on “ Gulliver” the praise of a rich invention. The idea, be 
it hinted, and not unfrequently the very incidents, are so far from being original, that 
ney ae deed, with but Jittle variation, from Pantagruel’s Voyage to the Holy 
Bortle. "The misanthropy, indeed, that hangs like a foul blight over the pages of 
Gillliver, is Swift’s own: his detestable character furnished an ample source of irrita- 
bilit fate an excellent, article on this subject in the Edinburgh Review]; but the 
It GE and invention of his romance, which would lead the uninformed reader to sup- 
posit tlle Dean's, may be fairly ascribed to his close acquaintance with Rabelais. 
ms rtor Bilchah, in a recent medical publication, has attempted to account, physically 
for Swift’§ anomalous mature. “The reasons he assigns for it we wowd hope, for the 
pride of human nature, are falge. : 
