1826.] Memoirs and Writings of Rabelais. 523 
episcopal ‘comment.’ Epistemon, the veracious Epistemon, is’ a sample 
for travellers’ to~imitate + the*physician Rondibilis is as true to life‘as if 
he had just-doie’ walking the hospitals ; while the old lawyer who gives 
that adinitable' advice'to his son—never to interfere in a dispute until 
both ‘contending’ parties were exhausted, —- manifestly drew his hints 
from ‘Rabelais’ own personal’ experience. What again can be truer 
to human character than Pichrocole and his courtiers: the one all 
pride ‘and ignorance, the other all suppleness and sycophancy, numbering 
un-Alnaschar-like the future trophies of the monarch, until put to shame 
by the unexpected candour of one crafty old statesman, who advises 
the acquisition of the different kingdoms previous to their being 
divided, for which he is of course disgraced? For mere richness of 
humour, nothing can exceed the account of the shepherd tossed out 
of the ship by Panurge; who stands upon deck, archly enumerating 
to the drowning wretch the manifold blessings of that heaven to which 
he is just dispatching him; and congratulating him upon the speed 
with which he is likely to change this wicked world for an imperishable 
crown of glory. The Demi-semi-quaver Friar is the most matter-of- 
fact ecclesiastic we ever yet met with, and pairs well with the mathe- 
matician whose highest poetical conceptions were drawn from the 
stanzas “thirty days hath September.” So much (and we have sketched 
but few of them) for his characters ; his chapters are equally felicitous. 
‘That on paying debts especially, wherein he proves that debt is the sole 
chain which binds this earth to heaven, and that nothing is more satis- 
factory to a philanthropist than to know that when he dies his memory 
will be dear to some; viz. to his creditors, who will recal his last mo- 
ments with a sigh, comes home to the sensibilities of all. A chapter on 
catchpoles, too, which contains inter alia a receipt for destroying these 
offensive vermin, and in which our humourist accounts for his own disin- 
clination to pay his debts, by stating that a friend of his dropped sud- 
denly dead while discharging an old tick (tick doloureux, we presume), 
and that he is apprehensive of encountering a like accident, deserves uni- 
versal consideration. Sometimes, however, in his eagerness to commit 
‘extravagance, Rabelais goes beyond all bounds: as in the description of 
Pantagruel’s mouth, which(although it has a political tendency) is never- 
theless outrageously insipid. A greater praise cannot be given to the 
account of Epistemon’s decapitation, and the subsequent junction of his 
head with his shoulders; not that we think the absence of a head at all 
marvellous (many of our most esteemed friends being in this predi- 
cament), but that the chapter itself is intrusive and superfluous, whether 
in point of wit or fancy. Another peculiarity in Rabelais, is the quaint 
grave humour of his various chapters: these are dijoux in themselves, 
and we therefore subjoin a few for the reader’s amusement. 
Chapter 3. Book 3.—How Panurge praiseth debtors and borrowers with a 
word in praise of patient creditors. 
Chapter 7.—Panurge’s exposition of the monastic mystery of powdered 
pee 
Chapter 10.—How Pantagruel praiseth dumb women, 
» Chapter 32.—How the physician Rondibilis declareth cuckoldry to be natu- 
‘rally one of the appendages of marriage.* 
* Imitated by Arbuthnot in his John Bull. 
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