ENGLISH CYCLOPEDIA. 



BIOGRAPHY. 



The names of those living at the time of the continuous publication of the 'English Cyelopcedia of Biography,' are preceded by an asterisk. 



EABELAIS, FRANCOIS. 



RABENER, GOTTLIEB WILHELM. 



T> ABELAIS, FRANCOIS, was born in 1483, at Chinon in Touraine, 

 -**' of humble parents. He entered the order of St. Francis, but his 

 jovial temper and satirical humour made him obnoxious to his 

 -.brother monks, and he was glad to obtain permission to remove into a 

 convent of Benedictines. But here also he could not sympathise with 

 the habits of his brethren, and at last he ran away from his convent, 

 and went to Montpelier, where he studied medicine and took his 

 doctor's degree. He practised as a physician, though he retained the 

 garb of a secular priest ; and in his capacity of physician he became 

 known at the court of Francis I. In 1536 he accompanied Cardinal 

 du Belloi to Rome, and obtained the pope's absolution for the breach 

 of his monastic vows. On his return to France he obtained a prebend 

 in a collegiate church, and was afterwards appointed cure or rector of 

 Meudon, in which situation he continued till his death in 1553. 



Rabelais was a man of extensive and varied information ; he was 

 acquainted with the principal European languages, besides Latin and 

 Greek, but his principal merit consists in overflowing humour, and in 

 the acutenesa with which he caught at and exposed the absurdities 

 and the vices of his contemporaries, sheltered as they were by hallowed 

 prejudice or by the cloak of superstition and hypocrisy. His principal 

 work is a satirical novel, in which, under an allegorical veil, he lashes 

 all classes of society, kings, statesmen, scholars, clerical as well as lay, 

 prelates and popes, and especially monks, of whom he seems to have 

 had a special dislike. Rabelais took for his first hero Gargantua, a 

 gigantic personage, about whom there were many wonderful traditional 

 stories, to which Rabelais added many more. Gargantua lived for 

 several centuries, and at last begot a son, Pantagruel, who is as won- 

 derful as himself; beneath his tongue a whole army takes shelter from 

 rain ; in his mouth and throat are cities which contain an immense 

 population, &c. The adventures of these personages are all ridiculous, 

 and are described in humorous language, which often descends to low 

 buffoonery and very frequently to obscenity. This obscenity was 

 according to the taste of the age, but it now is, in its loathsome 

 excess, the chief drawback to the reading of the book. But under 

 this coarse covering there lies a moral, for Rabelais meant to correct 

 and improve society by his satire. He exposes the faults of the educa- 

 tion of his time, the barbarous eloquence of college pedants, the folly 

 of scholastic disputation, and the pretensions of self-styled philo- 

 sophers ; all which are successively held up to ridicule in the harangue 

 of Janotus de Braginardo, in which he demands back the bells of the 

 cathedral of Notre Dame, which Gargantua had detached from the 

 belfry and appended to the neck of his mare ; in the curious catalogue 

 of the books of the library of St. Victor; in the disputation carried 

 on by signs between Panurge and the English Thaumaste ; and, lastly, 

 in the description of the prodigies which science had produced in the 

 country of Quint-Essence, or kingdom of Ente'le'chie. In another 

 part of his work the author exposes the manners of courts and the 

 weakness even of good monarchs. Pantagruel is a virtuous prince, 

 devout, and severe in his morals, and yet he takes for his favourite 

 Panurge, an arrant rogue, a drunkard, a coward, and a libertine, who 

 seems to be a counterpart of the Margutte of Pulci's 'Morgante Mag-' 

 giore,' for Rabelais was acquainted with the Italian romance writers, 

 whose tales of giants and heroes and their wonderful achievements he 

 probably had in view in his caricatures. The disastrous wars of 

 Charles VIII. and Francis I. had produced too many evils in his time 

 not to attract Rabelais' censure. To the headlong ambition of those 

 conquerors he opposes the prudence and moderation of bis heroes, 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. v. 



who, before they enter upon even a defensive war, exhaust every 

 means of conciliation. Rabelais sneers openly at the pretensions of 

 the popes to interfere in temporal matters, and in Ms fourth book 

 he exposes the pretended mortifications of a certain cla?s of devotees 

 who feasted on meagre days on a variety of dishes of the finest fish 

 and other savoury things. 



It has been assumed by some that Rabelais' work is a continued 

 allegory of the events and personages of his time ; and people have 

 fancied that they recognised Francis I. in Gargantua, Henri II. in 

 Pantagruel, Louis XII. in Grand Gousier, &c. This however seems 

 very doubtful, and the notion has been strongly combated by Ch. 

 Nodier, in an article ' De quelques livres satiriques et de leur clef,' 

 Paris, 1834. It seems more likely that Rabelais made occasional 

 allusions to some of the leading characters of his age and their pre- 

 vailing faults, while he lashed in general the vices and follies of society. 

 With regard to the traditional stories of Gargantua, which he took 

 for his subject, see 'Notice de deux ancieus Romans, intituled lea 

 Chroniques de Gargantua, ou Ton examine les rapporta qui existent 

 entre ces deux ouvrages et le Gargantua de Rabelais, et si la premiere 

 de ces Chroniques n'est pas aussi de 1'auteur de Pautagruel,' by J. Cb. 

 Brunet, author of the ' Nouvelles Recherches Bibliographiques/ 

 Paris, 1824. 



The romance of Rabelais has gone through several editions, and has 

 been translated into German and English. One of the best French 

 editions is that by Duchat, ' (Euvres de Maitre Frangois Rabelais, avec 

 des remarques historiques et critiques,' 3 vols. 4to, Amsterdam, 1741. 

 An excellent recent French edition of the works of Rabelais is that 

 published by E. Johanneau and Esmangart, with a biography of the 

 author, and his 'Songes drolatiques,' being a collection of one hundred 

 and twenty caricatures, designed by Rabelais himself, and intended to 

 represent the characters of his romance, and also his ' Sciomachie,' a 

 work which had become extremely scarce. Swift, in his ' Gulliver's 

 Travels,' has imitated Rabelais. Rabelais was charged in his lifetime 

 with irreligion and heresy, but he was protected by Francis I., who, 

 having read his romance, said that he found no grounds for the charge. 

 Rabelais knew Calvin, who at one time thought of numbering him 

 among his followers, but there was too much dissimilarity between 

 the two men to allow any such connection, and Calvin having gravely 

 censured Rabelais for his profane jesting, the satirist took his revenge 

 by placing in the mouth of Panurge, while buying a sheep of Din- 

 denault, some of the theological expressions of his austere monitor. 



RABENER, GOTTLIEB WILHELM, born in 1714 at Wachau 

 near Leipzig, was educated in the public school at Meissen. In 1734 

 he went to the University of Leipzig to study the law, where he became 

 acquainted with some of the most eminent men of the age, and formed 

 an intimate friendship with Gellert, with whom he took an active part 

 in the establishment of a celebrated literary periodical called ' Bremer 

 Beitrage.' In 1741 he received an office in the board of taxes for the 

 circle of Dresden, and in 1763 he was appointed counsellor of the 

 court of aids (Steuerrath), which office he held until his death, on the 

 26th of March 1771. Rabener was in his time one of the most popular 

 writers in Germany, and he exercistd a very beneficial influence 

 upon his countrymen. His satires, in which he attacked in a good- 

 humoured strain the most glaring follies, fashions, and pretensions of 

 his time, though not marked by much depth of thought, are still 

 instructive and amusing as historical pictures of the age in which he 

 lived, for the things which he ridiculed have long ceased to exist. 



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