the _Vie
tres-horrifique du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel,_ should have
described it as "an obscene tale;" and the whole part of Panurge, the
brilliant talker of the tale,

"Take him for all in all the best boy in the world,"

fully justifies the Sorbonne. But, by way of striking contrast, at the
same time that the works of Rabelais attest the irregularity of men's
lives and minds, they also reveal the great travail that is going on and
the great progress that has already been made in the intellectual
condition of his day, in the influence of natural and legitimate
feelings, and in the appreciation of men's mutual rights and duties.
Sixty-two years ago M. Guizot published, in a periodical collection
entitled _Annales de l'Education,_ a Study of Rabelais' ideas compared
with the practice and routine of his day in respect of Education; an
important question in the sixteenth as it is in the nineteenth century.
It will be well to quote here from that Study certain fragments which
will give some notion of what new ideas and tendencies were making their
way into the social life of France, and were coincident with that great
religious and political ferment which was destined to reach
bursting-point in the reign of Francis I., and to influence for nearly
a century the fortunes of France.

"It was no easy matter," were the words used by M. Guizot in 1811, "to
speak reasonably about education at the time when Rabelais wrote. There
was then no idea of home-education and the means of rendering it
practicable. As to public education, there was no extensive range and
nothing really useful to the community in the instruction received by
children at college; no justice and no humanity in the treatment they
experienced; a fruitless and ridiculously prolonged study of words
succeeded by a no less fruitless study of interminable subtilties, and
all this fruitless knowledge driven into the brains of children by help
of chastisements, blows, and that barbarous severity which seems to
regard the _Compelle intrare_ as the principal law and object of
instruction. How proceed, in such a state of things, to conceive a plan
of liberal, gentle, and reasonable education? Rabelais, in his book,
had begun by avoiding the danger of directly shocking received ideas;
by transporting both himself and his heroes to the regions of imagination
and extravagance he had set himself at liberty to bring them up in quite
a different fashion th