reedoms I took in
other places with cowls, with Red Hats, and the Triple Crown itself,
would have brought me into great danger. Not only my book, but I myself,
should, in all probability, have been condemned to the flames; and
martyrdom was an honour to which I never aspired. I therefore
counterfeited folly, like Junius Brutus, from the wisest of all
principles--that of self-preservation. You, Lucian, had no need to use
so much caution. Your heathen priests desired only a sacrifice now and
then from an Epicurean as a mark of conformity, and kindly allowed him to
make as free as he pleased, in conversation or writings, with the whole
tribe of gods and goddesses--from the thundering Jupiter and the scolding
Juno, down to the dog Anubis and the fragrant dame Cloacina.

_Lucian_.--Say rather that our Government allowed us that liberty; for I
assure you our priests were by no means pleased with it--at least, they
were not in my time.

_Rabelais_.--The wiser men they; for, in spite of the conformity required
by the laws and enforced by the magistrate, that ridicule brought the
system of pagan theology into contempt, not only with the philosophical
part of mankind, but even with the vulgar.

_Lucian_.--It did so, and the ablest defenders of paganism were forced to
give up the poetical fables and allegorise the whole.

_Rabelais_.--An excellent way of drawing sense out of absurdity, and
grave instructions from lewdness. There is a great modern wit, Sir
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who in his treatise entitled "The Wisdom of
the Ancients" has done more for you that way than all your own priests.

_Lucian_.--He has indeed shown himself an admirable chemist, and made a
fine transmutation of folly into wisdom. But all the later Platonists
took the same method of defending our faith when it was attacked by the
Christians; and certainly a more judicious one could not be found. Our
fables say that in one of their wars with the Titans the gods were
defeated, and forced to turn themselves into beasts in order to escape
from the conquerors. Just the reverse happened here, for by this happy
art our beastly divinities were turned again into rational beings.

_Rabelais_.--Give me a good commentator, with a subtle, refining,
philosophical head, and you shall have the edification of seeing him draw
the most sublime allegories and the most venerable mystic truths from my
history of the noble Gargantua and Pantagruel. I don't desp