elais and STERNE have passed away to the
curious.

These fraternal geniuses alike chose their subjects from their own times.
Cervantes, with the innocent design of correcting a temporary folly of his
countrymen, so that the very success of the design might have proved fatal
to the work itself; for when he had cut off the heads of the Hydra, an
extinct monster might cease to interest the readers of other times, and
other manners. But Cervantes, with judgment equal to his invention, and
with a cast of genius made for all times, delighted his contemporaries and
charms his posterity. He looked to the world and collected other follies
than the Spanish ones, and to another age than the administration of the
duke of Lerma; with more genuine pleasantry than any writer from the days
of Lucian, not a solitary spot has soiled the purity of his page; while
there is scarcely a subject in human, nature for which we might not find
some apposite illustration. His style, pure as his thoughts, is, however,
a magic which ceases to work in all translations, and Cervantes is not
Cervantes in English or in French; yet still he retains his popularity
among all the nations of Europe; which is more than we can say even of our
Shakspeare!

Rabelais and Sterne were not perhaps inferior in genius, and they were
read with as much avidity and delight as the Spaniard. "Le docte Rabelais"
had the learning which the Englishman wanted; while unhappily Sterne
undertook to satirise false erudition, which requires the knowledge of the
true. Though the _Papemanes_, on whom Rabelais has exhausted his grotesque
humour and his caustic satire, have not yet walked off the stage, we pay a
heavy price in the grossness of his ribaldry and his tiresome balderdash
for odd stories and flashes of witty humour. Rabelais hardly finds readers
even in France, with the exception of a few literary antiquaries. The day
has passed when a gay dissolute abbe could obtain a rich abbey by getting
Rabelais by heart, for the perpetual improvement of his patron--and
Rabelais is now little more than a Rabelais by tradition.[A]

[Footnote A: The clergy were not so unfavourable to Rabelais as might
have been expected. He was through life protected by the Cardinal
Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, who employed him in various important
negotiations; and it is recorded of him that he refused a scholar
admittance to his table because he had not read his works. This
familiarity with his gro