dence, knights and squires arrive from every nation.
I therefore made inquiries from them, or from the count himself,
who cheerfully conversed with me.

The foregoing is one of the most celebrated passages of description in
Froissart. At the same time that it discloses the form and spirit of
those vanished days, which will never come again to the world, it
discloses likewise the character of the man, who must indeed have loved
it all well, to have been able so well to describe it.

We take now a somewhat long forward step, in going, as we do, at once
from Froissart to Rabelais. Comines, lying between, we must reluctantly
pass, with thus barely mentioning his name.

III.

RABELAIS.

1495-1553.

Rabelais is one of the most famous of writers. But he is at the same
time incomparably the coarsest.

The real quality of such a writer, it is evidently out of the question
to exhibit at all adequately here. But equally out of the question it is
to omit Rabelais altogether from an account of French literature.

Of the life of Francois Rabelais the man, these few facts will be
sufficient to know. In early youth he joined the monastic order of the
Franciscans. That order hated letters; but Rabelais loved them. He, in
fact, conceived a voracious ambition of knowledge. He became immensely
learned. This fact, with what it implies of long labor patiently
achieved, is enough to show that Rabelais was not without seriousness of
character. But he was much more a merry-andrew than a pattern monk. He
made interest enough with influential friends to get himself transferred
from the Franciscans to the Benedictines, an order more favorable to
studious pursuits. But neither among the Benedictines was this
roistering spirit at ease. He left them irregularly, but managed to
escape punishment for his irregularity. At last, after various
vicissitudes of occupation, he settled down as curate of Meudon, where
(the place, however, is doubtful, as also the date) in 1553 he died. He
was past fifty years of age before he finished the work which has made
him famous.

This work is "The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel," a grotesque and
nondescript production, founded, probably, on some prior romance or
traditionary tale of giants. The narrative of Rabelais is a tissue of
adventures shocking every idea of verisimilitude, and serving only as a
vehicle for the strange humor of the writer. The work is replete with
evidences of Rabe