ict lasciviousness. Rabelais sinned against manners, more than
he sinned against morals. But his obscenity is an ocean, without bottom
or shore. Literally, he sticks at nothing that is coarse. Nay, this is
absurdly short of expressing the fact. The genius of Rabelais teems with
invention of coarseness, beyond what any one could conceive as possible,
who had not taken his measure of possibility from Rabelais himself. And
his diction was as opulent as his invention.

Such is the character of Rabelais the author. What, then, was it, if not
fondness for paradox, that could prompt Coleridge to say, "I could write
a treatise in praise of the moral elevation of Rabelais' works, which
would make the church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be
truth, and nothing but the truth"? If any thing besides fondness for
paradox inspired Coleridge in saying this, it must, one would guess,
have been belief on his part in the allegorical sense hidden deep
underneath the monstrous mass of the Rabelaisian buffoonery. A more
judicial sentence is that of Hallam, the historian of the literature of
Europe: "He [Rabelais] is never serious in a single page, and seems to
have had little other aim, in his first two volumes, than to pour out
the exuberance of his animal gayety."

The supply of animal gayety in this man was something portentous. One
cannot, however, but feel that he forces it sometimes, as sometimes did
Dickens those exhaustless animal spirits of his. A very common trick of
the Rabelaisian humor is to multiply specifications, or alternative
expressions, one after another, almost without end. From the second book
of his romance,--an afterthought, probably, of continuation to his
unexpectedly successful first book,--we take the last paragraph of the
prologue, which shows this. The veracious historian makes obtestation of
the strict truth of his narrative, and imprecates all sorts of evil upon
such as do not believe it absolutely. We cleanse our extract a little:--

And, therefore, to make an end of this Prologue, even as I give
myself to an hundred thousand panniers-full of fair devils, body
and soul,... in case that I lie so much as one single word in this
whole history; after the like manner, St. Anthony's fire burn you,
Mahoom's disease whirl you, the squinance with a stitch in your
side, and the wolf in your stomach truss you, the bloody flux seize
upon you, the cursed sharp inflammati