ison with Cervantes, whose precursor he was in
reality, though the two books and the two minds are very different. They
have only one point in common, their attack and ridicule of the romances of
chivalry and of the wildly improbable adventures of knight-errants. But in
Don Quixote there is not a single detail which would suggest that Cervantes
knew Rabelais' book or owed anything to it whatsoever, even the
starting-point of his subject. Perhaps it was better he should not have
been influenced by him, in however slight a degree; his originality is the
more intact and the more genial.

On the other hand, Rabelais has been several times translated into German.
In the present century Regis published at Leipsic, from 1831 to 1841, with
copious notes, a close and faithful translation. The first one cannot be
so described, that of Johann Fischart, a native of Mainz or Strasburg, who
died in 1614. He was a Protestant controversialist, and a satirist of
fantastic and abundant imagination. In 1575 appeared his translation of
Rabelais' first book, and in 1590 he published the comic catalogue of the
library of Saint Victor, borrowed from the second book. It is not a
translation, but a recast in the boldest style, full of alterations and of
exaggerations, both as regards the coarse expressions which he took upon
himself to develop and to add to, and in the attacks on the Roman Catholic
Church. According to Jean Paul Richter, Fischart is much superior to
Rabelais in style and in the fruitfulness of his ideas, and his equal in
erudition and in the invention of new expressions after the manner of
Aristophanes. He is sure that his work was successful, because it was
often reprinted during his lifetime; but this enthusiasm of Jean Paul would
hardly carry conviction in France. Who treads in another's footprints must
follow in the rear. Instead of a creator, he is but an imitator. Those
who take the ideas of others to modify them, and make of them creations of
their own, like Shakespeare in England, Moliere and La Fontaine in France,
may be superior to those who have served them with suggestions; but then
the new works must be altogether different, must exist by themselves.
Shakespeare and the others, when they imitated, may be said always to have
destroyed their models. These copyists, if we call them so, created such
works of genius that the only pity is they are so rare. This is not the
case with Fischart, but it would be n