wn about you, I truly
find no kind of inconveniency in it, provided you send up to God for all
some small scantling of thanks.

Since then my luck or destiny is such as you have heard--for it is not for
everybody to go to Corinth--I am fully resolved to be so little idle and
unprofitable, that I will set myself to serve the one and the other sort of
people. Amongst the diggers, pioneers, and rampire-builders, I will do as
did Neptune and Apollo at Troy under Laomedon, or as did Renault of
Montauban in his latter days: I will serve the masons, I'll set on the pot
to boil for the bricklayers; and, whilst the minced meat is making ready at
the sound of my small pipe, I'll measure the muzzle of the musing dotards.
Thus did Amphion with the melody of his harp found, build, and finish the
great and renowned city of Thebes.

For the use of the warriors I am about to broach of new my barrel to give
them a taste (which by two former volumes of mine, if by the deceitfulness
and falsehood of printers they had not been jumbled, marred, and spoiled,
you would have very well relished), and draw unto them, of the growth of
our own trippery pastimes, a gallant third part of a gallon, and
consequently a jolly cheerful quart of Pantagruelic sentences, which you
may lawfully call, if you please, Diogenical: and shall have me, seeing I
cannot be their fellow-soldier, for their faithful butler, refreshing and
cheering, according to my little power, their return from the alarms of the
enemy; as also for an indefatigable extoller of their martial exploits and
glorious achievements. I shall not fail therein, par lapathium acutum de
dieu; if Mars fail not in Lent, which the cunning lecher, I warrant you,
will be loth to do.

I remember nevertheless to have read, that Ptolemy, the son of Lagus, one
day, amongst the many spoils and booties which by his victories he had
acquired, presenting to the Egyptians, in the open view of the people, a
Bactrian camel all black, and a party-coloured slave, in such sort as that
the one half of his body was black and the other white, not in partition of
breadth by the diaphragma, as was that woman consecrated to the Indian
Venus whom the Tyanean philosopher did see between the river Hydaspes and
Mount Caucasus, but in a perpendicular dimension of altitude; which were
things never before that seen in Egypt. He expected by the show of these
novelties to win the love of the people. But what happened thereup