ing it. All
the editions of Rabelais continue, and rightly, to reproduce the edition of
1564. It is not the real Rabelais, but however open to criticism it may
be, it was under that form that the fifth book appeared in the sixteenth
century, under that form it was accepted. Consequently it is convenient
and even necessary to follow and keep to the original edition.

The first sixteen chapters may, and really must be, the text of Rabelais,
in the final form as left by him, and found after his death; the framework,
and a number of the passages in the continuation, the best ones, of course,
are his, but have been patched up and tampered with. Nothing can have been
suppressed of what existed; it was evidently thought that everything should
be admitted with the final revision; but the tone was changed, additions
were made, and 'improvements.' Adapters are always strangely vain.

In the seventeenth century, the French printing-press, save for an edition
issued at Troyes in 1613, gave up publishing Rabelais, and the work passed
to foreign countries. Jean Fuet reprinted him at Antwerp in 1602. After
the Amsterdam edition of 1659, where for the first time appears 'The
Alphabet of the French Author,' comes the Elzevire edition of 1663. The
type, an imitation of what made the reputation of the little volumes of the
Gryphes of Lyons, is charming, the printing is perfect, and the paper,
which is French--the development of paper-making in Holland and England did
not take place till after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes--is
excellent. They are pretty volumes to the eye, but, as in all the reprints
of the seventeenth century, the text is full of faults and most
untrustworthy.

France, through a representative in a foreign land, however, comes into
line again in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and in a really
serious fashion, thanks to the very considerable learning of a French
refugee, Jacob Le Duchat, who died in 1748. He had a most thorough
knowledge of the French prose-writers of the sixteenth century, and he made
them accessible by his editions of the Quinze Joies du Mariage, of Henri
Estienne, of Agrippa d'Aubigne, of L'Etoile, and of the Satyre Menippee.
In 1711 he published an edition of Rabelais at Amsterdam, through Henry
Bordesius, in five duodecimo volumes. The reprint in quarto which he
issued in 1741, seven years before his death, is, with its engravings by
Bernard Picot, a fine library edition.