Is straight enrolled.
Who money has, all raise, none hold him back—
They only are condemned who money lack.
Francois Rabelais was born in or about 1495, in Chinon, Touraine. Successively, monk, physician and scientist, he is best known as a master of humor and grotesque invention. His romance of Gargantua and Pantagruel is an extravagant, satirical criticism of the follies and vices of the period, burlesquing the current abuses of government and religion.
Unable to escape a paternal label,
An able writer in the Foreign Quarterly Review speaks of Rabelais as “an author without parallel in the history of literature: an author who is the literary parent of many authors, since without him we should probably have never known a Swift, a Sterne, a Jean Paul, or, in fact, any of the irregular humorists: an author who did not appear as a steadily shining light to the human race, but as a wild, startling meteor, predicting the independence of thought, and the downfall of the authority of ages: an author who for the union of heavy learning with the most miraculous power of imagination, is perhaps without a competitor.”
The works of Rabelais abound in learning and serious intent, but the riotous humor and flashing wit are presented with an accompaniment of repulsive coarseness intolerable to the modern mind.
This phase, however, was a part of the manners and customs of his time, and to philosophers and students Rabelais will ever be a mine of deep and recondite wisdom and thought.
Indicative of his wildly extravagant fancy are the following extracts.