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Such personal disinterestedness, which was lacking in Voltaire, Newton, and Bacon, but eminent in the lives of Rabelais, Spinosa, Loyola, Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is indeed a magnificent frame to those ardent and sublime figures.
Now humour is the quality which Dumas, Moliere, and Rabelais possess conspicuously among Frenchmen. Montaigne has it too, and makes himself dear to us, as the humorous novelists make their fancied people dear. Without humour an author may draw characters distinct and clear, and entertaining, and even real; but they want atmosphere, and with them we are never intimate. Mr.
Oh! very. My fable, then, is taken from Rabelais. This is it: Bacchus has made a wonderful fox that cannot possibly be overtaken. Vulcan, for his part, has given a dog of his making the power to overtake any animal that he pursues. 'Now, as my author says, 'suppose that they meet. You see what a wild and interminable race will result.
Rabelais takes us by the hand, shows us the cup of life, deep as eternity, and bids us drink and be satisfied. What else could he use, if not wine, as a symbol for such quenching of such thirst. And after wine, sex. There is no other who treats sex as Rabelais does; who treats it so completely as it ought to be treated!
Daddy Croizeau went to dine with 'M. Denisart's fair lady, as he called her. And here I must make a somewhat important observation. "The reading-room had been paid for half in cash, half in bills signed by the said Mlle. Chocardelle. The quart d'heure de Rabelais arrived; the Count had no money.
The obscurity relating to this matter is far from being cleared up, and perhaps never will be. It fell to my lot here, unfortunately, I am forced to speak of a personal matter to print for the first time the manuscript of the fifth book. At first it was hoped it might be in Rabelais' own hand; afterwards that it might be at least a copy of his unfinished work.
"You are right, sir," said Booth; "but though I should agree that the doctor hath sometimes condescended to imitate Rabelais, I do not remember to have seen in his works the least attempt in the manner of Cervantes. But there is one in his own way, and whom I am convinced he studied above all others you guess, I believe, I am going to name Lucian.
That Rabelais collected the materials for the fifth book, had begun it, and got on some way, there can be no doubt: the excellence of a large number of passages prove it, but taken as a whole the fifth book has not the value, the verve, and the variety of the others. The style is quite different, less rich, briefer, less elaborate, drier, in parts even wearisome.
Such a man was Swift, in whom the saeva indignatio was a bitterness to others, because it was a bitterness to himself. Such a satirist Whistler was not. He did not laugh because he was happy, like Rabelais. But neither did he laugh because he was unhappy, like Swift.
Henry Irving's position seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took place before his departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches he had to make and to listen to, were really terrific! One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing: "Where is our friend Irving going?
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