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From her we learn that their father was a combination of Montaigne, Rabelais, and "Uncle Toby." Young Balzac went to a clerical school at seven, and stayed there for seven years. Then he was brought home, apparently much prostrated, although the good fathers could find nothing physically amiss with him, and nothing in his studies to account for his agitation.
It is not every poet whose Pegasus clears at a bound a space as wide as all that waste of land and sea the watchman views from his tall tower on the rock. Mr. Hawkehurst's papers on Lauzun, Brummel, Sardanapalus, Rabelais, Lord Chesterfield, Erasmus, Beau Nash, Apelles, Galileo, and Philip of Orleans, were in demand, and the reading public wondered at this prodigy of book-making.
Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers. We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is to say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which if you prick them do not bleed.
The whole atmosphere is so large, so genial, so courteous, so sweet-tempered, so entirely what the life of man upon earth should be. Even the military exploits of Friar John, even the knavish tricks of Panurge, cannot spoil our tenderness for these dear bully-boys, these mellow and magnanimous rogues! Certain paragraphs in Rabelais recur to one's mind daily.
At least, so old Sir John used to say, and very sensibly he put it too, as he was wont to do: "If they want to describe a finished young gentleman in France, I hear, they say of him, 'Il sait son Rabelais. But if I want to describe one in England, I say, 'He knows his Bewick. And I think that is the higher compliment." But Tom thought nothing about what the river was like.
But, as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the century following theirs, came Sir Thomas Brown, and immediately after him La Fontaine.
He is remembered as having published amid the terrors of 1791 an amusing essay on the authority of Rabelais 'in the matter of this present Revolution. He led a peaceful life through all that troubled time, and succeeded in forming a very useful library containing about 3000 volumes; it was purchased for the British Museum on his death, and became the foundation of the great series of works on the French Revolution which has been brought together there.
These privileges, from the praises and eulogies they express in terms very personal and very exceptional, are as important in Rabelais' life as were, in connection with other matters, the Apostolic Pastorals in his favour. Of course, in these the popes had not to introduce his books of diversions, which, nevertheless, would have seemed in their eyes but very venial sins.
Surely it is quite time for Minerva to have a general house-cleaning, to put on a fresh smock, and to live cleanly. Rabelais shall be washed, and Sterne sad-ironed into gravity; De Foe shall be made as decorous as a tract; Mandeville shall be reburned, and we will kindle the fire with half the leaves of this dry and yellow Montaigne.
Hood, as we have seen, is a perfect master equally of the grotesque and the terrible. Some writers, it may be, were as powerful as he in the grotesque. Rabelais had a certain hugeness in it, which Hood did not have and did not need. Other writers transcended Hood in the region of the terrible. It is almost useless to name such sublime masters of it as Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton.
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