"Rabelais" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in which, for thirty years, Madame de la Valliere expiated the solitary frailty of her life. And so at every turn! Not a gloomy by-street, not a dilapidated fountain, not a grim old college facade but had its history, or its legend. Here the voice of Abelard thundered new truths, and Rabelais jested, and Petrarch discoursed with the doctors. Here, in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, walked the shades of Racine, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Voltaire. Dear, venerable, immortal old Quartier Latin! Thy streets were ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... mouth] Rosalind requires nine questions to be answered in one word. Celia tells her that a word of such magnitude is too big for any mouth but that of Garagantua the giant of Rabelais. ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... suited to the vulgar taste: no one can read them without being struck with the truly historic character of the subjects and the handling, and without moralizing upon the age which they describe. Skelton, a contemporary of the French Rabelais, seems to us a weak English portrait of that great author; like him a priest, a buffoon, a satirist, and a lampooner, but unlike him in that he has given us no English Gargantua and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... on in the world." This is a very important distinction and one which illuminates the connection between the drama and the mores. Socrates was an etholog, although not an actor. He spent sarcasm, irony, and humor on the ways of the Athenians of his time.[2037] Aristophanes was another, Rabelais was another, Erasmus was an inferior one. In his Colloquies and Praise of Folly he is more of a preacher, but his aim is to influence by graphic satirical description. In our day the comic papers attempt the task of the etholog. They try to satirize manners and men. A comic ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... for war. Now let us pass to literature, and see our own Rabelais, a sober man who drank nothing but water, but is held to be, nevertheless, an extravagant lover of good cheer and a resolute drinker. A thousand ridiculous stories are told about the author of one of the finest books in French ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the awful hobgoblins of hell and Satan, as in Dante, or over vast masses and spaces of nature and the abysms of aboriginal man, as in Walt Whitman, what matters it? Are we not refreshed by all? There is one mastery in Burns, another in Byron, another in Rabelais, and in Victor Hugo, and in Tennyson; and though the critic has his preferences, though he affect one more than another, yet who shall say this one is a poet and that one is not? "There may be any ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Essays, Shakespeare, Gibbon. Famous literary compositions at different levels or in their various classes are Boccaccio's Decameron, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Aretino, Spenser's Faery Queen, Rabelais, Pilgrim's Progress, La Fontaine's Tales, Rousseau's Confessions, Tristram Shandy, Candide, Don Juan; and even among these how fair a proportion depends for its value and fruitfulness on the student? And, again, on his training. For we are ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... their types, their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of books! The disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me regret still more that I could not become what I should most have preferred—an Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world makes failures of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that it monopolizes. It aborts all sincere sentiment by its manner of scattering our taste, our curiosity, our desire, the little spark of genius ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... poetry and that the wholesale allegorizing of the middle ages was far off the mark. In his suspicion that in most cases the fable was first and the interpretation after, Bacon was in complete agreement with Rabelais in the prologue of Gargantua.[417] At any rate Bacon seems to have given the coup de grace to allegory ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... was an Alsatian humorist of satiric bent, great learning, and little originality. His prose—especially in Gargantua, his most important work, which is an amplified and Germanized version of the first book of Rabelais—is hard to read on account of its recondite allusions, far-fetched puns, and generally eccentric diction. As a poet he is at his best in the Lucky Boat of Zrich, a narrative poem which describes, with much patriotic warmth, the notable feat of a Swiss boat-crew in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... high, not poetic; but firm, wide, genuine, whose clearsightedness only made him more noble. I love him well that he could see without showing these myriad mean faults of the social man, and yet make no nearer approach to misanthropy than his Alceste. These witty Frenchmen. Rabelais, Montaigne, Moliere, are great as were their marshals and preux chevaliers; when the Frenchman tries to be poetical, he becomes theatrical, but he can be romantic, and also dignified, maugre shrugs ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... with the essence of that flower. I think that muguet is connected with the old French word musguet, smelling of musk. In Molire's time muguet had become rather antiquated; hence it was rightly placed in the mouth of Sganarelle, who likes to use such words and phrases. Rabelais employs it in the eighth chapter of Gargantua, un tas de muguets, and it has been translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart as "some fond wooers and wench-courters." The fashion of calling dandies after the name of perfumes is ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... manners and politeness. If you will please people, you must please them in their own way; and, as you cannot make them what they should be, you must take them as they are. I repeat it again, they are only to be taken by 'agremens', and by what flatters their senses and their hearts. Rabelais first wrote a most excellent book, which nobody liked; then, determined to conform to the public taste, he wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel, which everybody liked, extravagant as ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Mayor, we know all about that. One hand up—so—and one foot—so!" And she put herself in an attitude which, to use Rabelais' phrase, stripped Crevel bare from his brain to his heels, so quaint and delicious was the nudity revealed through the light film ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's Jolly {54} Beggars. ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... won renown, or at some family ball, where he suffocates till midnight. Some fools are surprised at the phantasmagoria of the monads which they see with the aid of the microscope in a drop of water; but what would Rabelais' Gargantua,—that misunderstood figure of an audacity so sublime,—what would that giant say, fallen from the celestial spheres, if he amused himself by contemplating the motions of this secondary life of ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... old truth, that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of its exotics. The gigantesque levity, the flamboyant eloquence, the Rabelaisian puns and digressions were seen to be once more what they had been in Rabelais, the mere outbursts of a human sympathy and bravado as old and solid as the stars. The human spirit demanded wit as headlong and haughty as its will. All was expressed in the words of Cyrano at his highest moment of happiness, Il me faut des ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... exaggerations make it a fine type of Oriental Chauvinism, pitting the superhuman virtues, valour, nobility and success of all that is Moslem, against the scum of the earth which is non-Moslem. Like the exploits of Friar John of the Chopping-knives (Rabelais i. c. 27) it suggests ridicule cast on impossible battles and tales of giants, paynims and paladins. The long romance is followed by thirteen historiettes all apparently historical: compare "Hind, daughter of Al-Nu'man" (vol. viii. 7-145) and "Isaac of Mosul and the Devil" (vol. vii. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the Thousand and One Nights, were all men of genius as well ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... of Topas tell, Mad Rabelais of Pantagruel, A later third of Dowsabel With such poor trifles playing; Others the like have laboured at, Some of this thing and some of that, And many of they knew not what, But what ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... Esq. Nov. 21.-A simile. Sameness of llife at Paris. Invites him to transplant himself to Roehampton. Reflections on coming old age. Object of all impostors. Rabelais— 445 ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of letters of the sixteenth century were encouraged financially and morally or protected by Marguerite d'Angouleme—Rabelais, Marot, Pelletier, Bonaventure-Desperiers, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Lefevre d'Etaples, Amyot, Calvin, Berquin. Charles de Sainte-Marthe says: "In seeing them about this good lady, you would say it was a hen ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... works; the variety of his resources, sometimes diverting him from applying them to the most effectual purposes. He might be said to combine the powers of AEschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he would perhaps have appeared greater. The natural ease and indifference of his temper made him sometimes less scrupulous than he might have been. He is relaxed ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious mouthful! as Rabelais ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... where the Wandering Jew and ruthless Golo faced each other, and of the large and only table with its circle of seats. The school supplied nothing, not even a drop of ink; every one had to come with a full set of utensils. The inkhorn of those days, a relic of the ancient pen case of which Rabelais speaks, was a long cardboard box divided into two stages. The upper compartment held the pens, made of goose or turkey quills trimmed with a penknife; the lower contained, in a tiny well, ink made of soot ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... what a prize he is winning." "Oh! do look at those lovely ribbon-bows!" "You darling, how happy you must be." "Real Valenciennes!" Then a whisper in the lady's ear, and her reply, "Oh, don't, Nelly!" So they would chirp over their treasures, as in Rabelais they chirped over their cups; and every thing would be done in due order till the wedding-day, when mamma, who had strained her sinews and the commandments to bring the match about, would weep and look indignantly at the unhappy bridegroom. "I hope ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Lucian, but Boswell was not likely to have known it. He modestly himself says he has enlarged on the plan of Mason's Life of Gray; but his merits are his own. For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron said of Rabelais, le livre—the book—'in worth as a book,' decides Carlyle, 'beyond any other ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... but would have been more or less impressed by it, while, possibly, nervous opponents might have a little quailed under it. Thinking within himself a moment, the bachelor replied: "Had you experience, you would know that your tippling theory, take it in what sense you will, is poor as any other. And Rabelais's pro-wine Koran no more trustworthy than Mahomet's ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... A. M.—Just now I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume of Rabelais), behold! the head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance! He was probably attempting to get a fly, which was on the pane of glass against which he rapped; and on my first motion the feathered visitor took wing. This incident had a curious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... that their predecessors had tried to nationalize on Parnassus. It was a Bohemian, Mathurin Regnier, who was one of the last defenders of the bulwarks of poetry, assailed by the phalanx of rhetoricians and grammarians who declared Rabelais barbarous and Montaigne obscure. It was this same cynic, Mathurin Regnier, who, adding fresh knots to the satiric whip of Horace, exclaimed, in indignation at the manners of his day, "Honor is an old saint ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... After the best manner of the grimoires, Miss Vaughan began her preparations by a triduum, taking one meal daily of black bread, fritters of high-spiced blood, a salad of milky herbs, and the drink of rare old Rabelais. The preparations in detail are scarcely worth recording as they merely vary the directions in the popular chap-books of magic which abound in foolish France. At the appointed time she passed through the iron doors of the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the Emperor. Among these former comrades, Philippe particularly liked an old captain of the dragoons of the Guard, named Giroudeau, in whose company he had seen his first service. This friendship with the late dragoon led Philippe into completing what Rabelais called "the devil's equipage"; and he added to his drams, and his tobacco, and his play, a ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... these hearts to beat, of recreating their language and costume." It is a significant fact that Sainte-Beuve opened the campaign of romanticism in "Le Globe" with a "Tableau de la poesie francaise au seizieme siecle," the century of the "Pleiade," and of Rabelais and Montaigne. It is a still more significant fact that the members of the "Cenacle," the circle of kindred minds that gathered around Victor Hugo—Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, David ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Ascham. 2. Double translating. 3. Rabelais. 4. First appearance of realism in instruction. 5. Montaigne. 6. Summary of ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... literary, and artistic life are familiar sources of inspiration for him. With all, he shows the lofty spirit of a worshipper of greatness and depth wherever he finds them. Tolstoi or Aeschylus, Goethe or Dante, Ibsen or Poe, Swinburne or Walt Whitman, Leopardi or Rabelais, Hugo or Carlyle, Serbian Folk Lore or the Bible, Hindu legends or Italian songs, Antiquity or Middle Ages, Renaissance or Modernity, any nation or any lore are objects worthy of study and stores of wisdom for him. Indeed, very few living poets could ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... honour, and yet the fact remains that he understands the political, social, domestic, amorous, even cloacal conditions of the French better than any of his contemporaries, always excepting the aforementioned Mirbeau. In On Purge Bebe he has written saucy variations on a theme which Rabelais, Boccaccio, George Moore, and Moliere in collaboration would have found difficult to handle. It is as successful an experiment in bravado and bravura as Mr. Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." And he has accomplished this feat with nimbleness, variety, authority, even (granting ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... of the first half of the sixteenth century was not a poet, though he wrote verses, but a great creator in imaginative prose, great partly by virtue of his native genius, partly because the sap of the new age of enthusiasm for science and learning was thronging in his veins—FRANCOIS RABELAIS. Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modest station, he received his education in the village of Seuille and at the convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury. For fifteen years he ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... all his good fortune to the familiar knowledge he had of Rabelais. He knew his Rabelais by heart. This served to introduce him to the Duke of Orleans, who took great pleasure in reading that author. It was for this he gave him an abbey, and he was gradually promoted till he ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... philosophical, and poetical revolution, Calvin, Montaigne, and Ronsard, born in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, did not do anything that exercised any power until the later. One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I. Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period. The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, Bude (Budaeus), J. C. Scaliger; Muretus, Danes (Danesius), Arnyot, Ramus (Peter la Ramee), ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... phrase can light up an idea, as when, a few days before marriage, "the Bridegroom is running up and down like a dog." But, on the other hand, the spirit manifests itself sometimes in exuberance, as when Urquhart and Motteux metagrobolized Rabelais into something almost more tumescent and overwhelming than the original. In that vein of humour the present work frequently runs. The author is as ready to pile up his epithets as Urquhart himself. Let the Nurse go, ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... employed them to the same purposes. There are some, however, who, though not void of these talents, have made so wretched a use of them, that, had the consecration of their labours been committed to the hands of the hangman, no good man would have regretted their loss; nor am I afraid to mention Rabelais, and Aristophanes himself, in this number. For, if I may speak my opinion freely of these two last writers, and of their works, their design appears to me very plainly to have been to ridicule all sobriety, modesty, decency, virtue, and religion, out of the world. Now, whoever reads over the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... scortum," or lovely dame of ill repute, the favorite of a monk of the order of St. Anthony, who does not seem to have resisted temptation so well as the founder of his order. We have always ranked the physician Rabelais among the early reformers, but I do not know that Vesalius has ever been thanked for his hit at the morals of the religious orders, or for turning to the good of science what was intended for the "benefit ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... letters. This little oasis of intellectual light, shadowed as it was with vices, had its influence, and there were many women in the solitude of remote chateaux who began to cultivate a love for literature. "The very women and maidens aspired to this praise and celestial manna of good learning," said Rabelais. But their reading was mainly limited to his own unsavory satires, to Spanish pastorals, licentious poems, and their books of devotion. It was on such a foundation that Mme. De Rambouillet began to ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... to the form of composition,—which may be called, I think, the Rhapsodico-Reflective. In this the Sartor Resartus resembles some of the master-works of human invention, which have been acknowledged as such by many generations; and especially the works of Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne and Swift. There is nothing I know of in Antiquity like it. That which comes nearest is perhaps the Platonic Dialogue. But of this, although there is something of the playful and fanciful on the surface, there ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... bare chaos, Athenian genius was learning how to construct, under Eupolis, Cratinus and Aristophanes, that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes mad—but with a subtle method in ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... others; there is no sermon in his song—or at least none for those who will not seek it for themselves; there is never a hint of a preachment. But for all that I have found in his work a trace of the tonic morality which inheres in Moliere, for example, also a Parisian by birth, and also in Rabelais, despite his disguising grossness. This finer morality comes possibly from a wider and a deeper survey of the universe; and it is as different as possible from the morality which is externally applied and which always punishes the villain in ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... the esprit gaulois, the spirit that is often called "Rabelaisian," though it is only one side of the genius of Rabelais. The good Cure was a contemporary of |57| the author of "Pantagruel." His "Chansons de Noels nouvaulx" was published in 1520, and contains carols in very varied styles, some naive and pious, others hardly quotable at ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... and others. These interpreters are mostly violent partisans and don't conceal it. A speech they like they deliver with real energy, rasping in the points. They are not above private interpretations; they were as liberal as Sir Thomas Urquhart when he translated Rabelais not in the interests of decency. When they hated a speaker they mangled and compressed him. There was a great uproar when Gillies, a German, but one of the English deputation, insisted on translating his first ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Vallee," and "La Grenadiere." Says Balzac of the habitant: "...He is a listless and unobliging individual." But the sojourner for a day will probably not notice this, and, if he should, must simply make allowance, and think with Henry James of the other memories of "this land of Rabelais, Descartes, and Balzac; of good dinners, good company, and good houses." To link the city still closer with letters, the first printing-press in Touraine was set up here in 1496. Nicolas Jensen, famed as the foremost Venetian printer of his time, was born in the neighbourhood and was ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... hour the words which had been frozen up were melted, and fell gently upon the further bank, although the Muscovite traders had already gone away. The prices demanded were, however, so high that the Lucchese merchant returned without making any purchase. A similar idea is utilised by Rabelais in Pantagruel, and by Steele in one of his Tatlers. The story of the cherry tree growing out of the stag's head, again, is given in Lange's book, and the fact that all three tales are of great antiquity is proved ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... their Anthology which is stuffed full of such hyperboles. A good many fall into the same fault either because their talent is weak or because they write for the unskilled—a consideration which should move those who have no compunction about reading, let alone praising, the silly tales of Rabelais which are filled with ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... French originals, and a follower at a long distance. Even those who have the keenest relish for our "good-humoured, civil, nonsensical, Shandean kind of a book," ought to admit how far it falls behind Rabelais in exuberance, force, richness of extravagance, breadth of colour, fulness of blood. They may claim, however, for Sterne what, in comparison with these great elements, are the minor qualities of simplicity, tenderness, precision, and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his concluding Urquhart's version of Rabelais. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... dried; that of commerce, however, is from the tunny, a large fish of passage which is common in the Mediterranean. The best kind comes from Tunis." —Smyth's Sailor's Word-Book. Botargo was chiefly used to promote drinking by causing thirst, and Rabelais makes Gargantua eat it.] ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... romantic adventure, insinuates a lesson in morals or in humanity, of which we often in our days must fail to perceive the drift. The book of Apuleius, before quoted, is subject to as many discoveries of recondite meaning as is Rabelais. As regards the licentiousness of the Milesian fables, this sign of semi-civilization is still inherent in most Eastern books of the description which we call "light literature," and the ancestral tale-teller never collects a larger purse of coppers than ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... those that write by Humour, and receive only such as aim at Solidity in their Writings. How the Celebrated Tale of a Tub will come off then with the best Judges, I can easily guess, that excellent Treatise being much of the same nature as Rabelais, of whom La Bruyere says, Rabelais is incomprehensible: His Book is an inexplicable Enigma, a meer Chimera; It has a Woman's Face, with the Feet and Tail of a Serpent, or some Beast more deform'd. 'Tis a Monstrous Collection of Political and Ingenious Morality, with a Mixture of Beastliness; where 'tis bad 'tis abominable, ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... peers of the Round Table, was a northern, a Teutonic, institution. The sense of honor which formed its very essence was further developed by the social atmosphere of a monarch's court. It became the virtue of the nobly born and chivalrously nurtured, as appears very remarkably in this passage from Rabelais[3]: 'En leur reigle n'estoit que ceste clause: Fay ce que vouldras. Parce que gens liberes, bien nayz, bien instruictz, conversans en compaignies honnesties, ont par nature ung instinct et aguillon qui toujours les poulse a faitctz ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... fluxions, on phlogiston, on the physical cause of the Deluge, on Irish literature, on the origin of language, on the evidences for Christianity, and on all other sorts of unrelated topics. Hazlitt thought that the soul of Rabelais had passed into Amory, while a more recent critic can see in his long-winded discussions naught but the "light-headed ramblings of delirium." If we try to read John Buncle consecutively, the result is boredom; but if we open the book at random, we are ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... identity, and see the puzzled pens of the pamphleteering word all busy in sketching an ideal likeness which each fancied to be the original. If we could imagine the shade of Swift or Shaftesbury, of Scarron or Rabelais, to walk invisibly through the world playing its bitter and fantastic tricks in the ways of men, stinging some, astounding others, and startling all, we perhaps would approach nearest to the feelings which might, now and then, have indulged the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... the apostle of—I don't quite know what, but she calls it Purity. Of course, you know her by repute. She, too, had the Public Hall, and gave addresses to which only women were admitted. I have a very strong opinion as to the tendency of those addresses, and if Rabelais had come to life among us just then—but never mind. The fact is, old Polterham got into a thoroughly unwholesome condition, and we're anything but right yet. Perhaps a little honest fighting between Liberal and Tory may help to clear the air.—Well, now, that ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... French,—so much, to the conception of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coarsest of humorists, offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of regard. On the other hand, Pascal,—not to mention the moralists ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... centripetation"—a property which causes universal pressure; but in what these attributes of pushing and pulling differ from gravitation and attraction was not expounded. Many of his "truths" were as mystified as the conundrums of Rabelais; so nothing was ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... never to be spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their "Wardour Street" Old French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate inheritor of Gauloiserie. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much more time on these things, and that the ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... matter—Swift, whose muse seems to have been mere misanthropy; he was a cynic rather than a poet, and his natural dryness and sarcastic severity would have been unpleasing, had not he qualified them, by adopting the extravagant humour of Lueian and Rabelais—Prior, lively, familiar, and amusing—Rowe, solemn, florid, and declamatory—Pope, the prince of lyric poetry; unrivalled in satire, ethics, and polished versification—the agreeable Parnel—the wild, the witty, and the whimsical Garth—Gay, whose fables may vie with those of La Fontaine, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... contemptible, although he disgraced his priestly character by his profligacy, and his literary character by a shameless plagiarism,[189] he possessed in a high degree a quality which must give him a distinguished place in English fiction. His borrowed plumage and his imitation of Rabelais' style apart, Sterne had originality, a gift at all times rare, and always, perhaps, becoming rarer. As a humorist, he is to be classed with Fielding and Smollett, but as a novelist, his position in the history of fiction is ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the test by the supposed death of the husband—an old joke, which our Hans Sachs has handled drolly enough. [Footnote: I know not whether it has been already remarked, that the idea on which the Mariage Force is founded is borrowed from Rabelais; who makes Panurge enter upon the very same consultation as to his future marriage, and receive from Pantagruel just such a sceptical answer as Sganarelle does from the second philosopher.] We have an avowal of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... capable of a cool and steady comprehension of them. He had wit at will. He had humor that when he pleased was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured or caustic, Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais, at his pleasure. He had talents for irony, allegory, and fable, that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth. He was master of that infantine simplicity which the French call naivete which never fails to charm ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... legs!"—"Well, and has he not justification? what do you find in Terence? Quid agitur? Statur."[392] I do not even blench from my principle where I find that it brings what is called "taking a sight" within permissible forms of expression: Rabelais not only establishes its antiquity, but makes it English. Our old translation[393] has it thus (book 2. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... women, while more recent observers have believed that hysteria is particularly difficult to treat in autumn. Oribasius (Synopsis, lib. i, cap. 6) quotes from Rufus to the effect that sexual feeling is most strong in spring, and least so in summer. Rabelais said that it was in March that the sexual impulse is strongest, referring this to the early warmth of spring, and that August is the month least favorable to sexual activity (Pantagruel, liv. v, Ch. XXIX). Nipho, in his book on love dedicated to Joan of Aragon, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... you, Barney McGee! Bold when they're sunny and smooth when they're showery,— Oh, but the style of you, fluent and flowery! Chesterfield's way, with a touch of the Bowery! How would they silence you, Barney machree? Naught can your gab allay, Learned as Rabelais (You in his abbey lay Once on the spree). Here's to the smile of you, (Oh, but the guile of you!) And a long while ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. Hertrippa is a magician who gives Panurge advice on the subject of marriage. Bluphocks is simply racking his brain for words to rhyme with "Pippa," so that he may write doggerel poetry to or about her. For "King ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... or, as he called them, the 'ghost' of wit, the king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais' 'Gargantua' to the 'Zadig' of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and call themselves boldly the successors of the Apostles, they bless God for their being Protestants. But these are shameless heretics, who deserve to be blown hence through the flames to old Nick, as Rabelais says, and for this reason I do not trouble myself ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... seeking an imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age Punch and the Times flourished. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... they simply reflect and do not mould public taste. Shakespeare, Hogarth, Rabelais, portrayed men and things as they found them; not as they might, could, would, or should have been. Was Sir Peter Lely responsible for the style of dress worn by court beauties in the reign of Charles II.? He faithfully painted what passed before him. Miss Earl, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... books I noted masterpieces by the greats of ancient and modern times, in other words, all of humanity's finest achievements in history, poetry, fiction, and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame George Sand. But science, in particular, represented the major investment of this library: books on mechanics, ballistics, hydrography, meteorology, geography, geology, etc., held a place there no less important than works on natural history, and I realized that they made ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... 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 old grey boulder-stone that has finished its peregrination from the rock to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... departments certain names are equal to an appalling plexus of questions—Wagner, Ibsen, Meredith, Browning, Comte, Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante, Degas, Rousseau, Tolstoi, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Zola, Whistler, Leopardi, Emerson, Carlyle, Swedenborg, Rabelais). Socialism, its various schools, its past and its future; Anarchism: bombs. Labour questions: the Eight Hours' Day, the Unemployed, the Living Wage, etc., etc. Mr. Gladstone's career. Shall members of Parliament be paid? Chamberlain's position; ditto for every statesman ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... is a foul reproach. Gifts made to father-in-law after bridal by bridegroom seem to denote the old bride-price. Taking the bride home in her car was an important ceremony, and a bride is taken to her future husband's by her father. The wedding-feast, as in France in Rabelais' time, was a noisy and drunken and tumultuous rejoicing, when bone-throwing was in favor, with other rough sports and jokes. The three days after the bridal and their observance in "sword-bed" are ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... peace, with this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign policy, Danton was more than a sane—he was a just, and even a diplomatic man. He was fond of wide reading, and his reading was of the philosophers; it ranged from Rabelais to the physiocrats in his own tongue, from Adam Smith to the Essay on Civil Government in that of strangers; and of the Encyclopaedia he possessed all the numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Frenchman here, named Rabelais, Once a Franciscan friar, and now a doctor, And secretary to the embassy: A learned man, who speaks all languages, And wittiest of men; who wrote a book Of the Adventures of Gargantua, So full of strange conceits ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... heartburning with which the latest Pontifical Princess smilingly swallows the insolence of the descendant (a la main gauche) of the Great Henri, happy to have been noticed, even though to be noticed meant inevitably to be snubbed. There was a freedom about the water, an honest vulgarity, a quality as of Rabelais, refreshingly in contrast with the hot-house manners and morals of the haute noblesse. Madame need not hesitate to cross her legs, if she found that attitude comfortable; monsieur could at once remove coat, waist-coat, collar, cuffs, if he found ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... that they might not have changed with the times and come frankly and positively, as some urged them to do, had it not been for Rabelais' failure towards the end of the Boer war. Rabelais (it will be remembered) appeared in London at the very beginning of the season in 1902. Everybody knows one part of the story or another, but if I put down the gist of it here I shall be of service, ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... and sat down in the chair which a page presented. 'What! is it Rambouillet's GRISON again?' he said with some surprise. 'Well, fire away, man. But who brought you forward as a Rabelais?' ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... were still producing plays in a little hall, certain members of the Company told him that a play on the Rebellion of '98 would be a great success. After a fortnight he brought them a scenario which read like a chapter out of Rabelais. Two women, a Protestant and a Catholic, take refuge in a cave, and there quarrel about religion, abusing the Pope or Queen Elizabeth and Henry VIII, but in low voices, for the one fears to be ravished by the soldiers, the other by the rebels. At ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... real as Richard Savage, with whom he is contemporary, and it must be admitted that he is a more presentable personage. What a jolly philosophy is his about the delights of beggary! It has all the humor of Rabelais with no touch of the Touraine grossness. It has something of the wisdom of Aurelius, only clad in homespun instead of the purple. The philosophy of contentment was never more merrily nor more whimsically expressed. A synod of sages could not ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... regarded had attracted to her side some of the most astute, as well as the least sensible, members of the court. The former, because they said with Montaigne, "How do I know?" and the latter, who said with Rabelais, "Perhaps." The greatest number had followed in the wake of the latter, just as in hunting five or six of the best hounds alone follow the scent of the animal hunted, whilst the remainder of the pack follow only the scent of the hounds. The two queens and Madame examined with particular ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... superlative powers of wit set him above any risk of such uneasiness. Garrick had remarked to me of him, a few days before, 'Rabelais and all other wits are nothing compared with him. You may be diverted by them; but Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you, whether you will ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted Cervantes, Le Sage, Moliere, Swift, Hood, and the then fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these he added the Georgia Scenes of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were quite equal to Don Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other department ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... would curse if I could, but not RABELAIS even I reckon Language could find, or a voice if he wished ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... of—1. Adverse criticism of P. & P. from an enraged idiot in the London Atheneum; 2. Paragraph from some indignant Englishman in the Pall Mall Gazette who pays me the vast compliment of gravely rebuking some imaginary ass who has set me up in the neighborhood of Rabelais; 3. A remark of the Tribune's about the Montreal dinner, touched with an almost invisible satire; 4. A remark of the Tribune's about refusal of Canadian copyright, not complimentary, but not necessarily malicious—and of course adverse criticism which is not malicious is a thing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this passage, and a merry account of words freezing in Nova Zembla, Tatler, No. 254.; and Rabelais' account of the bloody fight of the Arimasphians and Nephelebites upon the confines of the Frozen Sea (vol. iv. c. 56. p. 229., Ozell's edit. 1737). To which Mr. John Done probably refers, in his panegyric upon T. Coryat, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... Luther, an individual whom, both in his apostasy and fierceness, he much and only resembled: on the contrary, the editor of the "Praise-all Review" appeared as the mild and meek Melanchthon. Mr. Sievers, not yet at Vienna, was Erasmus. Ariosto, Guicciardini, Ronsard, Rabelais, Machiavel, Pietro Aretino, Garcilasso de la Vega. Sannazaro, and Paracelsus, afforded names to many nameless critics. Two Generals, brothers, appeared as Cortes and Pizarro. The noble Director of the Gallery was Albert Durer, and his deputy ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly; —not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the brow full and prominent and falling with deep projection over a little flattened nose turned up at the end like the noses of Rabelais and Socrates; a laughing, wrinkled mouth; a short chin boldly chiselled and garnished with a gray beard cut into a point; sea-green eyes, faded perhaps by age, but whose pupils, contrasting with the pearl-white balls on which they floated, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... that are simply pleasant, of the moderns, Boccaccio's Decameron, Rabelais, and the Basia of Johannes Secundus (if those may be ranged under the title) are worth reading for amusement. As to the Amadis, and such kind of stuff, they had not the credit of arresting even my childhood. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Like Rabelais, he can use the pencil to greater ends under cover of the motley, and encase bitter truths with the gilt of a printed jest. Like Giotto and his legendary feat, he can draw you a perfect circle with his pen—and perhaps he is the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... assumed a pseudo-radical position. Yet, after all, nothing is strange when a man is wrong in his premises. Carp at them as he may, CARLYLE is of the destructives rather than the builders, and, like all literary destructives, continually flies for shelter to the conservatives, even as Rabelais fled for safety ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with infantile pride and delight to visitors; and here, reckless of his pecuniary embarrassments, he gave a grand dinner to Theophile Gautier, the Marquis de Belloy, and Boulanger, and entertained them in the evening with good stories "a la Rabelais." ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... great kingdoms of Europe, was again shown in the multitude and variety of observations in the contemporary memoirs upon the conduct of the men who untruthfully called themselves Gruyeriens. A comment of Rabelais in his Pantagruel, adds to the general reproach. "It has always been the custom in war, to double pay for the day when the battle is won. With victory there is profit and somewhat for payment; with defeat, ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... Hooker Dreams Jeremy Taylor English Reformation Catholicity Gnosis Tertullian St. John Principles of a Review Party Spirit Southey's Life of Bunyan Laud Puritans and Cavaliers Presbyterians, Independents, and Bishops Study of the Bible Rabelais Swift Bentley Burnet Giotto Painting Seneca Plato Aristotle Duke of Wellington Monied Interest Canning Bourrienne Jews The Papacy and the Reformation Leo X. Thelwall Swift Stella Iniquitous Legislation Spurzheim and Craniology French Revolution, 1830 Captain B. Hall and the Americans ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... within man's grasp, inflamed with joy at escaping from out-worn wearying formula into what appeared to be the simple intuition of an everlasting verity, pulses through all his utterances. He has the same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the work of Rabelais. The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious elaboration of modern metaphysic in rapport with modern science—that process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... uncomfortable, and he asks what ails us. Now we know. It is strange that a book so wise and enlivening, whether it is picturing the Cornish coast in spring, the weakness of peace propaganda, Bianca Stella, Rabelais, the Rules of Art, the Bayeux Tapestry, or Spanish cathedrals, should have been ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Rabelais relates the story of a jurist who was trying a case, and who, after citing innumerable laws and reading twenty pages of incomprehensible judicial Latin, made an offer to the litigants to throw dice; if an even number fell then ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... very conversant with the lowest scenes of life;"—who, when Swift or Pope represents a coxcomb in the act of swearing, scruple not to laugh at the ridiculous execrations; but, in a less reputed author, condemn the use of such profane expletives;—who eagerly explore the jakes of Rabelais, for amusement, and even extract humour from the dean's description of a lady's dressing-room; yet in a production of these days, unstamped with such venerable names, will stop their noses, with all the signs of loathing ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Francois Rabelais a great deal, my love. It is in Rabelais and in Villon that I studied French. They are good old masters of language. But, darling, do you know the 'Pantagruel?' 'Pantagruel' is like a beautiful and noble city, full of palaces, in the resplendent dawn, before the street-sweepers of Paris ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... declared to be unreadable. It was called "The Conscience of John Digby," and when published it sold by thousands and tens of thousands. But he lost the handsome reward he received for this service by publishing at his own expense, on magnificent paper, an edition of Rabelais' works in their original tongue. He frequently spotted winners for his friends and for himself, but any money that he won at a race meeting he invariably lost coming home in the train on the Three ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... Rabelais used to come to Cauterets, and one of the springs is said to be named from a visit of Caesar's. Eaux Chaudes and Eaux Bonnes have had eclipses of popularity, but Cauterets has always been in vogue. It was not always luxurious, however. Invalids were brought here by rough litters or on ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... fashion to dub this new drama the "serious" drama; the label was unfortunate, and not particularly true. If Rabelais or Robert Burns appeared again in mortal form and took to writing plays, they would be "new" dramatists with a vengeance—as new as ever Ibsen was, and assuredly they would be sincere. But could they well be called "serious"? Can we call Synge, or St. John Hankin, or Shaw, or Barrie serious? ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... may be placed, John Skelton stands alone amongst satirists, there is no one like him: possibly from a feeling that he was writing on the winning side, and sure of sympathy and protection, he scorns to hide his pearls under a dunghill like Rabelais, and utters fearlessly and openly what he has to say. ...
— Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... truth in this, for there are some traces of Italian influence before the reign of Francis I. But the French spirit hardly needed this outside stimulus. It was awakening of itself. Scholars like William Bude and the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets like Marot, were the natural product of French soil. Everywhere, north of the Alps no less than south, there was a spontaneous ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... be imagined that Chambord is the parody of the old castles, just as the Abbey of Theleme parodies the abbeys of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both heaped a fatal ridicule upon the bygone age, but what Rabelais could only dream Francis could realize, yet not with the unfettered perfection that was granted to the vision of Gargantua; for surely never was the spirit of the time, seized and smitten into incongruous shapes ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... perturbations of Mars reveals equal perturbations in his domestic economy. It may be to this candor, this gemth, that we are to ascribe the powerful personal magnetism he exercises in common with Rousseau, Rabelais, and other rich and ingenuous natures. Who would be otherwise than frank, when frankness has this power to captivate? The excess of this influence appears in the warmth betrayed by writers over their favorite. The cool-headed Delambre, in his "Histoire de l'Astronomie," speaks ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the immortal translator of Rabelais, in his preface, "have deservedly gained esteem by translating; yet not many condescend to translate but such as cannot invent; though to do the first well, requires often as much genius as to do the latter. I wish, reader, thou mayest be as willing to do the author ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Such memories loose and craze the tongue. A man pulls himself up suddenly, to find that he has been vulgar. If so here, so be it! I refuse to plead to the indictment; sentence me and be hanged to you! I am by nature a vulgar fellow. I prefer "Tom Jones" to "The Rosary," Rabelais to the Elsie books, the Old Testament to the New, the expurgated parts of "Gulliver's Travels" to those that are left. I delight in beef stews, limericks, burlesque shows, New York City and the music of Haydn, that beery and delightful old rascal! I swear in the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... 21. Rivers are, etc.—Apparently suggested by a chapter in Rabelais: How we descended in the isle of Odes, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... his support, he was determined to levy on them at least an involuntary contribution, and accordingly (in 1769,) he published the Adventures of an Atom, in which he laid about him to right and left, and with a random humour, somewhat resembling that of Rabelais and Swift, made those whom he had defended and those whom he had attacked, alike the subject of very ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... humbly to think that any one who, even at the age of Cato, wants to learn Greek, should begin where Greek literature, where all profane literature begins—with Homer himself. It was thus, not with grammars in vacuo, that the great scholars of the Renaissance began. It was thus that Ascham and Rabelais began, by jumping into Greek and splashing about till they learned to swim. First, of course, a person must learn the Greek characters. Then his or her tutor may make him read a dozen lines of Homer, marking the cadence, the surge and thunder of the hexameters—a ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... of hypothetical creations which do not belong to my subject, because they are acknowledged to be fictions, as those of Lucian,[177] Rabelais,[178] Swift, Francis {103} Godwin,[179] Voltaire, etc. All who have more positive notions as to either the composition or organization of other worlds, than the reasonable conclusion that our Architect must be quite able to construct millions of other buildings on millions ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Dorn seized his arm. "I want to talk. I feel gabby. My lady friend doesn't understand words." The sulphurous eyes glowed caresses over him. "You remember the thing in Rabelais about women—insatiable, devouring, hungering in their satieties. The prowling animal. Well, here it is. Alive. Not in print. She's alive with something deeper than life. Wheels of flesh grinding her blood into a hunger for ecstasies. She's a mate ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Intelligencers, Mercuries, and other news-sheets. Between 1640 and 1645 one does indeed discern twinkling in this jumble some gems or would-be gems of the purer ray serene. The "Epigrams Divine and Moral" of Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, were published in April 1641; Howell's "Instructions for Foreign Travel" came out in September in the same year; Baker's "Chronicle of the Kings of England" in the following December; in April 1642 there was a London edition of Thomas Randolph's Poems, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... prosperity of the subjects of the Pope were in exact proportion to the square of the distance which separated them from Rome: in other words, that the shade of the monuments of the eternal city was noxious to the cultivation of the country. Rabelais says the shade of monasteries is fruitful; but he ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... several Authors of Satire. 1. The Ancients; Homer, Simonides, Archilochus, Aristophanes, Menippus, Ennius, Lucilius, Varro, Horace, Persius, Petronius, Juvenal, Lucian, the Emperor Julian. 2. The Moderns; Tassone, Coccaius, Rabelais, Regnier, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... for it is one of the few books he speaks of in his correspondence as having read and enjoyed. The present generation of readers are not familiar with John Buncle. Of the book and its author, Hazlitt says "John Buncle is the English Rabelais. The soul of Francis Rabelais passed into Thomas Amory, the author of John Buncle. Both were physicians, and enemies of much gravity. Their great business was to enjoy life. Rabelais indulges his spirit of sensuality in wine, in dried neats' tongues, ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... contemporary civilization;—a marvelous book which the poet entitled "a comedy" and which he could have called history; which takes all forms and all style, which surpasses Tacitus and Suetonius; which traverses Beaumarchais and reaches Rabelais;—a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic ideal. Unknown to himself, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... (as some count reality) of the Church, Charles Kingsley. The Archdeacon and the Canon would have fought on many ecclesiastical and some political grounds, but they might have got on as being, in Dr. Grantly's own words at a memorable moment "both gentlemen." At any rate, Kingsley was soaked in Rabelais, and one of the real curiosities of literature is the way in which the strength of Gargantua and Pantagruel helped to beget the sweetness of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... specimens of which are given in his Budget of Paradoxes, P. 82. The pseudonyms adopted by authors are often transposed forms, more or less exact, of their names; thus "Calvinus'' becomes "Alcuinus''; "Francois Rabelais,'' "Alcofribas Nasier''; "Bryan Waller Proctor,'' "Barry Cornwall, poet''; "Henry Rogers,'' "R. E. H. Greyson,'' &c. It is to be noted that the last two are impure anagrams, an "r'' being left out in both cases. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... are poems of nature, poems of the sea, the lake, the high oaks, the hawthorn, a rosary, Northumberland; and there are poems of books, poems about Burns, Christina Rossetti, Rabelais, Dumas, and about Shakespeare and his circle. In all the poems about books in this volume there is excellent characterisation, excellent criticism, and in the ode to Burns a very notable discrimination of the greater Burns, not the Burns of the love-poems but the fighter, the satirist, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... a genuine classic, as classics of that sort go. It is better than the gross obscenities of Rabelais, and perhaps, in some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writings of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and point of view.—[In ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... estimate of his genius, therefore, puts the critic to no trouble of elaborate discrimination or comparison. When we think of Hood as a humorist, there is no need that we should at the same time think of Aristophanes, or Lucian, or Rabelais, or Swift, or Sterne, or Fielding, or Dickens, or Thackeray. When we think of him as a poet,—except in a few of his early compositions,—we are not driven to examine what he shares with Chaucer, or Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or Byron, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... to find one meant resemblance there; We lash the vices, but the persons spare. Prints should be priz'd, as authors should be read, Who sharply smile prevailing folly dead. So Rabelais laugh'd, and so Cervantes thought; So nature dictated what art ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... journalism existed to rouse them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. 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 Browne, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... cane-swinging discoverer of the principality of Graustark, and the cane-swinging inventor of the "Tennessee Shad," appraising together the new styles in women's hats, or investigating the display in a shop-window. What is the subject that they are so earnestly discussing? The Influence of Rabelais on the Monastic System of the Fifteenth Century? The obscurity of Robert Browning? Whether or not the art of the novel is a finer art than it was in the days of the Victorians? Not at all. The point in dispute is the figure of Delehanty's batting average in 1867. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... I know not how to translate it better; for it is a real translation that is needed by this old-fashioned and artless language of the peasants of the country "that I sing," as they used to say. These people speak French that is too true for us, and since Rabelais and Montaigne, the advance of the language has lost for us many of its old riches. Thus it is with every advance, and we must make the best of it. Yet it is a pleasure still to hear those picturesque ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the sixties into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still"—Mr. Scogan sighed.—"I for one should like to see, mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit of Rabelais ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Hariri? That accomplished scholar, the late Mr. Chenery (of The Times), translated twenty-six of his poems from the Arabic, and added most interesting notes. This curious book is a fusion of the Arabian Nights, Ecclesiastes, and Rabelais. There is the magical unexpectedness of the Arabian Nights, the vanity of vanities, all is vanity, of the Preacher, and the humour of the French satirist. Wisdom is scattered about it; at one moment you acknowledge a great thought, the next you are reproached for a folly, and presently laugh ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration on record. It was this kind of thing: Where is our friend Irving going? He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is not going like A—— to face something else. He is not going to China, etc.,—and so on. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Commerce,' 'Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences,' 'Smith's Housewife,' 'The Devil on Sticks,' 'Voltaire's Essay on Universal History,' 'Dictionnaire de Cuisine' and several others on various subjects, 'Oeuvres de Rabelais,' 'American Gazetteer,' etc. These, it will be remembered, had remained unsold, but among the sold there must have been ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... his Ameto. Of his mother we would fain know more, for his wit has in it a quality, especially noticeable in the Tenth Novel of the Sixth Day of the Decameron, which marks him out as the forerunner of Rabelais, and prompts us to ask how much more his genius may have owed to his French ancestry. His father was of sufficient standing in Florence to be chosen Prior in 1321; but this brief term of office—but two months—was his last, as well as his first ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... spirit of one who wished to exhibit these capabilities; and did exhibit them signally in more than one or two ways. He showed how the novel could present, in refreshed form, the fatrasie, the pillar-to-post miscellany, of which Rabelais had perhaps given the greatest example possible, but of which there were numerous minor examples in French. He showed how it could be made, not merely to present humorous situations, but to exhibit a special kind of humour itself—to make the writer as it were the hero without ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... leading the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the never-to-be-forgotten Four, 'one for all and all for one;' Cagliostro and Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his cowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty things, into the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... pushing his stick before him, that he might not knock against a chair. He found one, and seated himself. He was young, small, vigorous, with black hair, a high and open forehead, a singularly expansive face for a blind man, and, as Rabelais says, a magnificent smile of thirty-two teeth. His wife remained standing ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... wreathed with poppies red, With flowers that Helen's feet have kissed, With leaves of vine that garlanded The Syrian Pantagruelist, The sage who laughed the world away, Who mocked at Gods, and men, and care, More sweet of voice than Rabelais, And lighter-hearted than Voltaire. ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... is excellently represented. We have here examples of Villon, Rabelais, and Moliere, but we have specimens also of La Rochefoucauld, Regnard, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Chamfort, Dumas, Gautier, Labiche, De Banville, Pailleron, and many others.... The book ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... and the Centre of that Trade, Thanks to my fair Customers, my Warehouse is graced as well as the Benefit Days of my Plays and Operas; and the foreign Goods I sell seem no less acceptable than the foreign Books I translated, Rabelais and Don Quixote: This the Criticks allow me, and while they like my Wares they may dispraise my Writing. But as tis not so well known yet that I frequently cross the Seas of late, and speaking Dutch and French, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... escorted him to London in splendid state. That was a day when national feeling reached a point such as never has been before or since. Oughtred, the famous mathematician, died of joy when the royal emblems were restored. Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, died, it is said, of laughter at the people's wild ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... shoulders of the young poet, and he has read Max Stirner and Nietzsche not wisely, but too well. He is as frank as Walt Whitman (and as shameless) concerning the mysteries of life, and as healthy (and as coarse) as Rabelais. Furthermore, Strindberg played a marked role in his artistic development. Without the hopeless misogyny of the Swede, without his pessimism, Wedekind is quite as drastic. And the realism of the Antoine Theatre ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... them appeal to unnatural law?—law according to which God did not make this world? Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the "Children of Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation, which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... fulfilment; as his best critic[5] says he brought nothing to the literature he became a part of but himself. His daring and splendid genius made the local universal, raised out of rough and cynical satirizing a style as rich and humorous and astringent as that of Rabelais, lent inevitableness and pathos and romance to lyric and song. But he was content to better the work of other men. ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... next door, and—Name of Heaven!" Madame resumed, after breaking off abruptly, and shading her eyes with her hand, "what comes here? Is it a funeral? Or a pilgrimage? If all the priests about here are as black, no wonder M. Rabelais fell out ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the reading public, there are but few general readers who could honestly plead an ignorance of the "Decameron," Balzac, La Fontaine, "Heptameron," Crebillon fils, or of matter-of-fact Monsieur le Docteur Maitre Rabelais,—works which, more or less, carry a moral instruction in every tale, which, like the tales of the "Malice of Women," in the unexpurged edition of the literal translation of the "Arabian Nights," contains much more of practical ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from Spenser's Faerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... different kind is an imitation of Rabelais, which is not so badly done, but cannot be well translated into English, because of its grotesque and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various |
