526 reinforced by the straggler from the neighbouring town, the jolly visitor from the convent, and all the other motley personages that chance would daily collect about the hearth; at which, doubtless, in his childhood, Rabelais had lingered to hear strange tales. How much his future life was affected by these young impressions one may not know, yet it is impossible to conceive that they must not have exercised strange power; and that, peradventure, his thirst for omnigenous knowledge, his spirit of free inquiry, his love of travel, of strange scenes and new sensations, of all manner of lore, whether practical or theoretic, mechanical or moral, may not have had its first inspiration and impulse from the tales that he heard, and the men that he saw, under his father's roof-tree. In Rabelais's time, the bustling, stirring spirit, the intense energy, the motley intercommunication of all things, and the barbaresque splendour of the middle ages, continued in a great degree to exist. The words of Chateaubriand, applied to an earlier period, were still true:"These were the times of the marvellous in every thing. The almoner, the monk, the pilgrim, the knight, the troubadour, had always adventures to tell or sing. In the evening, seated on the benches in the chimney-corner, they listened to the romance of King Arthur, of Ogier the Dane, of Lancelot of the Lake, or the story of the Goblin Orthon. Among these tales were to be heard also the Sirvante of the Jongleur against a felon knight, or a narrative of the life of a pious personage." No doubt, besides " a stock of facts-of useful facts-ay, and of facts available as the foundation for principles, were to be gathered from the narratives and conversation of these motley groups. I am much in error if more useful knowledge might not have been acquired in that chimneycorner, than at the new-fangled schools of your professed utilitarians. In furtherance of my argument, there remains for me but to remove one obstacle, the apothecary. "What, ho, apothecary!" I am not in the least afraid to grapple with him. Certainly, I am ready to admit that if he were an apothecary upon the model of those created by Shakspeare in England, and Molière in Rabelais's own country, the func would be very difficult, indeed, to fancy that he could have been Seigneur de la Devinière, after the fashion of other seigneurs of la belle France. But how the supposition could have ever entered the mind of any body who read Rabelais's own prologue is very extraordinary. Yet the error is an old one. Now, however, gentle reader, dismiss from your mind all remembrance of the modern French apothecary whom Molière victimised; and think of Shakspeare's only for the purpose of contrasting his inventory of valuables for an apothecary's shop, with Rabelais's own account of the contents of an apothecary's bouctique, or warehouse : "In his needy shop a tortoise hung, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, Were thinly scatter'd to make up a show," This contrasts strangely with the right rare and precious articles whereof Rabelais speaks. Every thing he mentions was of highest value, in those days when French commerce with the countries that produced the articles was difficult, tedious, and expensive. On the very face of the prologue, it is evident the Seigneur de la Devinière was an apothecary of a very different order from the Warwickshire disciple of Esculapius, whom Shakspeare chose to locate in a country whose language has no word that answers to, or is analogous to, our word "apothecary.” Equally certain it is that at the time, and in the state of society wherein Rabelais's father lived, he might have been an apothecary in such sort as to reconcile all manner of differences respecting his station. His means it would be quite absurd to doubt. The primitive and the early, and, as I would submit, the meaning in the days of Francis I, of apothecary, was the keeper or possessor of a warehouse, or, as the Americans call it, a store. 'Arolun is literally a store; but it was generally applied in the Greek, as again in the equivalent Latin word, horreum, to a place in which wine or corn was stored; and a keeper of wine and aƐ aam in his house at La De That he may have been, moreover, a merchant, drawing in addition "from the Orient" its precious stones, and still more precious drugs, I can also well admit. He might have been the store-keeper for the neighbouring convent, on some of whose inmates the duty of practising physic would in that age devolve. He might, by his tenure or his caprice (but more probably by the former, as his dissolute descendant, with whom the name ended, or at least was quite eclipsed, was also an apothecary), have been obliged to purvey certain commodities, and to perform certain offices for the monastic body under which he held; but that, upon the evidence, and under all the circumstances and collateral considerations, the father of our Rabelais could have been a mere vintner, or a mere apothecary, from the depth of my soul I believe to be impossible. Men will at least think charitably of this argument, if they only recollect that, unlike mind's, names can be acclimated "Cœlum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt." So sings the poet, and he is right; but with words it is otherwise: and without confessing them, with Mirabeau, to be things—that is, generally—they are things wherever they may have found a home when looked at from a distance. Sooth to say, a word is like the shield of our childish days, about the quality of which the gallant knights quarrelled on the highway, the golden side was turned to one, the silver to the other; it was only when the chances of the combat had thrown each upon the side whence he had not before gazed that they found, as the life-blood ebbed fast away, that they were both right and both wrong. The judicious reader will not alone be indulgent to the inference thus drawn, but acknowledge and adopt it; "for the general," however, I would submit a case, for which I choose to go to a land in that earlier state of society where any gentleman might, without derogation, keep a store, and, besides, exercise high functions of the state, and for the people-that is, in other words, be practically, as some theorists think, the only species of nobleman that is not a nuisance. I go to America, and there I find a visible and living history, and map of European civilisation. In the one instance, I travel from the story of age to age from the present to that wherein history is quite mute, and tradition melts into mere fable; in the other, I pass from province to province, until I get into the primeval forest, and am again physically, as I was before morally, in the presence of impassible and inscrutable Time. Very well! but as in many of these provinces, so in many of these ages, I find a want, A judge is a judge all over America. What is an American judge? A fellow who curses, draws his knife to call counsel to order, squats himself on the bench, with his heels flung aloft-spits, smokes, and drinks brandy, in the judgment-seat. What is an American judge? An industrious, able, eloquent, and most learned individual-a professor, with a renown unequalled—a writer on law quite unapproached in these latter days, and destined to take his place with Bacon, Coke, Holt, Hale, and Somers" the enlightened magistrate of nations"-the first authority as a lawyer in the world. Both are true. You may, in the person of him who wrote the book on equity, and the treatise of the "Conflict of Laws,” find the one at Cambridge, Massachusetts; the other it might not be so pleasant to encounter, but he abounds in the backwoods. In few words, Joseph Story is a judge, Nehemiah Van Rensaeller is a judge; in like manner, Smith is an apothecary, and Rabelais was an apothecary. But the articles vended, and the position of the people, were very different. If Mr. Martin should be able to reconcile this theory to his conscience, I am quite sure he would rejoice at it; for no man could evince a more generous spirit in endeavouring to rescue the memory of Rabelais from the idle imputations cast upon it by stories, chiefly suggested by passages in his own romance. The truth is that, from Rabelais's boyish days, he applied himself to study with a zeal rarely equalled, never excelled. "It was his aim," says Père Niceron,* "to become grammarian, poet, philosopher, phy sician, jurisconsult, and astronomer." And Mr. Martin adds : "And his works demonstrate how completely he succeeded. He possessed Mémoires des Hommes Illustres, tome 32. a peculiar aptitude for the acquisition of languages; an aptitude which afterwards shewed itself in his command of Italian, Spanish, German, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. At this period he was a perfect master of the Latin and Greek tongues; the latter of which had for some time been attracting the attention of the most enlightened minds in Europe. Within the walls of Fontenay-le-Comte, however, a Greek book was regarded as no better than a work of magic; while the man who possessed the key to its secrets was looked upon as a trafficker in the arts inhibited:' and it appears, by a letter from Budæus to a friend, that Rabelais's attachment to the Greek writers drew down upon him the hatred and persecu. tions of his fellow monks." It was said he was obliged to leave "After rambling up and down for "In 1533, we find him established at Lyons, where he was hospital physician, and taught and practised for several years. At the commencement of the year 1534, his friend, Jean du Bellay, then bishop of Paris, having occasion to pass through Lyons on his way to the papal court, regarding the divorce of Henry VIII. of England, took Rabelais along with him in the capacity of his physician; thus enabling him to realise what had been long his passionate wish, a personal acquaintance with Italy and the Eternal City." Through Cardinal Du Bellay, his old schoolfellow, and other friends, aided by two learned cardinals, he was relieved from ecclesiastical censure. By their exertions, a bull in his fa- No man can seriously believe the have been the work of some idle jestmonger, who laid an offspring he dared not own at Rabelais's door; but, in my mind, it was more probably the weak invention and filthy device of those worthy monks whom he had caused to be consigned to several puncheons full of devils. Never, would it appear, did mortal man more diligently possess himself of the means of doing good to his fellow-creatures; never did any body more zealously and devotedly endeavour to mitigate the woes of human kind. It was said of Democritus, that he spent his time in the wisest manner, in contemplating the works of nature, and railing at the passions and proceedings of man (I quote from a loose recollection of the passage). But by how much more noble a spirit was not our Rabelais animated? He, too, contemplated nature, both in her exterior features and her hidden mysteries. All the elements, and all created things, however mute to others, bore to his soul a pregnant voice," and lent to it their choicest impulses." His heart was strong, yet chastened in the consciousness of wisdom. He had won for himself "That content, surpassing wealth, The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crown'd." He was free from ambition, avarice, and lust-the demons that beset humanity-not simply so, but even averse to advancement, and careless of pelf-and secure against all female blandishments, without resorting to the expedient of the philosopher, who destroyed his eyesight, lest he might be allured through the eye-that window of the passionate soul-and so be dragged to earth from his divine contemplations. Thus he preserved to old age all his corporal faculties, for the sake and the use of his rational soul. Hence his crown of glory, which is that of a passionless HEALER. He fulfilled in the spirit the fancy breathed by Homer for a man in the flesh. Unscathed and incapable of wound, he witnessed all that we vain mortals are wont, after various phases of the like scenes, to do and suffer; but he never entangled himself in the throng, or compromised himself in the conflict. He saw and felt all that was noble, true, and generous, amongst those who struggled; and with a courage and a purity which makes that courage which cannot quail, he supported them generously-and most generously, because most wisely. Ile gave them the labours, bodily and mental, of half a century of almost, according to the ancient computation, two generations of man. No man had a keener sense of ridicule-a more discursive habit of fun. The one was mentally electric: it only required that his eye should touch the object. The other was illimitable. Neither could the world of reality chill it, nor the world of imagination exhaust it. Every thing his intellect chose to magnetise became fun. Yet did he neither "deride the joys nor the griefs" of the multitude. As a divine, a lawyer, and a physician, and as one deeply learned in the arts and sciences, he lent to his brethren, during the long life vouchsafed to him, more varied and more truly beneficial aid than any man ever did before. If any other possessed the means, he had not the beneficence to put it into act. On leaving this phantasmal scene, he might have truly said, with one of his greatest children, the poet Béranger— "J'ai donc utilisé ma vie." The knowledge of the heart and mind of man, which he acquired in his intercourse with him under those confidential circumstances to which the practice of some profession essential to the weal of soul or body can alone admit, enabled him, with his profound general knowledge, to deal with his fellow-men in the most exalted character which a human benefactor can assume, and which, with one exception in the world's story, I believe to have been peculiarly his own. Thus much of the man- -thus much of the book generally! Hereafter, more of the book in its several parts and its multifarious tendencies, and of Maître Alcofaribas, when he condescends to appear personally on the scene. VOL YY NO. CXIX. MINISTERIAL TEARS. "Cur me querelis exanimas tuis?"-HORACE, Ode XVII. lib. ii. LORD JOHN R-ss-1 (pulls out a white handkerchief). WHY, M-lb-ne, will you vex me so? And leave your place and pelf: I cannot, cannot ever bear, Oh! should the Tory fates decree (Oh! may that day be distant!) The blow, but that same instant |