"Rabelais" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bald head, 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 ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... 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, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... laugh of Rabelais, To rout these moralising croakers! (The cowls were mightier far than they, Yet fled before that King of Jokers) O for a slash of Fielding's pen To bleed these pimps of Melancholy! O for a Boz, born once again To play the Dickens ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... calls himself French; and, little communicative as Ned Land was, I must admit that he took a certain liking for me. My nationality drew him to me, no doubt. It was an opportunity for him to talk, and for me to hear, that old language of Rabelais, which is still in use in some Canadian provinces. The harpooner's family was originally from Quebec, and was already a tribe of hardy fishermen when ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... read Al 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 ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... Canterbury Tales, Montaigne's 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 aware of readers who prefer ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... seventh he was to treat of the other principal dramatists of the Elizabethan period, Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher; in the eighth of the life and all the works of Cervantes; in the ninth of Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne, with a dissertation "on the nature and constituents of genuine humour, and on the distinctions of humorous from the witty, the fanciful, the droll, the odd, etc." Donne, Dante, and Milton formed the subject of the tenth; the Arabian Nights Entertainment, and the romantic ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... himself in the midst of books, of thought, and discussion. He has time to look at all the common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything. He can flirt with young opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human thought. Here first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love with that enchantress, "who sifts time with a fine large blue silk sieve." There is hardly a clever ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... strange manners, for exotic ideas, and ways not our own. More perhaps is due to what, as Englishmen think, is the lack of HUMOUR in the most brilliant and witty of races. We have friends many in Moliere, in Dumas, in Rabelais; but it is far more difficult to be familiar, at ease, and happy in the circles to which Madame Sand, M. Daudet, M. Flaubert, or M. Paul Bourget introduce us. M. Bourget's old professor, in "Le Disciple," we understand, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... doubted if any Englishman since Swift has had the same power of presenting vivid pictures and decisive criticisms of the political and social organism of his times. It is this Aristophanic gift which Swift had. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rabelais, Diderot, Heine, Beaumarchais had it. Carlyle had it for other ages, and in a historic spirit. There have been far greater satirists, men like Fielding and Thackeray, who have drawn far more powerful pictures of particular characters, foibles, or social maladies. But since Swift we have ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... 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 plaintiff was right; ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... 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 not rare in France. Thus Regnier ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... owing to the following causes:—The universality of his genius was, perhaps, a disadvantage to his single 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 and careless in critical places; he is in earnest ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 presence of ladies ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... 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 ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... old doctor, being in bed with his wife, dreamed that the Devil gave him a ring, which, so long as he had it on his finger, would prevent his being made a cuckold: waking he found he had got his finger the Lord knows where. See Rabelais, and Prior's ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... Hindu Charvakas explain the Triad, Bramha, Vishnu and Shiva, by the sexual organs and upon Vishnu's having four arms they gloss, "At the time of sexual intercourse, each man and woman has as many." (Dabistan ii. 202.) This is the Eastern view of Rabelais' "beast with two ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... yet different kind is an imitation of Rabelais, which is not so badly done, but cannot be well translated into English, because of its ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... shoulders; a felt cap covered his bald crown. His red face, his triple chin, his lips thick and crimson, his nose long and flat at the end, his small and lively gray eyes, gave him a certain resemblance to Rabelais; but what specially characterized Father Griffen's physiognomy was a rare mixture of frankness, goodness, strength ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... 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 pale twilight of ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... 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 of stone at so unfortunate a moment, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... me; it is unfortunately true. One of the most interesting chapters in Rabelais's 'Pantagruel' is devoted to ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... inherent in fugal style. The way in which the voices chase each other about—compared by Berlioz[160] with the gambols of a delighted elephant—and their spasmodic attempts at assertion, produce an effect irresistibly droll. The humour is as broad as that of Aristophanes or Rabelais. Words are powerless to describe the thrill of the last fifty measures which launch us into the Finale. We may merely observe that this long passage, pp throughout until the last molto crescendo, and with the rhythmic element ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... in the history of freedom than the songs of Burns. His satire has lost none of its edge. His musical arrows yet sing through the air. He is so substantially a reformer, that I find his grand, plain sense in close chain with the greatest masters—Rabelais, Shakespeare in comedy, Cervantes, Butler, and Burns. If I should add another name, I find it only in a living countryman of Burns. He is an exceptional genius. The people who care nothing for literature and poetry ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Ascham. 2. Double translating. 3. Rabelais. 4. First appearance of realism in instruction. 5. Montaigne. 6. Summary of ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... despair Leuwenhoech and Swammerdam, who beheld the entire universe in a drop of water. This inexhaustible subject has again inspired an entertaining book full of Gallic malice and English humor, where Rabelais and Sterne meet and greet him at the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... 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 by the appearance of counterparts to them in Lady Guest's edition of the Mabinogion. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... enjoyed the fun; 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
... richer than the contrast of the bird's wild sweet notes, some of which he imitated with wonderful skill, and the accompaniment of the Cobbler's hoarse cracked {p.162} voice, uttering all manner of endearing epithets, which Johnny multiplied and varied in a style worthy of the Old Women in Rabelais at the birth of Pantagruel. I often wondered that Mathews, who borrowed so many good things from John Ballantyne, allowed this Cobbler, which was certainly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... curse if I could, but not RABELAIS even I reckon Language could find, or a voice if he wished for the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... 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 rear the social structure upon which her reputation ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... and ease in using them. The Italians were more than a century older; the English could not yet, like the Italians, say what they would; the strength of English was, doubtless, there in germ, but it had still to reach its full growth and development. Even the French prose of Rabelais and Montaigne was more mature. But in Spenser, as in Hooker, all these tentative essays of vigorous but unpractised minds have led up to great and lasting works. We have forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect, to speak ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... ranked below Irving, Holmes and Lowell—nay, actually below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby! The thing is fabulous, fantastic, unglaublich—but nevertheless true. Lacking the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humourists" (exempli gratia, Rabelais, Moliere, Aristophanes!!), Mark is dismissed by this Professor Balderdash as a hollow buffoon.... But stay! Do not laugh yet! Phelps himself, indignant at the stupidity, now proceeds to credit Mark ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... the Colonel continued to Harry, seeing by the boy's face that the latter had no great love or comprehension of his favourite humour. "We consume a vast deal of it in this house. Rabelais is my favourite reading. My wife is all for Mr. Fielding and Theophrastus. I think Theo prefers Tom Brown, and Mrs. Hetty ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... town of Pezenas they still show an elbow-chair of Moliere's (as at Montpelier they show the gown of Rabelais,) in which the poet, it is said, ensconced in a corner of a barber's shop, would sit for the hour together, silently watching the air, gestures, and grimaces of the village politicians, who, in those days, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... 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 Agrippa" see ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... satisfaction of feeling that he is French to the core. No part of his admirable country is more characteristically national. Normandy is Normandy, Burgundy is Burgundy, Provence is Provence; but Touraine is essentially France. It is the land of Rabelais, of Descartes, of Balzac, of good books and good company, as well as good dinners and good houses. George Sand has somewhere a charming passage about the mildness, the convenient quality, of the physical conditions ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... production of wit and humor which has ever been brought forth. ... The author of this original book is a clergyman by the name of Sterne, who, under his Harlequin's name, Yorick, has given to the world the most excellent sermons." The review contains also a brief word of comparison with Rabelais and a quotation from an English critic expressing regret at Yorick's embroidering "the choicest flowers of genius on a paultry groundwork of buffoonry."[29] This late mention of Sterne's great novel, and the manner in which it is made ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... monstrous conflagration of their fight Startling the day and splendoring the night! Both are unconquerable—one is right. Will't keep the pigmy, if we make him strong, From siding with a giant in the wrong? When Genius strikes for error, who's afraid To arm poor Folly with a wooden blade? O Rabelais, you knew it all!—your good And honest judge (by men misunderstood) Knew to be right there was but one device Less fallible than ignorance—the dice. The time must come—Heaven expedite the day!— When all mankind shall their decrees obey, And nations prosper ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... 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 be compared ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... princes of Europe, lay and ecclesiastical, extended to them, the nobility following in the wake of the princes. The best literary brains of the day however were largely absorbed by the religious movement. The great imaginative writers, unless we except Rabelais, appear in the latter half of the sixteenth century—Tasso and Camoens and Cervantes, [Footnote: Don Quixote did not appear till 1605; but Cervantes was then nearly sixty.] Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as Montaigne. But even in the first half of the century, Copernicus enunciated ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... as he sat there on Francis' sometime throne; and these Sir Jollys were his subjects all—Marot, Caillette, Brusquet, Villot, and the lesser lights, jesters of barons, cardinals and even bishops! Rabelais, too, that poor, dissolute devil of a writer, learned as Homer, brutish as Homer's swine—all subjects of his, the king of jesters, save one; one whom he eyed with certain fear and wonder; fear, because she ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... forgiveness, kind reader, that 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 idioms used in the old districts in the center of France; all the more because ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... to send for Lorarios, those officers to carry them all together for company to Bedlam, and set Rabelais to be their physician. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... system which might be built on sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius. But the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of the natural goodness of man. Jansenism had struggled against it and was defeated. After theology it was the turn of metaphysics. Kant's moral imperative marked the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... a country house there, very old and very tumbledown. They say that Rabelais used to come to the village. But our house is from later, from the time of Henri Quatre. Poissac is not far from Tours. An ugly name, isn't it? But to me it is very beautiful. The house has orchards all round it, and yellow roses with flushed centers poke themselves ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... three days' time. 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 Sanctum Regnum. "Fear not!" said Albert Pike, and she ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... just now, and beneath this again is this large distribution of the lawless and sooty literature, frankly intended as a debauch for the gutter-snipe and his consort. Even the coarse, and in no line squeamish, Rabelais wrote that, "Science sans conscience n'est que ruine ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... "Rabelais lied, as all men lie. The real truth is that the fox can go no farther, that he is at the end of his breath and his courage, ready to fall into the ditch, and if the hound ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... market buildings of Free Town have a creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale—things one wants the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue. Here are all manner of fruits, some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon become so to you in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it) you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... questionable whether there is much in these inimitable romances half so objectionable as many of the chapters in Rabelais and Boccaccio. Nor do the most archaic of the passages which Captain Burton declines to "veil in the decent obscurity of a learned language" leave much room for the admirers of Shakespeare, or Greene, or Nash, or Wycherley, or Swift, or Sterne to cry shame. Their coarseness was a reflection ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with absent correspondents instead of with present interlocutors, real or imagined. He follows in them the old theme, the art of living, the happiness of moderation and contentment; preaching easily as from Rabelais' easy chair, with all the Frenchman's wit, without his grossness. And, as we read, we feel how the ten years of experience, of thought, of study, have matured his views of life, how again the labour spent during their progress on lyrical composition, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... of the most luxurious and well-kept small cities of France. It is the seat of the prefecture, the assizes, and a university—whose college of medicine was famous in the days of Rabelais. It has the modern attributes of steam-heated, electric-lighted hotels and restaurants, a tramway system that is appalling and dangerous to all other traffic by reason of its complexity, and an Opera House and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... So much as this Boccaccio has himself told us, under a transparent veil of allegory, in 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 ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... vast imagination, equal to the comprehension of the greatest objects, and capable of a steady and cool 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, in Phaedrus and La Fontaine, from the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... strange is that, having all his life cultivated belles-lettres, he does not reason better about our good authors than about our philosophers. He looks on Rabelais as a great man. He cites the "Amours des Gaules" as one of our best works. He was, however, a scholar, a courtier, a man of much wit, an ambassador, a man who had reflected profoundly on all he had seen. He possessed great knowledge: ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... those attacks which he anticipated certain critics would make upon his hardy experiment. He claimed for his book the protection of all those to whom literature was dear, because it was a work of art—and a work of art, in the highest sense of the word, it undoubtedly is. Like Boccaccio, Rabelais, the Queen of Navarre, Ariosto, and Verville, the great author of The Human Comedy has painted an epoch. In the fresh and wonderful language of the Merry Vicar Of Meudon, he has given us a marvellous picture of French life and manners in the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... his vision of Hades, beheld the Shades of the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian's hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and "imperial Caesar dead and turned to clay" a hawker of petty wares. It was easier to fit the shadows of ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... 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 ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... 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 ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were ... disorder and spiritual beings."[13] For the very elements of experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith, like Taoism, a sort ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... mandibular grimace. With this byplay of the jaws and their menacing gestures of the head in the empty air the lovers have the air of intending to eat one another." Thus they preface their bridals by displays of gallantry, recalling the ancient betrothal customs of which Rabelais speaks; the pretenders were cuffed and derided and threatened ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... title please thine ear, Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver! Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rabelais's easy chair,— ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... some matters of a difficult and delicate nature might be thrown into his hands at the present emergency, during the conduct of which it would be fitting for him to act by some better oracle than that of the Bottle, celebrated by Rabelais. In full compliance with this prudent determination, he touched neither the ale nor the brandy which were placed before him, and declined peremptorily the sack with which his friend would have garnished the board. Nevertheless, just as the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... not written for children, they may outrage readers offended by Chaucer, La Fontaine, Rabelais ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Rabelais's word, on one of the many occasions of popular manifestation: "This is not the first time that I have had occasion to remark that the population of Paris is only a ramas ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... pranks. His indecencies are all, indeed, in print, but fortunately scattered, and it would be a groveling nature that should seek to collect them; yet the absence of this chapter from the world's book of humor means the omission of a comic strain that neither Aristophanes nor Rabelais has surpassed. Even as I write, a newspaper misprint assures me that typesetting machines are no protection against the Imp of the Perverted. Perhaps we may be pardoned the reproduction of one of the ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... dearly loved excursions, Francis Rabelais, inserted in one of his fables an account of a country where the roads were in motion. He called the place the Island of Odes, from the Greek [Greek: odss], a "road," and explained: "For the roads travel, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... Scott quotes from Rabelais the passage in which the monk suggests to Gargantua that in order to induce sleep they might together try the repetition of the seven penitential psalms. 'The conceit pleased Gargantua very well; and, beginning the first of these psalms, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... attain to this, and leave to ghouls and large or small coffin-worms the business of investigating and possibly fattening on the thing. But even the oldest experience dealing with his novels (which were practically all early) may find itself considerably tabuste, as Rabelais has it, that is to say, "bothered" with faults which are mitigated in the Genie du Christianisme, comparatively (not quite) unimportant in the Voyages, and almost entirely whelmed in the Memoires d'Outre-Tombe. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Charles Morton, Thomas Moss, Thomas Norris, John Otway, Thomas Paine, Thomas Palafox, Don Joseph Parnell, Thomas Percy, Thomas Philips, John Pollok, Robert Pope, Alexander Porteus, Beilby Prior, Matthew Proctor, Bryan Walter Quarles, Francis Rabelais, Francis Raleigh, Sir Walter Randolph, John Rochefoucauld, Duc de Rochester, Earl of Rogers, Samuel Roscommon, Earl of Rowe, Nicholas Savage, Richard Scott, Sir Walter Sewall, Jonathan M. Sewell, Dr. George Shakespeare, William Sheffield, Duke ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... Sterne took it up in the 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 ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... me that the activity and 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 speaks in ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... hundred years ago, in the sad silence that had followed the comparative failure of the noble effort of the Middle Ages, there came upon all Europe a storm out of the south. Its tumult is of many tongues; one can hear in it the laughter of Rabelais, or, for that matter, the lyrics of Shakespeare; but the dark heart of the storm was indeed more austral and volcanic; a noise of thunderous wings and the name of Michael the Archangel. And when it had shocked and purified ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... Brandt in his literary qualities has been compared to Rabelais, so his satirical pencil has been likened to Hogarth's. Boldness, drollery, dramatic spirit, force, and spontaneous satire characterize both artists. He does not mount a pulpit and speak to the erring masses with sanctimonious self-righteousness; but he enters ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... bad French," she was steeped in French scholarship. She had read Plato and Sophocles under the stimulating guidance of William Cory, and her love of Italy had taught her a great deal of Italian. The authors whom she enjoyed and quoted were a motley crowd—Dante and Rabelais, Pascal and Montaigne, George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, Tolstoi and George Borrow, "Mark Rutherford" and Samuel Butler, Fenelon and Renan and Anatole France. Her vein of poetic feeling was strong and genuine. In addressing some young girls she ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... his belief that the black colour of the negro is a disease, which depletion, properly exercised, might be capable of remedying—a scheme not a whit more feasible, than that of the courtiers of La Reine Quinte, referred to by Rabelais, "who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, by just rubbing their stomachs with the bottom of ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... ribald jest he is said to have flung himself back in a chair and expired of sheer merriment. Later days elucidate his fate by declaring that overbalancing himself he broke his neck on the marble pavement. Sir Thomas Urquhart, the glorious translator of Rabelais, is reported to have died of laughter on hearing of the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... obeys, and he appears all black, "with sharp visage and ample beard. His locks hung to his ankles, his eyes were scattering fiery sparks, sulphureous flame stood in his mouth, he was frightfully feather-clad."[126] This is already the devil of the Mysteries, the one described by Rabelais, almost in the same words. We can imagine the effect of so minute a picture on the Saxon herdsmen assembled on Sunday in their little mysterious churches, almost ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... women were shrieking 'Murder!' 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 ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... children, masters, and men, all that little world, share in the garnering of the divine hoard. These various elements of satisfaction explain the hilarity of the vintage, transmitted from age to age in these last glorious days of autumn, the remembrance of which inspired Rabelais with the bacchic form ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... of primeval breadth and vastness! The vice egrillard of Voltaire, the coarse animalism of Rabelais, even the large comic sexuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: for the forest is the world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed, and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring. Only a Roman ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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 a note-book ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh—well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know their own business. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that, although allegorical poetry does exist, allegory is not essential to 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 ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... Rabelais Dickens Thomas Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... him; the religious, 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; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Catullus: while there seems no reason to doubt that he read Greek, though it is quite true that his references to Greek authors do not prove any first-hand acquaintance. He understood French, and read Rabelais and the French sonneteers, and he seems to have been acquainted with Italian.[3] His knowledge of English literature was wide, and his judgement good: but his chief bent lay towards the history, legendary ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... him that "his voice was clear and sonorous, his eye beaming with fire, his head of the antique cast, his hands beautiful, and his gesture graceful and abounding—at once Rabelais and Fontaine, with the droll humor of the one and the polished elegance ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... would have sufficed to throw the youth of 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 and Chaucer." ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In Ronsard's time that rougher [158] element seemed likely to predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To effect this softening is the object of the revolution in poetry which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for the means ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... girl a woman, of a gallant a husband. Remember that there is not exemption for lovers. For them, as for ordinary folk like Louis and me, there lurks beneath the wedding rejoicings the great "Perhaps" of Rabelais. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Vanity of Melancholy. And by the land of Phaeacia is to be understood the place of Art and of fair Pleasures; and by Circe's Isle, the place of bodily delights, whereof men, falling aweary, attain to Eld, and to the darkness of that age. Which thing Master Francoys Rabelais feigned, under the similitude of the Isle ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... said my say, I must bid you, worthy reader, farewell. Beseeching you, in the words of old Rabelais, "to interpret all my sayings and doings in the perfectest sense. Reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with all these jolly maggots; and do what lies in you to keep me always merry. Be frolic now, my ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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 ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... constant coming in and going out of peasants with dripping sabots, of dogs with wet paws, and draggle-tailed hens with miry feet; geese, and even pigs, not unfrequently venture inside, and have a good walk round before their presence is noticed and they are treated to quotations from Rabelais, enforced with the broomstick. Then the rain beats in at the open door, which nobody troubles to close. Under these circumstances, the rural inn becomes detestable. So I found the auberge at Saint-Gery, where I waited long hours for the weather to change, after having received a soaking while climbing ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... another. The author of Tristram Shandy was himself only a follower of one of the greatest of 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 finesse. These are the qualities ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of the games that Mr. Newell calls "world-old and world-wide." It is found in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, etc., was played by Froissart in the fourteenth century, and by Rabelais in the fifteenth. The game is supposed to have had its source in a formula sung at the sowing of grain to propitiate the earth gods and to promote and quicken the growth of crops. Mrs. Gomme notes that the turning around and bowing to the fields and lands, coupled with pantomimic actions ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... was just as irreverent as he dared be, and 1601 reveals his richest expression of sovereign contempt for overstuffed language, genteel literature, and conventional idiocies. Later, when a magazine editor apostrophized, "O that we had a Rabelais!" Mark impishly and anonymously—submitted 1601; and that same editor, a praiser of Rabelais, scathingly abused it and the sender. In this episode, as in many others, Mark Twain, the "bad boy" of American ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... gleek is often mentioned in Tudor literature. It is derived from Old Fr. glic, used by Rabelais, and the word is very common in the works of the more disreputable French poets of the 15th century. According to French archaeologists the game was also called bonheur, chance, fortune, and hasard. Hence glic represents ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... 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 Pantagruel ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and of muscular motion, on the Athanasian Creed, on 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, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... 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? He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is not going like A—— to face ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless you cut deep into life, wantonness and gaiety lose their savour and are not fit for the ends of art. The French spirit is not only embodied in Rabelais and Montaigne and Moliere—if these are your superficial men!—but also in Pascal. Was there so great a gulf between Pascal and Daumier? And I find not only the spirit of Pascal in some of these pictures in ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... and all the rhetorical part of him came to the top, his face growing as red as his hair. "France, that has always been in rebellion for liberty and reason. France, that has always assailed superstition with the club of Rabelais or the rapier of Voltaire. France, at whose first council table sits the sublime figure of Julian the Apostate. France, where a man said only the other day those splendid unanswerable words"—with a superb gesture—"'we have extinguished ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of Grattan, before ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the immortal satirist Rabelais, and, after him, Michael Montaigne, had already divined the truth, had pointed out serious defects in education, and the way to reform. No one followed out their suggestions, or even gave them a hearing. ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Lucian.—Friend Rabelais, well met—our souls are very good company for one another; we both were great wits and most audacious freethinkers. We laughed often at folly, and sometimes at wisdom. I was, indeed, more correct and more elegant in my style; but then, in return, you had a greater ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... On Rabelais, Swift, and Sterne: on the Nature and Constituents of genuine Humour, and on the Distinctions of the Humorous from the Witty, the Fanciful, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... daily, after the fashion of those times; but they seem to have comforted themselves under their troubles by a good deal of wild life out of school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... say, who, having a Stepmother, rushes sulky into the wide world; and will wring the paternal heart?—Poor Louis escapes from known unsupportable evils, to an unknown mixture of good and evil, coloured by Hope. He goes, as Rabelais did when dying, to seek a great May-be: je vais chercher un grand Peut-etre! As not only the sulky Boy but the wise grown Man is obliged to do, so often, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and piling wonder upon wonder, Lucian first condemned in his "Instructions for Writing History," and then caricatured in his "True History," wherein is contained the account of a trip to the moon, a piece which must have been enjoyed by Rabelais, which suggested to Cyrano de Bergerac his Voyages to the Moon and to the Sun, and insensibly contributed, perhaps, directly or through Bergerac, to the conception of "Gulliver's Travels." I have added the Icaro- Menippus, because that Dialogue describes another trip to the moon, though its ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... Essayist, Charles Lamb will be remembered, in years to come, with Rabelais and Montaigne, with Sir Thomas Browne, with Steele, and with Addison. He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry, and the most heart-touching pathos. In the largest ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... printed, it is difficult to decide at the present time whether or not this be true. The primary idea of the play is common to many commedia dell' arte, whilst Moliere has also been inspired by such old authors as Noel Du Fail, Rabelais, those of the Quinze joyes de Mariage, of the Cent ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... book there 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... into some house of ill fame. The house surgeon, naturally possessed by curiosity, knowing his master's opinions, and being himself a rabid follower of Cabanis (Cabaniste en dyable, with the y, which in Rabelais seems to convey an intensity of devilry)—Bianchon stole into the church, and was not a little astonished to see the great Desplein, the atheist, who had no mercy on the angels—who give no work to the lancet, and cannot suffer from fistula or gastritis—in short, this ...
— The Atheist's Mass • Honore de Balzac
... highest value when the real literary work of Modern Europe began. The futilities of the problems upon which the scholastic thinkers exercised themselves gave occasion for the satiric onslaught both of Rabelais and Erasmus. "Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimaera in vacuo bombinans possit comedere secundas intentiones; et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in Consilio Constantiensi," and "Quid consecrasset Petrus, si consecrasset eo tempore, quo corpus Christi pendebet in cruce?" are samples which will ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... heartless hypocrite and the other a madman. Certainly I am not prejudiced in favor of Christianity, and yet I enjoyed the play. If Mr. Caine says he is trying to bring the stage and the pulpit together, then he is a humorist, with the humor of Rabelais. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson |
