psalms or anything"-" If I live to be served such another trick, I'll have my brains taken out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new-year's gift." What are these, and a hundred other such conceits in Falstaff, but the lucky result, as it were, of sheer voluntary drivel the lips speaking on in blind haste, and Nature, per force, supplying the matter? And precisely so it is in Rabelais. In him, however, the zanyism is most frequently of a peculiar genus-a vinous zanyism, so to speak; the zanyism of intoxication. We seem to see all through the heavy eye, the swaggering look, the alternate mock-solemnity and downright idiotcy of drunkenness. Indeed, as has been well remarked, the whole of Rabelais's book may be best conceived as a drama within a drama; the real scene being the tavern-parlor of the hostelry at Chinon warm and well lighted in a blustering winter night, with a company of jolly topers seated in it round a board; and the professed story, with its Gargantuas, Panurges, and Friar Johns, passing through this only as a mad phantasmagory, or drunken revel. And thus we see how Rabelais was still the old man, and how, even in his mature age, all that he could do was to roll back his later experience of life, so as to bed and smother it in his early recollections.

Of the vigor of the dramatic or creative faculty in Rabelais, the proof lies in the distinctness with which one learns to picture the main characters of his fiction. What can be finer, in its way, than his description of the domestic old giant, Grangousier, as he was quietly spending his time when the news reached him of the invasion of his territories by Picrochole?" Grangousier, good old man, warming his thighs at a good, great, clear fire, waiting upon the broiling of some chestnuts, very serious in drawing scratches on the hearth with a stick burnt at one end, wherewith they stirred the fire, telling to his wife and the rest of his family pleasant old stories and tales of former times." Nor is the portrait of Gargantua less clear to the reader. It is, however, upon the three friends and companions-Pantagruel, Friar John, and Panurge, that Rabelais has taken most pains. The characters of these three stand out as conceptions perfectly and peculiarly Rabelæsian. Pantagruel, the wise, the good, the invincible, the modest, the sad, the speculative, half a Hamlet, half a giant; Friar John, the lusty, the fearless, the jovial, the profane, "going through the world like a bull;" and Panurge, the witty, the mischievous, the wily, the unprincipled, half a Pistol

and half a Mephistopheles, with all the lying and cowardice of the one, and all the clever rascality of the other, yet somehow loveable, after all-where shall we find such another triad? And how they set off each other! Panurge always active, always amusing, never at a loss, sneaking off at the first glimpse of danger, re-appearing whenever it is past; Friar John, with his hanger ever ready for a foe, and his knife for a joint, often bullying his poor co-mate, yet bearing with him like a brother; and Pantagruel, sometimes standing apart and looking on, at others joining in the sport, but always as a superior nature, occupied with thoughts of his own

there is something almost fearful in such a conjunction. The affection that Pantagruel bears to Panurge, the uniform kindness and consideration with which he treats that strange unearthly being, who seems but one lump of facetiousness and vice, are positively mystic. He sometimes rebukes Friar John, Panurge never. Of the three characters, Panurge is, beyond question, the masterpiece. As a poetic impersonation of the principle of evil

we do not hesitate to say it-the character of Panurge, by Rabelais, is a more original and masterly conception than that of Mephistopheles, by Goethe.

And this leads us, finally, to the philosophy of Rabelais. It was a favorite opinion of Coleridge, that the real scope of the great work of Rabelais was not political, but philosophical. "Pantagruel," he said, " was the Reason; Panurge, the Understanding—the pollarded man, the man with every faculty except the Reason." With virtually this meaning in view, Rabelais, as Coleridge conceived, was led, by the necessity of the times, to assume the guise of zanyism-now making a deep thrust; then, to appear unconscious of what he had done, writing a chapter or two of pure buffoonery. This hypothesis, a little altered and softened, would almost seem admissible; so clear is it, above all in the delineation of Pantagruel, that Rabelais, too, had his high thoughts and serious moments. And here, without investigating the matter further, let us quote, in conclusion, one passage, in which, more than in any other in the whole work, (we can say this as conscientious readers,) Rabelais has shown his deeper susceptibilities-a passage which proves, we think, that even he, mass of fat, fun, and filth, as people would fain represent him to have been, was subject to visits of a mystic melancholy that Horace never knew. It is where, in Book iv. chapter 28, Pantagruel, discoursing on immortality, relates what is

profound but obscure idea of Pagan ages, which is connected with the elementary glimpses of man into the abysses of his higher relations, and lurks mysteriously amongst what Milton so finely calls "the dark foundations" of our human nature. This notion, it is hard to express in modern phrase, for we have no idea exactly corresponding to it; but in Latin it was called piacularity. The reader must understand upon our authority, nostro periculo, and in defiance of all the false translations spread through books, that the ancients (meaning the Greeks and Romans before the time of Christianity) had no idea, not by the faintest vestige, of what in the scriptural system is called sin. The Latin word peccatum, the Greek word amartia, are translated continually by the word sin; but neither one word nor the other has any such meaning in writers belonging to the pure classical period. When baptized into new meaning by the adoption of Christianity, these words, in common with many others, transmigrated into new and philosophic functions. But originally they tended toward no such acceptations, nor could have done so; seeing that the ancients had no avenue opened to them through which the profound idea of sin would have been even dimly intelligible. Plato, 400 years before Christ, or Cicero, more than 300 years later, was fully equal to the idea of guilt through all its gamut: but no more equal to the idea of sin, than a sagacious hound to the idea of gravitation, or of central forces. It is the tremendous postulate upon which this idea reposes, that constitutes the initial moment of that revelation which is common to Judaism and to Christianity. We have no intention of wandering into any discussion upon this question. It will suffice for the service of the occasion if we say, that guilt, in all its modifications, implies only a defect or a wound in the individual. Sin, on the other hand, the most mysterious, and the most sorrowful of all ideas, implies a taint not in the individual, but in the race-that is the distinction; or a taint in the individual, not through any local disease of his own, but through a scrofula equally diffused through the infinite family of man. We are not speaking controversially, either as teachers of theology or of philosophy; and we are careless of the particular construction by which the reader interprets to himself this profound idea. What we affirm is, that this idea was utterly and exquisitely inappreciable by Pagan Greece and Rome; that various translations from Pindar, from Aristophanes, and from the Greek tragedians,

embodying at intervals this word sin,* are more extravagant than would be the word category introduced into the harangue of an Indian sachem amongst the Cherokees; and finally, that the very nearest approach to the abysmal idea which we Christians attach to the word sin (an approach, but to that which never can be touched a writing as of palmistry upon each man's hand, but a writing which

no man can read"), lies in the Pagan idea of piacularity: which is an idea thus far like hereditary sin, that it expresses an evil to which the party affected has not consciously concurred; which is thus far not like hereditary sin, that, it expresses an evil personal to the individual, and not extending itself to the race.

This was the evil exemplified in Edipus. He was loaded with an insupportable burden of pariah participation in pollution and misery, to which his will had never consented. He seemed to have committed the most atrocious crimes; he was a murderer, he was a parricide, he was doubly incestuous, and yet how? In the case where he might be thought a murderer, he had stood upon his self-defence, not benefiting by any superior resources, but, on the contrary, fighting as one man against three, and under the provocation of insufferable insolence. Had he been a parricide? What matter, as regarded the moral guilt, if his father (and by the fault of that father) were utterly unknown to him? Incestuous had he been? but how, if the very oracles of fate, as expounded by events and by mysterious creatures such as the Sphinx, had stranded him like a ship left by the tide, upon this dark unknown shore of a criminality unsuspected by himself? All these treasons against the sanctities of nature had Edipus committed; and yet was this Edipus a thoroughly good man, no more dreaming of the horrors in which he was entangled, than the eye at noonday in midsummer is conscious of the stars that lie far behind the

* And when we are speaking of this subject, it may be proper to mention (as the very extreme anachronism which the case admits of), that Mr. Archdeacon W. has absolutely introduced the idea of sin into the "Iliad;" and, in a regular octavo volume, has represented it as the key to the whole movement of the fable. It was once made a reproach to Southey, that his Don Roderick spoke, in his penitential moods, a language too much resembling that of Methodisin: yet, after all, that prince was a Christian, and a Christian amongst Mussulmans. But what are we to think of Achilles and Patroclus, when described as being (or not being) "under convictions of sin?"

Laius, king of Thebes, the descendant of Labdacus, and representing the illustrious house of the Labdacide-about the time when his wife, Jocasta, promised to present him with a child-had fearned from various prophetic voices that this unborn child was destined to be his murderer. It is singular that in all such cases, which are many, spread through classical literature, the parties menaced by fate believe the menace, else why do they seek to evade it? and yet believe it not; else why do they fancy themselves able to evade it? This fatal child, who was the Edipus of tragedy, being at length born, Laius committed the infant to a slave, with orders to expose it on Mount Citharon. This was done the infant was suspended, by thongs running through the fleshy parts of his feet, to the branches of a tree, and he was supposed to have perished by wild beasts. But a shepherd, who found him in this perishing state, pitied his helplessness, and carried him to his master and mistress, king and queen of Corinth, who adopted and educated him as their own child. That he was not their own child, and that in fact he was a foundling of unknown parentage, Edipus was not slow of finding from the insults of his schoolfellows; and at length, with the determination of learning his origin and his fate, being now a full-grown young man, he strode off from Corinth to Delphi. The oracle of Delphi, being as usual in collusion with his evil destiny, sent him off to seek his parents at Thebes. On his journey thither, he met, in a narrow part of the road, a chariot proceeding in the counter direction from Thebes to Delphi. The charioteer relying upon the grandeur of his master, insolently ordered the young stranger to clear the road; upon which, under the impulse of his youthful blood, Edipus slew him on the spot. The haughty grandee who occupied the chariot rose up in fury to avenge this outrage, fought with the young stranger, and was himself killed. One attendant upon the chariot remained: but he, warned by the fate of his master and his fellow-servant, withdrew quietly into the forest that skirted the road, revealing no word of what had happened, but reserved by the dark destiny of Edipus, to that evil day on which his evidence, concurring with other circumstantial exposures, should convict the young Corinthian emigrant of parricide. For the present, Edipus viewed himself as no criminal, but much rather as an injured man, who

defence against an insolent aggressor. This aggressor, as the reader will suppose, was Laius. The throne therefore was empty on the arrival of Edipus in Thebes: the king's death was known, but not the mode of it; and that Edipus was the murderer, could not reasonably be suspected either by the people of Thebes, or by Edipus himself. The whole affair would have had no interest for the young stranger; but through the accident of a public calamity then desolating the land, a mysterious monster, called the Sphinx, half woman and half lion, was at that time on the coast of Boeotia, and levying a daily tribute of human lives from the Boeotian territory. This tribute, it was understood, would continue to be levied from the territories attached to Thebes, until a riddle proposed by the monster should have been satisfactorily solved. By way of encouragement to all who might feel prompted to undertake so dangerous an adventure, the authorities of Thebes offered the throne and the hand of the widowed Jocasta as the prize of success; and Edipus, either on public or on selfish motives, entered the lists as a competitor.

The riddle proposed by the Sphinx, ran in these terms :-"What creature is that which moves on four feet in the morning, on two feet at noon-day, and on three toward the going down of the sun?" Edipus, after some consideration, answered, that the creature was MAN, who creeps on the ground with hands and feet when an infant, walks upright. in the vigor of manhood, and leans upon a staff in old age. Immediately the dreadful Sphinx confessed the truth of his solution by throwing herself headlong from a point of rock into the sea; her power being overthrown as soon as her secret had been detected. Thus was the Sphinx destroyed; and, according to the promise of the proclamation, for this great service to the state, Edipus was immediately recompensed. He was saluted King of Thebes, and married to the royal widow Jocasta. In this way it happened, but without suspicion either in himself or others, pointing to the truth, that Edipus had slain his father, had ascended his father's throne, and had married his own mother.

Through a course of years all these dreadful events lay hushed in darkness; but at length a pestilence arose, and an embassy was despatched to Delphi, in order to ascertain the cause of the heavenly wrath, and the proper means of propitiating that wrath