Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/21

 RABELAIS 5 most superstitious, fanatical, unlettered, and inert of monks. One shudders to think of what that great intellect and genial heart must have endured in such society. Only his unquenchable thirst for knowledge and his marvellous animal spirits could have sus- tained him. We shall not be surprised to read in his books the most bitter contempt and abhorrence for monks and monkery. Released thus, at length, he soon threw off the regular habit and assumed that of a secular priest, attaching himself to d'Estissac, who allotted him the income of a secretaryship, and undertook to provide him with a benefice when occasion should offer. He could now pursue his studies in peace (not in pace), with the advantages of a select society of liberal scholars and scholarly men of the world. He soon made the acquaintance of the leading thinkers and writers more or less in sympathy with the Reformation, or in revolt against the old orthodoxy, such as Calvin, Clement Marot, and Bonaventure des Periers. He could not long remain on good terms with Calvin, who was just as bigoted and dogmatical, in his own way, as any of the most narrow-minded doctors of the Church. Rabelais was not the man to free himself from one set of dogmas in order to involve himself in another as stringent. He was essentially a sceptic and free- thinker, enthusiastic for all erudition and science, hating all intolerance. Henry Etienne, the famous printer and scholar, echoing Calvin, said : " Though Rabelais seems to be one of us, he often flings stones into our garden." Father de St. Romuald reports : "Some said he turned Lutheran, others that he turned Atheist." And Mr. Besant, in his article on