Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/55

 RABELAIS 39 Coleridge says : "It is impossible to read Rabelais without an admiration mixed with wonder at the depth and extent of his learning, his multifarious knowledge and original observation, beyond what books could in that age have supplied him with;" and Mr. Besant remarks that he knew more than any other man of the time. This learning and general knowledge he pours forth with the most careless prodigality on every page, d propos of everything and nothing, so as to suggest that his stores are really inexhaustible. The book-learning and the command over many languages are astonishing enough, espe- cially to one who, like myself, is no scholar ; but yet more astonishing is the other knowledge of which Coleridge speaks, the knowledge books could not furnish, and in which perhaps only Shakespeare can parallel him : in our day Robert Browning comes nearest to this quasi-omniscience. Rabelais' long medical studies may account for much of his acquaint- ance with natural history, which is such as to recall the precepts of Gargantua in that magnanimous letter to his son (ii, 8) : " Now, in matter of the know- ledge of the works of nature, I would have thee to study that exactly; that so there be no sea, river, nor fountain of which thou dost not know the fishes ; all the fowls of the air ; all the several kinds of shrubs and trees, whether in forests or orchards ; all the sorts of herbs and flowers that grow upon the ground ; all the various metals hidden within the bowels of the earth ; the precious stones of all the Orient and the South — let nothing of all these be unknown to thee." But how and when and where did he gather, how did he find room in his head to store up that prodigious