Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/59

 RABELAIS 43 vols., is enriched with an abundance of notes on words, things, and events, gathered from the best commentators, and constituting a real treasure-house of Rabelaisian information. The cheap and handy edition of L. Jacob, Bibliophile (Paul Lacroix), pub- lished by Charpentier, Paris, has the advantage of the Memoir — to which I have already acknowledged my indebtedness — and of glossarial and other notes at the bottom of each page, thus sparing the reader the great nuisance of continual reference to a glossary at the end of the work, a nuisance so great that most readers soon give up referring at all. Mr. Besant, in his bright book, " The French Humourists," says : " It is not impossible that England will yet learn to appreciate more largely this glorious wit and satirist. There may be found some man who has the leisure, and to whom it would be a labour of love to edit for modern readers the life and voyages of Pantagruel. The necessary omissions could be made without very great difficulty, and the parts to be left out are not inwoven with the web of the whole." For myself, although I detest castrated editions, I have no objection to see such an experi- ment tried with Rabelais ; but I doubt whether the general reader, who may be supposed not to care for him in his complete form, would care for him thus mutilated. Mr. Besant goes on : " Considering him as a moral teacher, we must remember what things he taught, and that he was the first to teach them in the vernacular. Many of his precepts are now commonplaces, texts for the copy-book; but they were not so then. In that time, when only a few had learning, and the old mediaeval darkness was