Page:The school of Pantagruel (1862).djvu/14

 Rh III.

The school of Pantagruel, like most other schools, has had its fluctuations of popular favour, popular indifference, and popular aversion. In the time of Charles the second, it was at its height in public favour in England. A dissolute court begot a dissolute populace, and mud-literature rose proportionally in estimation.

Demand proverbially creates supply. The Pantagruelists, who as yet had received few marks of English esteem, and who had, indeed, no great English representative—unless the Canterbury Tales oblige us to include reluctantly in their list the name of our sweet Chaucer—at length, emerging from the cloud, saw their literature suddenly coming into request. There were not found wanting men who set about diligently to produce an abundant supply. Among the earliest results were a translation of Rabelais by Sir Thomas Urquehart, and a translation of Scarron's Comic Romance by an unknown "hand." Of Virgile Travesty also, an imitation by Charles Cotton, the associate of Walton, was published.

I have dated the birth of this school in England as taking place at the beginning of the latter half of the seventeenth century, and not in the time of Ben Jonson and Shirley. For I cannot agree with those who, applying a microscopic sight to the past, and judging of its refinement by the refinement of the present, discover all manner of abominations in the Elizabethan dramatists. They certainly call by their names things which have since become unmentionable; they use expressions which have now grown obsolete; but in all this there is no pruriency, no pandering to the bad passions of our nature. I find no impurity—only the warmth of a rich imagination—in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, I do not find the prose writers anterior to 1650 full of passages only to be indicated by asterisks: I think the asterisks do more harm than the rude but forcible and well-meant passages omitted. Moreover the same process might, with equal