Rabelais and Sterne were not perhaps inferior in genius, and they were read with as much avidity and delight as the Spaniard.  “Le docte Rabelais” had the learning which the Englishman wanted; while unhappily Sterne undertook to satirise false erudition, which requires the knowledge of the true.  Though the Papemanes, on whom Rabelais has exhausted his grotesque humour and his caustic satire, have not yet walked off the stage, we pay a heavy price in the grossness of his ribaldry and his tiresome balderdash for odd stories and flashes of witty humour.  Rabelais hardly finds readers even in France, with the exception of a few literary antiquaries.  The day has passed when a gay dissolute abbe could obtain a rich abbey by getting Rabelais by heart, for the perpetual improvement of his patron—­and Rabelais is now little more than a Rabelais by tradition.[A]

[Footnote A:  The clergy were not so unfavourable to Rabelais as might have been expected.  He was through life protected by the Cardinal Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Paris, who employed him in various important negotiations; and it is recorded of him that he refused a scholar admittance to his table because he had not read his works.  This familiarity with his grotesque romance was also shared by Cardinal Duprat, who is said to have always carried a copy of it with him, as if it was his breviary.  The anecdote of the priest who obtained promotion from a knowledge of his works is given in the “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. p. 10.—­ED.]

In my youth the world doted on Sterne!  Martin Sherlock ranks him among “the luminaries of the century.”  Forty years ago, young men in their most facetious humours never failed to find the archetypes of society in the Shandy family—­every good-natured soul was uncle Toby, every humorist was old Shandy, every child of Nature was Corporal Trim!  It may now be doubted whether Sterne’s natural dispositions were the humorous or the pathetic:  the pathetic has survived!

There is nothing of a more ambiguous nature than strong humour, and Sterne found it to be so; and latterly, in despair, he asserted that “the taste for humour is the gift of heaven!” I have frequently observed how humour, like the taste for olives, is even repugnant to some palates, and have witnessed the epicure of humour lose it all by discovering how some have utterly rejected his favourite relish!  Even men of wit may not taste humour!  The celebrated Dr. Cheyne, who was not himself deficient in originality of thinking with great learning and knowledge, once entrusted to a friend a remarkable literary confession.  Dr. Cheyne assured him that “he could not read ‘Don Quixote’ with any pleasure, nor had any taste for ‘Hudibras’ or ‘Gulliver;’ and that what we call wit and humour in these authors he considered as false ornaments, and never to be found in those compositions of the ancients which we most admire and esteem."[A] Cheyne seems to have held Aristophanes and Lucian monstrously