The publication of the satirical writings of Rabelais was spread over a long series of years, from 1532 or 1533, when the first installment, in his _Gargantua_, was brought out, down to 1564, eleven years after his death, when the fifth and concluding book of his _Pantagruel_ was issued in its entirety. The main object of his satire was what used to be called "the intolerance, superstition, and disgusting follies and vices of the Romish Church," but, incidentally, pretenders to knowledge of every kind come under his lash. For when imposture, folly, and humbug grow too rank and noisome, there arise, it can scarcely be by accident, men like Lucian, Rabelais, and Voltaire, whose calling it is to cut them down. That theirs is an ill-requited office is sufficiently plain from the odium which, in spite of their beneficent labours, is often associated with their names. "[Hast thou] only a torch for burning, no hammer for building?" says the somewhat wearisome Herr Teufelsdröckh to the last named of these satirists, "take our thanks, then, and--thyself away."[236] Yet the torch for burning is as necessary as the hammer for building, if the site for the Temple of Truth is to be prepared. It may well be that burning down and rooting up are needed before building can be begun, and some of those who have endeavoured to benefit mankind have felt themselves called to the one sort of work rather than to the other. The form which Rabelais chooses for the frame-work of his satire is the burlesque adventures of the giant Gargantua, of whom many legends were current in Touraine, and of his son Pantagruel, sometimes spoken of as also a giant, and at others as a wise and virtuous prince of ordinary proportions. Along with the strange, tangled, and chaotic story of their exploits the writer from time to time enunciates admirable ideas, which must have seemed revolutionary to his contemporaries, and some of which even we have not yet realised. The translation of Rabelais by Sir Thomas Urquhart is his great literary achievement. "It is impossible," says Tytler, "to look into it without admiring the air of ease, freshness, and originality which the translator has so happily communicated to his performance. All those singular qualifications which unfitted Urquhart to succeed in serious composition--his extravagance, his drollery (?), his unbridled imagination, his burlesque and endless epithets--are in the task of translating Rabelais transplanted into their true field of action, and revel through his pages with a licence and buoyancy which is quite unbridled, yet quite allowable. Indeed, Urquhart and Rabelais appear, in many points, to have been congenial spirits, and the translator seems to have been born for his author."[237]