Rabelais: And you have written on journalists, or rather an imaginary plaint of the journalists: Where s......, s.... and p..... on jews conspire, and editorial maggots .... about, we gather .... smeared bread, or drive a snout still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire. Where s....., s..... and p..... on jews conspire, And editorial maggots .... about, We gather .... -smeared bread, or drive a snout Still deeper in the swim-brown of the mire. O .... O ..... O b...... b...... b.... O c..., ........ O .... O ......’s attire Smeared with ........................... Really I can not continue, no printer would pass it. Student: Quite out of my usual ...... Rabelais: There is still another on publishers, or rather on _la vie litteraire_, a sestina almost wholly in asterisks, and a short strophe on the American president. Student: Can you blame ... Rabelais: I am scarcely ....... eh..... Student: Beside, these are but a few scattered outbursts, you kept up your flow through whole volumes. Rabelais: You have spent six years in your college and university, and a few more in struggles with editors; I had had thirty years in that sink of a cloister, is it likely that your disgusts would need such voluminous purging? Consider, when I was nine years of age they put me in that louse-breeding abomination. I was forty before I broke loose. Student: Why at that particular moment? Rabelais: They had taken away my books. Brother Amy got hold of a Virgil. We opened it, _sortes_, the first line: _Heu, fuge crudeles terras, fuge litus avarum_ We read that line and departed. You may thank God your age is different. You may thank God your life has been different. Thirty years mewed up with monks! After that can you blame me my style? Have you any accurate gauge of stupidities? Student: I have, as you admit, passed some years in my university. I have seen some opposition to learning. Rabelais: No one in your day has sworn to annihilate the cult of greek letters; they have not separated you from your books; they have not rung bells expressly to keep you from reading. Student: Bells! later. There is a pasty-faced vicar in Kensington who had his dam’d bells rung over my head for four consecutive winters, L’Ile Sonnante transferred to the middle of London! They have tried to smother the good ones with bad ones. Books I mean, God knows the chime was a musicless abomination. They have smothered good books with bad ones. Rabelais: This will never fool a true poet; for the rest, it does not matter whether they drone masses or lectures. They observe their fasts with the intellect. Have they actually sequestered your books? Student: No. But I have a friend, of your order, a monk. They took away his book for two years. I admit they set him to hearing confessions; to going about in the world. It may have broadened his outlook, or benefited his eyesight. I do not think it wholly irrational, though it must have been extremely annoying.