with face to the wall. This done, I turned the scouring hose, full and strong, upon the incidents themselves, clearing out both dialectics and profanity thoroughly. I did not stop until I had left the famous trio, GRANDGOUSIER, GARGANTUA, and PANTAGRUEL where I had, from the first, hoped to place them,--high and dry above the scum which had so long clogged their rare good-fellowship, and which had made men of judgment blind to the genuine worth that was in them. In this way I believed that I saw the chance to free Rabelais' Giants, so long kept in bonds, from a captivity which has dishonored them. To do this was clearly running against that good old law which has invariably made all Giants--far back from fairy-time--thunder-voiced, great-toothed, rude-handed, hard-hearted, bloody-minded creatures and truculent captors, never, on any account, pitiful captives. But, to such, the Rabelaisian Giants are none of kin. No more are they of blood to that Giant that Jack slew, or that Giant Despair, in whose garden-court Bunyan dreamt that he saw the white bones of slaughtered pilgrims. Public sentiment has hitherto illogically retched at the name of Rabelais, while it swallows without qualm "Tristram Shandy" and "Gulliver's Travels." Shall it always retch? The time, I think, is practically taking the answer into its own hands. Rabelais, through some cotemporaneous influence, rising subtly in his favor among men who are neither afraid nor ashamed to judge for themselves, is, in one sense, slowly becoming a naturalized citizen of our modern Literary Republic. Literature and Art are joining hands in his rehabilitation. Mr. Walter Besant, a novelist, has been so good as to write his life; to say bright words about him; and to quote clean things from him. Mrs. Oliphant, a purist, has consented to admit him into her "Foreign Classics for English Readers." Three years ago M. Emile Hébert's bronze statue of him was unveiled at that Chinon, his birthplace, which he lovingly calls "the most ancient city of the world." And, to crown all, as the latest expression of a tardy recognition, his bust by M. Truphème was, only the other day, uncovered at that Meudon of which he was, for a time, the famous, if not always orthodox, Curé. Rabelais himself never, it is clear, appreciated his Giants save for the contrasted jollity which they lent to his satires. "_Mieulx est de ris que de larmes escripre,_ _Pour ce que rire est le propre de lhomme,_"