contribution?

What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of
Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous
Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human
suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad
necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his
academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old
volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an
hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk
about this greatest figure of the Renaissance.

Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of
Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest,
physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own
justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what
you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a
perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The
gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?

Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in
which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands
Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing
is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His
extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity
and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list
of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are
included.

Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that