with great wheels, large chains, terrible notches, and frightfully
complicated screws and weights like the roasting jack, but also has
amused Himself with little trifles and grotesque things light as
zephyrs, and has made also naive and pleasant creations, at which you
laugh directly you see them? Is it not so? Then in all eccentric
works, such as the very spacious edifice undertaken by the author, in
order to model himself upon the laws of the above-named Lord, it is
necessary to fashion certain delicate flowers, pleasant insects, fine
dragons well twisted, imbricated, and coloured--nay, even gilt,
although he is often short of gold--and throw them at the feet of his
snow-clad mountains, piles of rocks, and other cloud-capped
philosophers, long and terrible works, marble columns, real thoughts
carved in porphyry.

Ah! unclean beasts, who despise and repudiate the figures, phantasies,
harmonies, and roulades of the fair muse of drollery, will you not
pare your claws, so that you may never again scratch her white skin,
all azure with veins, her amorous reins, her flanks of surpassing
elegance, her feet that stay modestly in bed, her satin face, her
lustrous features, her heart devoid of bitterness? Ah! wooden-heads,
what will you say when you find that this merry lass springs from the
heart of France, agrees with all that is womanly in nature, has been
saluted with a polite _Ave_! by the angels in the person of their
spokesman, Mercury, and finally, is the clearest quintessence of Art.
In this work are to be met with necessity, virtue, whim, the desire of
a woman, the votive offering of a stout Pantagruelist, all are here.
Hold your peace, then, drink to the author, and let his inkstand with
the double cup endow the Gay Science with a hundred glorious Droll
Tales.