Motteux's rendering of Books IV. and V. followed in 1708. Occasionally (as
the footnotes indicate) passages omitted by Motteux have been restored from
the 1738 copy edited by Ozell.


[Illustration: Rabelais Dissecting Society--portrait2]




CONTENTS.




[Illustration: Francois Rabelais--portrait]


Introduction.

Had Rabelais never written his strange and marvellous romance, no one would
ever have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside
other things--a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of
childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of
popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of
baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the
comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the
whole there is such a force of life and thought, such a power of good
sense, a kind of assurance so authoritative, that he takes rank with the
greatest; and his peers are not many. You may like him or not, may attack