member to be in good case, spooming with a full sail bunt fair before the
wind, then to have seen those strouting champions, you would have taken
them for men that had their lances settled on their rest to run at the ring
or tilting whintam (quintain). Of these, believe me, the race is utterly
lost and quite extinct, as the women say; for they do lament continually
that there are none extant now of those great, &c. You know the rest of
the song. Others did grow in matter of ballocks so enormously that three
of them would well fill a sack able to contain five quarters of wheat.
From them are descended the ballocks of Lorraine, which never dwell in
codpieces, but fall down to the bottom of the breeches. Others grew in the
legs, and to see them you would have said they had been cranes, or the
reddish-long-billed-storklike-scrank-legged sea-fowls called flamans, or
else men walking upon stilts or scatches. The little grammar-school boys,
known by the name of Grimos, called those leg-grown slangams Jambus, in
allusion to the French word jambe, which signifieth a leg. In others,
their nose did grow so, that it seemed to be the beak of a limbeck, in
every part thereof most variously diapered with the twinkling sparkles of
crimson blisters budding forth, and purpled with pimples all enamelled with
thickset wheals of a sanguine colour, bordered with gules; and such have
you seen the Canon or Prebend Panzoult, and Woodenfoot, the physician of
Angiers. Of which race there were few that looked the ptisane, but all of
them were perfect lovers of the pure Septembral juice. Naso and Ovid had
their extraction from thence, and all those of whom it is written, Ne
reminiscaris. Others grew in ears, which they had so big that out of one
would have been stuff enough got to make a doublet, a pair of breeches, and
a jacket, whilst with the other they might have covered themselves as with
a Spanish cloak: and they say that in Bourbonnois this race remaineth yet.
Others grew in length of body, and of those came the Giants, and of them
Pantagruel.