obedience-it was ordered that here they might be honorably married, that they might be rich, and that they might live at liberty. As regards the legitimate age, the women were to be admitted from ten to fifteen, and the men from twelve till eighteen.

The preliminaries being agreed upon, the building was at once commenced. In the description of the building, Rabelais, who, like Victor Hugo, never touches a subject of which he is not master, has given so minute an account of a great and magnificent building that architects have succeeded in reproducing the plan and elevation which Rabelais had in his head. Greater descriptive power has never been shown than so to set forth a building as to enable a draftsman nearly three hundred and fifty years later to represent on paper exactly such a building as the author pictured. Suffice it to say that the abbey was conceived in the spirit of the greatest luxury and magnificence. Stately fountains, spacious galleries, tilt-yards, riding-courts, theatres, swimming-baths, the garden of Déduit, or Delight, by the river-side, a labyrinth, tennis and ball courts, orchards planted with fruit trees, a park full of deer, butts for guns, crossbow, and archery, stables, a falconry, a venery," where beagles and hounds were kept; and outside the abbey rows of houses in which dwelt, for the convenience of the fraternity, all sorts of handicraftsmen, such as goldsmiths, lapidaries, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, gold-drawers, velvet-weavers, tapestry-makers, upholsterers, and others, who worked for the monks and nuns of the new order.

No novelist or romance-writer has ever conceived a more delightful abode than the Abbey of Thelema, or a more splendid and magnificent foundation.

All their life was spent, not by laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose when they thought good; they ate, drank, worked, slept, when the desire came to them. No one woke them up; none forced them to eat, drink, or to do any other thing whatever. So had Gargantua established it. In their rule there was but this one clause:

FAY CE QUE VOULDRAS
(Do what you will);

because men who are free, well born, well bred, and conversant with honorable company, have naturally an instinct which prompts them to virtuous actions and withdraws them from

vice. This is called honor. By this liberty they entered into a laudable emulation to do all of them what they saw pleased one. If one of them, either a monk or a sister, should say, Let us drink,' they would all drink. If any one of them said, 'Let us play,' they all played. If one said, 'Let us go and take our pleasure in the fields,' they all went. . . . So nobly were they taught that there was not one among them but could read, write, sing, play upon musical instruments, speak five or six languages, and compose in them either in verse or in measured prose. Never were seen knights more valiant, more gallant, more dexterous on horse or foot, more vigorous, more active, more skilled in the use of arms than were these. Never were seen ladies so proper, so handsome, less whimsical, more ready with hand, with needle, or with every honest and free womanly action, than were these. For this reason, when the time came that any man of the said abbey, either at the request of his parents or for some other cause had a mind to go out of it, he carried along with him one of the ladies, namely, her whom he had chosen before for his mistress, and they were married together. And if they had formerly lived in Thelema in good devotion and amity, they continued therein, and increased it to a greater height in their state of matrimony; so that they entertained that mutual love till the end of their days just as on the very first day of their wedding.

The dream of the abbey is abandoned as soon as set down. We hear no more of it. Friar John, when we meet him again, has forgotten it. Certainly this coarse biberon of a monk was not the man to be the head of an abbey in which gentlefolk alone were to be admitted; but an objection of this kind may be taken to most of the Rabelaisian episodes; the author conceives vividly in portions, but imperfectly as a connected whole. There is nothing more outrageous in making Friar John propose the Abbey of Thelema than there is in making the wise and valiant Gargantua comb cannon-balls out of his hair and pick pilgrims out of his teeth. But the abbey! Would that we could have heard more of it! Would that the time were yet arrived when young men and maidens could live together in the sacred and honorable fraternity imagined by this prophet of a perfected humanity.

The description of the abbey appears to me the noblest dream of the sixteenth century, where so many things seemed possible, and men's minds rose to such grand conceptions. It is a vision which should have come to some great poet and been

wedded to immortal verse. In this monastery, which is the world at its best, there is to be no ugliness or deformity, either moral or physical; there are to be no stupid rules, no chains of custom or convention-everyone's conscience is to be his guide; there are no chapels, no masses, no beads, no bellsevery brother communicates alone in his cell with his God; there are no fasts; there is none of the degrading servitude to law which troubles the outside world. It is a society of scholars, students, and artists, gentle all, living together according to the rules of nature, restrained by common-sense, honor, and the love of God, continuously learning to respect more and more the mysteries of that inconceivable marvel which we call creation, by study and mutual love; advancing always by the road of unselfish labor to the higher life which mostly, to us of darkened spirit, seems so unattainable. They are always genial, cheerful, and thoughtful for each other. There are none of the feastings and revelings which do very well for the court of Grandgousier [Gargantua's father] and the common people. The damoiseaux and damoiselles of Thelema do not think of feasting. Their thoughts, like those of Rabelais when he wrote these chapters, are set on higher things. Love among them is free, and marriage the natural outcome of their life. All is noble; all is delightful; all is elevated; all is well bred and worthy; and, to crown everything, from a Rabelaisian point of view, there is not a priest in the place.

II. MONTAIGNE.

It was only in the sixteenth century, the century of the bloody religious wars, which has been called the most tragic in history, that France really felt all the influence of the renaissance. Under the iron hand of Richelieu in the following century, France, unified and pacified, was prepared for the glorious reign of Louis XIV. At the same time, all ideas of liberty, of the rights of man and of his aspirations, were crushed beneath the despotism of absolute monarchy; and the literature of the period, the writings of three men-La Boétie, Rabelais, Montaigne-slept-only to awaken formidable instruments for a nation then developed in the middle of the eighteenth century.

While they lived, few could truly understand them, for the necessity of such ideas was not yet realized. Man in the sixteenth century was interested in his own doings as much, perhaps, as he is to-day, but he did not know it; he had not reached that stage of intellectual development which leads to self-study, to the analysis of cause and effect.

Of the three great writers just mentioned, the most widely known is Michael de Montaigne. Born in 1533, when the renaissance had full sway in matters of education, he was carefully instructed in the ancient authors by a father who was an enthusiastic admirer

of the classics. He was, much against his will, twice elected to the mayoralty of Bordeaux, in which position he does not appear to have distinguished himself.