Note 197 — Chapter IV · THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.

Rabelais is no real exception. It is needless to say that Gargantua and Pantagruel do contain matter touching on literature. But Rabelais comes too early to be critical. The “Library of Saint-Victor” and other things are simply alarums and excursions of his general campaign against the rearguard of “monkish ignorance”; and in his references to French poetry he does not seem to have got beyond—or to have wished to get beyond—complacent acquiescence in rhétoriqueur pedantry.