Three Good Giants

 Long before the day when Fielding and Smollett began to be read on the sly, and before the comic Muse of Congreve and Wycherly began to be looked at askance, that English moral sentiment, over which Macaulay was to philosophize more than a century later, had solidified in ignoring Rabelais. Nothing is to be said against the sentiment itself. This has always been fairly righteous, if just a bit undiscriminating. A great humorist, showing himself content to grovel in the dirt, is, beyond question, deserving of black looks and shut doors. But more than most old masters of a type, strong, albeit coarse, Rabelais—from the distinctly marked physical attributes of his chief personages—may claim certain good points which, drawn out and grouped together, ought to fall within the circle of those tales which interest children.