tyranny of the external world, which is perpetually making encroachments or inroads through every avenue of nature. Individual will must be either continually resisting and driving them back, or be wholly overwhelmed and swallowed up; and this constitutes the force of character. In this sense, character, and not knowledge or wealth, is power. How freedom of will and the foreordination of Providence can coexist is inconceivable. Human ingenuity will probably never be able to unravel the enigma.

The third power the external world tyrannizes over man, notwithstanding hereditary proclivities and will, in a manner and to a degree not always appreciable. We are tied to this little clod of earth, and, from its continual presence and apparent immensity of extent, imagine it to make no small part of the universe; whereas, when we look off into the heavens at night, we see merely little glittering specks, compared with which our earth is imperceptible, scattered here and there, and can conjecture how small a part of the limited space that we see they would occupy if gathered into a single whole. If the human race were furnished with the power of aerial locomotion, and could leave the earth at will, a residence in the boundless ether would probably free us of no small part of our delusion as to the earth's magnitude and reality; and the effect would be, that we all should probably become idealists in metaphysics. Our being clogged with the earth makes materialists of us. The oyster thinks its shell the

universe.

Of organization we can know and determine very little with precision, of will, but little more; but of circumstances, or the external world, which in the case of a vast majority of the human race makes a very large factor in the formation of character, we know and can estimate everything with a great degree of certainty.

First, as to that part of the external world which to one man is made up of all other men. Most men have so little strength of will, that they are almost like wax in the hands of stronger men. Some never move until they see others start. They are like sheep, and blindly follow a leader. They cannot make up their own minds. Their beliefs, their opinions, their sentiments, all rest on authority. Nine tenths of the adherents of any particular faith are so simply because their fathers before them were. Let a little child be led by the hand to church by his father and mother, who, with reverence and solemnity in every action and look, attend to the most monstrous doctrines, propounded, it may be, by some ignorant and superstitious VOL. VIII. No. 71.

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priest set up before them in their midst; no matter what these doctrines are, he will as surely believe them, in most cases, as he hears them. How can he help it? His mother and father, to whom he has always been taught to yield implicit obedience and to reverence, devoutly and unhesitatingly accept all the priest may say; and even the thought of not believing would terrify and frighten the child.

As to climate, food, soil, and face of the country, they have made Imost of the differences we see between the various families of the human race. If mankind are the offspring of a single pair, they have produced all the diversities, as many and as great as they are. The American, the Caucasian, the African, the Mongolian, and the Malay are the five great families into which mankind are now divided. I think the four material influences which have been mentioned sufficient to account for all the diversities, even that between the Caucasian and African,-without the assumption of a multiplicity of original pairs, or of miraculous interposition, which are gratuitous when not absolutely necessary. Without going into this part of the subject in all its extent, since it has already been extensively examined, I will adduce one example near home which I have never seen mentioned. Virginia and Massachusetts were originally settled, at very nearly the same time, by Englishmen from adjacent counties or shires. The Western States Kentucky and Missouri, and some Southwestern States, as Tennessee and Mississippi, are peopled by descendants of Virginians; - but how great is the difference between the inhabitants of those States of the present day and New-Englanders! What is the cause of the diversity? They were of the same blood originally. Climate accounts for the difference in sentiments and manners and customs. It is so warm in those Southern States, that eight months in the year, on summer afternoons, the people can sit out on their piazzas and walk around in their gardens. It is so cold in New England, that eight months in the year people of evenings close their doors and window-blinds, and sit each by his own fire. This brings about the great social difference, which in time is incorporated into institutions as permanent as the difference of cli

mate.

Different effects are produced by regarding different aspects of the same locality. Who has not, as he has walked along with downcast eyes and narrow thoughts, had the horizon of his thoughts widen and enlarge by raising his eyes from the earth to the sky?

The tint of the paper which covers the wall of one's room will not only give hue to the thoughts, but will shorten or lengthen life.

I think a closer scrutiny of all the three determining causes of character would better enable us to understand the lives of individual men. In estimating the life of distinguished men, a great deal of attention is paid to will, to the exclusion of inherent proclivities, determined in part by ancestral peculiarities, and also to the exclusion of physical surroundings. We should examine into these things, in the case of great men as well as of common men. A great man is not a sphinx, nor are ordinary mortals chameleons. The one is not wholly independent of circumstances, nor are the others wholly subject to these apparently overwhelming, irresistible, and geometrically accumulating external influences, they are not mere passive products, notwithstanding the tyranny of the earth.

A NOTICE OF THE LIFE OF FRANÇOIS RABELAIS.

FRANÇOIS RABELAIS, the history of whose life is quite obscure, and depends in a great measure on the traditions of the people, entered while very young the Benedictine Abbey of Senillé, not far from his birthplace. Among the good brothers of Senillé Rabelais appears to have led a happy life, perfecting himself, according to his own account, in the science of eating, drinking, and sleeping. However, he does not waste much time in that pleasurable pursuit, but leaves the abbey and goes to continue his studies at the Convent de la Basmette. Having made rapid progress here, as soon as he had reached the proper age to begin his novitiate, he was removed to the convent of Fontenay-le-Comte, where he passed through all the sacerdotal grades, and in 1511 received the priesthood.

The austere life of the convent did not prevent Rabelais from applying himself to the study of secular literature. Gifted with a remarkable memory and mind, he plunged deep into the ancient classics, and, above all, obtained a thorough knowledge of the Greek. But he found few among his associates who appreciated his learning or sympathized with his labor. It is a singular picture: Rabelais, a man of great humor and worldly tendencies, but with all that, equalling in his genius those who were far above him in the ecclesiastical offices, struggling alone and against a thousand obstacles to master authors whose names were as yet little known in the world, but have since become familiar as the titles of our own heroes.

Alas! our rollicking Chinonian does not remain long undisturbed. His steadily increasing learning excites the jealousy of his brother monks, and he becomes the victim of a severe persecution, which ends in driving him from Fontenay-le-Comte. In his zeal to understand and add to the Greek and Roman compilations on medicine, he appears to have collected a number of plants and drugs to illustrate his studies; and in the midst of all this application he found many an opportunity to indulge his humor in a practical joke. But his herbs and his jokes gave to his enemies the occasion they desired of attacking his character. They accused him of dealing in venomous potations and other witchcraft, and of profaning the sacred shrines of the saints. But the intervention of powerful friends saved him from the wrath of those envious friars; and in 1524, having obtained an induct from Pope Clement VII., he entered the abbey of Maillezais, and assumed the robes of a regular canon. Soon after this he forsook the chapter of Maillezais, and attached himself to the Bishop's person; here his longing for the ease and freedom of his native place was appeased by the pleasure of meeting the most distinguished men of the day, among the rest Calvin. The learned friends of the Bishop were not slow to estimate highly the brilliant acquirements of Rabelais, and readily assigned to him the place of an equal in years and station.

This temporary prosperity in the life of Rabelais, during which he was prosecuting his studies under the most favorable auspices, was broken off by the attacks of the Catholic clergy on Calvin and his friends, one of whom was burnt alive at the stake, his own library furnishing the fuel. Rabelais, obliged to abandon the affluent home of his good friend the Bishop of Maillezais, went to Montpellier, and matriculated at the School of Medicine.

From the very first his course at Montpellier was a triumph, as the many traditions concerning his wit and learning go to show. Here his vast knowledge of Greek availed him much, for the medical science was in its infancy, and Hippocrates was still a text-book. Among the anecdotes told of him while he was at Montpellier we find the following. Having gone to Paris to plead the cause of the University of Montpellier before Chancellor Duprat, who had been partial to the rival University of Paris, he was unable to obtain a hearing. Nothing daunted by the successive refusals that rewarded his visits to the Chancellor's door, he determined on a ruse to gain admission. Dressed in a long green robe and Armenian bonnet, with his stock

ings down over his shoes, an enormous ink-horn attached to his girdle, and with a pair of spectacles tied to his bonnet, he began to promenade slowly and majestically before the Chancellor's house. The oddity of his costume soon drew around him a large crowd, whose shouts and laughter brought Duprat himself to the window. The Chancellor, curious to know who this strange personage was, bade a servant go and ask of the eccentric stranger his name and condition. "I am the flayer of calves," was the answer. This only served to increase the curiosity of Duprat, and he again sent to inquire of the disguised Rabelais why he had come to Paris. Rabelais responds in Latin; they must find a gentleman to interpret the Latin; but no sooner does he begin to speak than Rabelais expresses himself in Greek. Another gentleman must be found who knows Greek; him the witty ambassador apostrophizes in Spanish; and in Italian, English, and Hebrew, respectively, to each new interpreter that presents himself. The Chancellor, unable longer to restrain his curiosity, admits the stranger to a private audience, and is astounded to discover in the polyglot "flayer of calves" Rabelais, the celebrated Bachelor of Montpellier; but he was so much pleased by the clever strategem, that he readily granted all the ambassador asked.

tes.

Notwithstanding his success at Montpellier, Rabelais did not wait to obtain the degree of Doctor, but early in the year 1532 removed to Lyons, with the intention of writing and publishing books, and of giving to the world through the medium of the press some of that vast erudition and wit which hitherto only a privileged few had enjoyed. He at first devoted himself to the editing of the Greek and Latin classics, and of certain books on medicine, among others an edition of the Aphorisms and Treatises of Galen and HippocraThe publisher lost a considerable sum of money in the publication of the last-mentioned book, and complained bitterly to Rabelais, who immediately set to work, and in a few days carried to the disconsolate man the Gargantuan Chronicles; of which he himself asserted there would be more copies sold in two months than Bibles in ten years. Not long after he published a second and larger edition of the same book, and soon after this his Pantagruel appeared. Both of these books are extravagant romances, being, as a French writer of our day says, masterpieces of malice, good sense, wit, and learning.

In 1534, the Bishop of Paris, who was passing through Lyons on