made strong enough, the pressure which | fixed in the upper region of the Britannia might be inflicted within it by a few gallons Tower, 148 feet above the level of its base, of water might almost be illimitable. and about 45 feet above that to which the bridge is to be raised. The principle of the hydraulic press having been above faintly explained, the power and dimensions of the extraordinary engine of this nature, which has been constructed by Messrs. Easton and Amos, of Southwark, for raising the Britannia tubes, may be thus briefly described. The cylinder, or large tube, of the syphon, which is 9 feet 4 inches in length, 4 feet 10 inches in diameter, and which is made of cast iron 11 inches thick, weighs 16 tons The piston, termed the Ram, which, pressed upward by the water, works within it, is 20 inches in diameter. The whole machine complete weighs upward of 40 tons. The force-pump barrel communicates with a slender tube or passage about the size of a lady's smallest finger, which, like the touchhole of a cannon, is drilled through the metallic side of the cylinder; and thus, although the syphonic principle really exists, nothing appears to the eye but a sturdy cast-iron cylinder of about the length of a 24 lb. cannon, having the thickness of metal of a 13inch mortar. From the above trifling data it will be evident that, leaving friction and the weight of the ram out of the question, the lifting power of this machine must exceed the force applied to the force-pump in the same proportion that 1 inch diameter bears to a diameter of 20 inches-which in figures amounts to about 354 to 1; and as the two 40-horse steam-engines which are to be applied to the touch-hole for compressing the water in the smaller tube would, it has been calculated by Mr. Latimer Clark, be sufficient to force the fluid more than five times as high as the top of Snowdon, or 5000 feet higher than the summit of Mount Blanc, our readers have only to increase the force in this proportion to become sensible of the extraordinary power which the hydraulic press of the Britannia Bridge is capable of exerting for the purpose of raising its tubes. In short, the power is to the weight of the tubes as follows: TONS. Weight of one of the largest tubes . . 1800 Lifting-power of the hydraulic press . 2622 The mode in which this enormous power is practically exercised is as follows: The hydraulic cylinder, standing erect, like a cannon on its breech, on two stout wrought-iron beams bolted to each other, is, together with its steam-boiler, securely Around the neck of the iron ram or piston, which protrudes 8 inches above the top of this cylinder, there is affixed a strong horizontal iron beam 6 feet 9 inches in length, resembling the wooden yoke used by milkmaids for carrying their pails, from the extremities of which there hang two enormous iron chains, composed of eight or nine flat links or plates, each 7 inches broad, 1 inch thick, and 6 feet in length, firmly bolted together. These chains (which, in order to lift the tube to its destination, are required to be each 145 feet long, weigh no less than 100 tons-which is more than double the weight of the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, lately erected in Hyde Park-commonly regarded as one of the heaviest lifts ever effected; and certainly, when from the giddy region of the Britannia Tower, in which this hydraulic machinery, like the nest of an eagle, has been deposited, the stranger, after looking down upon the enormous weight of iron not only to be supported, but to be raised, compares the whole mass with the diameter of the little touch-hole immediately before him, through which the lifting-power has to pass-and when he reflects that the whole process can, with the greatest ease, be regulated and controlled by a single man, it is impossible to help feeling deeply grateful to the Divine Power for an invention which, at first sight, has more the appearance of magic than of art. As soon as all adjustments were prepared, and the boiler was sufficiently heated, the great piston, under the influence of severe pressure upon the water beneath it, began slowly, like a schoolboy's "jack-in-the-box," to emerge from the cylinder, and, apparently regardless of the enormous weight that oppressed his shoulders, he continued steadily to rise, until in about thirty minutes he lifted the tube 6 feet, and, as he could raise it no higher, the huge chains beneath were immediately secured by a powerful vice or "clams" at the foot of the press. By letting off the water, which of course relieved the pressure beneath the piston, it descended, by its own gravity, to the point from which it had start ed, where the chains being again affixed to its yoke an operation which requires about half an hour-it again by the vitality of steam, lifted its weight another six feet; and, as the other end of the tube was simultaneously treated in a similar way, the whole was pro From the British Quarterly Review. RABELAIS-HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. The Works of Francis Rabelais. Translated from the French by SIR THOMAS URQUHART and MOTTEUX; with Explanatory Notes by DUCHAT, OZELL, and others. A New Edition, revised, and with additional Notes. London: Bohn. 1849. 2 vols. unnecessary learning such were the rules imposed upon the Franciscan friars by the will of their founder; and whatever relaxations in these rules time may have introduc IN 1530, Luther, now an elderly man, had already accomplished more than half his great work, and the young Frenchman, Calvin, was just beginning his career as a theologian, when an erratic fellow-country-ed, man of the latter, a vagabond monk or priest, that had long been at a loss what to do with himself, came to Montpellier, and was matriculated at the university there as a student of medicine, by the name of Francis Rabelais. He must have seemed somewhat of an old fellow to be commencing a new course of study, for he was then in his forty-eighth year-that is to say, exactly as old as Luther, and about twenty-six years older than Calvin. But it was by no means uncommon at that time to see men that had been bred in the church, cast adrift to seek, late in life, for new ties and occupations. Many were the strange waifs that the Reformation had washed afloat upon society; nor of all these was there one whose severance from the papal wreck should have been less a matter of surprise than that of Rabelais. Born in 1483, at the small town of Chinon, in Touraine, where his father, who was an innkeeper, owned or rented a farm adjacent to a convent of Benedictine monks, Rabelais had been destined for the church from his boyhood; and after receiving the usual modicum of education, and fulfilling the usual novitiate, he had at last, in his twenty-ninth year (1511), been admitted into priest's orders as a member of a fraternity of Franciscan or Mendicant Gray Friars, established at Fontenay-le-Comte, in Lower Poitou. A position less suitable for a man of his tastes and temperament could not possibly have been found. To wear a coarse gray cloak and hood, to go barefooted, and live on fish and other meagre diet, to cherish an humble and abject demeanor, and to abstain from all enough of their spirit remained to preserve for the order its traditional character as the most ascetic and beggarly in the church. In any convent whatever, Rabelais would have been an unruly subject; but in a convent of Franciscans he was discord incarnate. His conventual offences were numerous. In the first place, it appears, he was by far too studious in his habits for a Franciscan; he, and another brother, named Peter Amy, would persist, among other things, in learning Greek together, and in corresponding with eminent Greek scholars, such as the celebrated Budæus—of all which it was clear to the friars that no good could come. Further, there was good reason, after the promulgation of the Lutheran heresy, to believe that brother Rabelais was by no means an orthodox catholic in his views of that movement, if, indeed, he was not in secret a disciple of Luther. But, worse than all, as we guess, he was of a disposition altogether intractable and uncomfortable, "un prêtre," as his friend Budæus hinted, "d'un caractère bien difficile et morose ;" an earlier Swift, in short, for bitterness and satiric humor. It is nowise necessary to add to these traits, as some do, the imputation of personal lewdness, in order to complete our picture of a man that would be likely to keep a community of Gray Friars in a state of hot water. Suffice it that, during thirteen years, he was, somehow or other, the most unpopular man in the monastery. At last, this dislike of his brother monks to him showed itself in a somewhat serious fashion. In 1524, in consequence of some formidable breach of rule—a profane practical jest, tradition says, that brought the whole convent into public scandal | I., as to sanction the burning of suspected -brother Rabelais was condemned by the heretics in the streets of Paris. Accordingconventual chapter to the terrible punishment ly, there was a temporary cessation of all overt called in pace-that is, to perpetual imprison- demonstration of opinion, or of Lutheran ment, on bread and water, in a subterranean collusion, if any such existed, on the part of cell. It was not so easy, however, thus to our ex-monk and his friends. The Bishop of dispose of a man whose abilities and learning, Maillezais and the Du Bellays jogged on as in spite of any faults he may have had as politic men in office, that could keep their regarded faith or morals, had already pro- thoughts to themselves; Clement Marot, a cured him some local reputation-a man that prosecution for eating bacon in Lent hanging knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had over him, continued to write popular verses; Budæus and bishops for his friends. The the noble Calvin calmly pursued his peculiar whole neighborhood of Fontenay-le-Comte way as a laborious student, whom a high rose in his favor; and by the exertions of destiny awaited; and Rabelais, a runaway certain influential individuals, among whom monk, with forty-eight years of his life gone, was André Tiraqueau, lieutenant-general of and the world yet before him, resolved, as the district, and Geoffroi d'Estissac, bishop we have seen, to study medicine. of the see of Maillezais in the same province of Poitou, not only was Rabelais released from his durance, but a papal indulgence was procured enabling him to quit his monastery altogether, and, in spite of his former vows as a Franciscan, enter the aforesaid bishop's own chapter, the Abbey of Maillezais, of the wealthy and scholarly order of St. Benedict. Even this change of situation, however, did not satisfy him; and it was not long before, assuming the habit of a secular priest, and so renouncing all monastic restraint, he decamped from the abbey without leave, and became once more a denizen of the common world. The Bishop of Maillezais, one of those easy semi-Lutheran prelates that then abounded, winked at this act of his protegé; and for several years the ex-monk lived and went about with him as his friend and secretary. It was at this time and in this situation that he became connected with Clement Marot, Etienne Dolet, Antoine Heroet, Hugues Salel, Bonaventure des Periers, and other distinguished literary sceptics of the day, in all of whom, sympathy with at least the negative side of the Lutheran movement was tolerably apparent; as well as with the four celebrated brothers Du Bellay, who, though all high civic or ecclesiastical functionaries, were yet all more or less Lutheran in their sentiments. There is even ground for supposing, that about the same period, he met and formed some slight acquaintance with Calvin, then a mere youth, but already known, like himself, as a profound Greek scholar. In 1530, however, the mixed party of wits, scholars, and public men, that seemed thus to be forming itself as a Lutheran, or semi-Lutheran, element in French society, found cause for prudence, if not for alarm; persecution having assumed so decided a form in the counsels of Francis The memory of Rabelais is sacred in Montpellier to this day. For many years after his death, the red gown which he had worn when a student, was carefully preserved; and, by way of ceremony, every medical pupil at the university was invested with it on passing his fifth examination. The ceremony is still kept up; but the real gown has twice been replaced by a substitute. According to the tradition, this custom is commemorative not merely of the fact that Rabelias studied at the university, but also of a signal service that he rendered it, in procuring, under very difficult circumstances, and by a very jocose stratagem, the restoration of certain privileges that had been withdrawn from it by Chancellor Duprat. All that is certain, however, is that Rabelias remained at the university about two years; that he obtained a bachelor's degree in medicine; that he led what might be called a merry life for a man verging on fifty-acting plays and farces with his fellow-students; and that, on leaving Montpellier for Lyons, in 1532, he carried with him a real knowledge of what was then taught as physic, as well as a full title to practice it. Settled at Lyons, whither he was probably led by the instances of his friend Dolet, his first occupation was to edit two medical works the one consisting of Letters of an Italian physician, named Manardi, and the other of revised Latin versions of certain treatises of Hippocrates and Galen. These works, however, did not sell. Two other productions, of an erudite literary character, were equally unsuccessful; and, as the common story goes, it was to make up to his publisher, Gryphius, the losses he had sustained by undertaking them, that Rebelias resolved to attempt something in a more popular vein. The result was the publication in 66 66 the same year of a mock tale of chivalry entitled, Chronique Gargantuine, or more fully, "The great and inestimable Chronicles of the great and enormous Giant Gargantua, containing his genealogy, the greatness and force of his body, as well as the marvelous feats of arms that he did for King Artus; as see hereafter, newly printed." Of this slipshod performance, doubtless written currente calamo, and, as the author says, during the time allotted to eating and drinking," there were sold, he says, more copies in two months than were sold of the Bible in nine years.' No time was, therefore, lost in bringing out a second edition of the same, greatly altered and enlarged; and in following it up in 1533 with a sequel, or continuation, under the name, "Pantagruel; the horrible and astounding feats and prowesses of the very renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes, son of the great giant Gargantua; newly composed by Alcofribas Nasier." This production, which forms the second book of the works of Rabelais, as they now stand, is in reality the parent of the other four books, nothing being contained in them that does not grow out of it necessarily or otherwise. The author, in passing from the Chronique, which he had thrown off so hastily, to this second work, or sequel, had evidently enlarged the design of his fiction, and determined to give it a new character. Accordingly, while he retains in the Pantagruel a great deal of the absurd machinery of the Chronique, making his hero a giant, and everything about him gigantesque, it is clear that he no longer aims at a mere boisterous parody of the legends of giants and enchantments, that then formed the staple popular literature of Europe. Merlin, King Arthur, Gog, Magog, and other similar personages, that had figured in the Chronique, are disbanded; and Pantagruel, the gigantic son of the giant Gargantua, moves on through a very different world from that to which his father had belonged. Paris, and the whole contemporary French world, that Rabelais himself knew, rise distinctly before one; and the author, descending like a licensed jester among real things and events, riots in universal allusion and invective. The transition is somewhat, though not entirely, as if from penning The Adventures of Jack the Giant Killer, one had passed to the composition of the Voyage to Brobdignag. Fancy does not yet succumb, indeed, so as to play only a second part; but purpose and savage intent are everywhere visible. Rabelais had thus discovered his true vein, | found out the natural bent of his genius, ascertained that he was a born satirist, and allirreverent jester. A somewhat odd discovery to be made so late, and after such varied premises! To have become a priest; to have spent thirteen years in a convent of beggarly ignoramuses; to have learnt Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and otherwise pursued knowledge under difficulties; to have been once all but starved to death in a mouldy cellar; to have changed one monkish order for another; to have been secretary to a bishop; to have kept company with distinguished scholars and wits; to have seen and talked with young Calvin; to have studied medicine, and edited heavy medical books; and then, at last, in his fiftieth year, to find out, by mere chance, that, after all, he was nothing else than what he had been at first— a village innkeeper's son, making fun every morning with the hostlers at his father's door; listening every night to snatches of song, broad jests, and roars of tipsy laughter from the tap-room; and au fait (the kitchen being his own) in all the mysteries of cooked and preserved meats! Such, however, was the fact of the case. What Rabelais was at the last, he was in embryo while a boy about his father's inn at Chinon. Take, for example, the opening passage of the Prologue to his Fourth Book: "Good people, God save and keep you! Where are you? I can't see you. Wait till I put on my spectacles. Ha, ha!-soft and fair goes Lent; I see you. Well, you have had a good I am not a bit vexed at it. vintage, they tell me. You have found an infallible cure against all weather changes. 'Tis bravely done. You, your wives, children, friends, and families, are in as good health as hearts could wish. It is well, it is good; it is as I would have it. God be praised for it; and, if it be his sacred will, long may you be kept so. For my own part, thank His kindness, I am there and thereabouts; and by the know, a certain jollity of spirit pickled in the means of a little Pantagruelism (which is, as you scorn of fortune), you see me now hale and cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will." What have we here but the salutation of a country innkeeper to his customers on a market-day? We seem to see old Thomas Rabelais, a ruddy, jovial soul, with plenty to say, and genius in the very wink of his eye, standing under his own sign of the Lamprey, and welcoming his guests in his bantering way, his first-born chewing a straw, and sympathetically looking on. "And so you mean to make that boy of yours a priest, Master Rabelais ?" |