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Thus, even in the time of the Renascence, Rabelais saw that the life of the intellect might be nourished by many things besides books. But books were still kept in the highest place. Even on a holiday, which occurred on some fine and clear day once a month, “though spent without books or lecture, yet was the day not without profit; for in the meadows they repeated certain pleasant verses of Virgil’s Agriculture, of Hesiod, of Politian’s Husbandry.” They also turned Latin epigrams into French rondeaux.

This course of study, “although at first it seemed difficult, yet soon became so sweet, so easy, and so delightful, that it seemed rather the recreation of a king than the study of a scholar.”

In preferring the Quadrivial studies to the Trivial, and still more in his use of actual things, Rabelais separates himself from all the teachers of his time.

§ 6. Very remarkable too is the attention he pays to physical education. A day does not pass on which Gargantua does not gallantly exercise his body as he has already exercised his mind. The exercises prescribed are very various, and include running, jumping, swimming, with practice on the horizontal bar and with dumb-bells, &c. But in one respect Rabelais seems behind our own writer, Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster trained the body simply with a view to health. Rabelais is thinking of the gentleman, and all his physical exercises are to prepare him for the gentleman’s occupation, war. The constant preparation for war had a strong and in some respects a very beneficial influence on the education of gentlemen in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, as it has had on that of the Germans in the eighteen hundreds. But to be ready to slaughter one’s fellow creatures is not an ideal aim in education; and besides this, one half of the human race can never (as far as we can judge at present) be affected by it. We therefore prefer the physical training recommended by the Englishman.