Crossword-Solution: RABELAISIANS 12 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 14

Yet, as there were heroes before Agamemnon, so there were Rabelaisians, even among the ‘writing fellows,’ before Rabelais; the greatest of them, of course, being Aristophanes, though, from all we hear, it may be reasonably feared that when Alcibiades, instead of getting damages out of Eupolis for libel, ‘in a duck-pond drowned him,’ he thereby extinguished for ever a Rabelaisian of the very first rank.

But we can only judge from what we have; and, to say nothing of the tabooed Lysistrata, the ‘Birds’ alone puts Aristophanes at the top of all pre-Rabelaisian Rabelaisians.

But when those immortal words came from that dying bed at Meudon: ‘Let down the curtain; the farce is done,’ they were prophetic as regards the literary Rabelaisians—prophetic in this, that no writer has since thoroughly caught the Rabelaisian mood—the mood, that is, of the cosmic humourist, gasping with merriment as he gobbles huge piles of meat and guzzles from huge flagons of wine.