Those who would make of him a Protestant altogether forget that the Protestants of his time were not for him, but against him.

Henri Estienne, for instance, Ramus, Theodore de Beze, and especially Calvin, should know how he was to be regarded.

Rabelais belonged to what may be called the early reformation, to that band of honest men in the beginning of the sixteenth century, precursors of the later one perhaps, but, like Erasmus, between the two extremes.

He was neither Lutheran nor Calvinist, neither German nor Genevese, and it is quite natural that his work was not reprinted in Switzerland, which would certainly have happened had the Protestants looked on him as one of themselves.
That Rabelais collected the materials for the fifth book, had begun it, and got on some way, there can be no doubt: the excellence of a large number of passages prove it, but--taken as a whole--the fifth book has not the value, the verve, and the variety of the others.

The style is quite different, less rich, briefer, less elaborate, drier, in parts even wearisome.