So comes a reckoning when the banquet ’s o’er,— The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.1
ATTRIBUTION:
The What d’ ye call it. Act ii. Sc. 9.
Note 1. The time of paying a shot in a tavern among good fellows, or Pantagruelists, is still called in France a “quart d’heure de Rabelais,”—that is, Rabelais’s quarter of an hour, when a man is uneasy or melancholy.—Life of Rabelais (Bohn’s edition), p. 13. [back]
