omatist. When Commynes wrote--towards the close of
the fifteenth century--the confusion and strife which Froissart had
chronicled with such a gusto were things of the past, and France was
beginning to emerge as a consolidated and centralized state. Commynes
himself, one of the confidential ministers of Louis XI, had played an
important part in this development; and his book is the record of the
triumphant policy of his crafty and sagacious sovereign. It is a fine
piece of history, written with lucidity and firmness, by a man who had
spent all his life behind the scenes, and who had never been taken in.
The penetration and the subtlety of Commynes make his work interesting
chiefly for its psychological studies and for the light that it throws
on those principles of cunning statecraft which permeated the politics
and diplomacy of the age and were to receive their final exposition in
the _Prince_ of Machiavelli. In his calm, judicious, unaffected pages we
can trace the first beginnings of that strange movement which was to
convert the old Europe of the Middle Ages, with its universal Empire and
its universal Church, into the new Europe of independent secular
nations--the Europe of to-day.

Commynes thus stands on the brink of the modern world; though his style
is that of his own time, his matter belongs to the future: he looks
forward into the Renaissance. At the opposite end of the social scale
from this rich and powerful diplomatist, VILLON gave utterance in
language of poignant beauty to the deepest sentiments of the age that
was passing away. A ruffian, a robber, a murderer, haunting the vile
places of Paris, flying from justice, condemned, imprisoned, almost
executed, and vanishing at last, none knows how or where, this
extraordinary genius lives now as a poet and a dreamer--an artist who
could clothe in unforgettable verse the intensest feelings of a soul.
The bulk of his work is not large. In his _Grand Testament_--a poem of
about 1500 lines, containing a number of interspersed ballades and
rondeaus--in his _Petit Testament_, and in a small number of
miscellaneous poems, he has said all that he has to say. The most
self-communicative of poets, he has impressed his own personality on
every line that he wrote. Into the stiff and complicated forms of the
rondeau and rondel, the ballade and double ballade, with their limited
rhymes and their enforced repetitions, he has succeeded in breathing not
only the spirit of beau