ty, but the spirit of individuality. He was not a
simple character; his melancholy was shot with irony and laughter;
sensuality and sentimentality both mingled with his finest imaginations
and his profoundest visions; and all these qualities are reflected,
shifting and iridescent, in the magic web of his verse. One thought,
however, perpetually haunts him; under all his music of laughter or of
passion, it is easy to hear one dominating note. It is the thought of
mortality. The whining, leering, brooding creature can never for a
moment forget that awful Shadow. He sees it in all its aspects--as a
subject for mockery, for penitence, for resignation, for despair. He
sees it as the melancholy, inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all
that is lovely on earth.

Dictes moi ou, n'en quel pays
Est Flora, la belle Rommaine;
Archipiada, ne Thais--

and so through the rest of the splendid catalogue with its sad,
unanswerable refrain--

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

Even more persistently, the vision rises before him of the physical
terrors of death--the hideousness of its approaches, the loathsomeness
of its corruptions; in vain he smiles, in vain he weeps; the grim
imagination will not leave him. In the midst of his wildest debauches,
he suddenly remembers the horrible features of decaying age; he repents;
but there, close before him, he sees the fatal gibbet, and his own body
swinging among the crows.

With Villon the medieval literature of France comes at once to a climax
and a termination. His potent and melancholy voice vibrates with the
accumulated passion and striving and pain of those far-off generations,
and sinks mysteriously into silence with the birth of a new and happier
world.

CHAPTER II

THE RENAISSANCE

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later
Middle Ages. The poems of Villon produce the impression of some bleak,
desolate landscape of snow-covered roofs and frozen streets, shut in by
mists, and with a menacing shiver in the air. It is--

sur la morte saison,
Que les loups se vivent de vent,
Et qu'on se tient en sa maison,
Pour le frimas, pres du tison.

Then all at once the grey gloom lifts, and we are among the colours, the
sunshine, and the bursting vitality of spring.

The great intellectual and spiritual change which came over western
Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the result of a
number