, for no great arch or
cornice, nor no colonnade had lifted him with its splendour.

That he could so discover it, that a solemnity and order should be
apparent in the midst of his raillery whenever he desires to produce an
effect of the grand, leads me to speak of that major quality of his by
which he stands up out of his own time, and is clearly an originator of
the great renewal. I mean his vigour.

It is all round about him, and through him, like a storm in a wood. It
creates, it perceives. It possesses the man himself, and us also as we
read him. By it he launches his influence forward and outward rather
than receives it from the past. To it his successors turn, as to an
ancestry, when they had long despised and thrown aside everything else
that savoured of the Gothic dead. By it he increased in reputation and
meaning from his boyhood on for four hundred years, till now he is
secure among the first lyric poets of Christendom. It led to no excess
of matter, but to an exuberance of attitude and manner, to an
inexhaustibility of special words, to a brilliancy of impression unique
even among his own people.

He was poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour, therefore,
led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness the rare
fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to teach, but
he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived at random
from his twentieth year in one den or another along the waterside.
Affection brought him now to his mother, now to his old guardian priest,
but not for long; he returned to adventure--such as it was. He killed a
man, was arrested, condemned, pardoned, exiled; he wandered and again
found Paris, and again--it seems--stumbled down his old lane of violence
and dishonour.

Associated also with this wildness is a curious imperfection in our
knowledge of him. His very name is not his own--or any other man's. His
father, if it were his father, took his name from Mont-Corbier--half
noble. Villon is but a little village over beyond the upper Yonne, near
the division, within a day of the water-parting where the land falls
southward to Burgundy and the sun in what they call "The Slope of Gold."
From this village a priest, William, had come to Paris in 1423. They
gave him a canonry in that little church called "St. Bennets Askew,"
which stood in the midst of the University, near Sorbonne, where the Rue
des Ecoles crosses the Rue St. Jacques