ed and became permanent in letters.

Her local spirit and her special quality had shone fitfully here and
there for a thousand years--you may find it in Julian, in Abbo, in
Joinville. But now, in the fifteenth century, it had been not only a
town but a great town for more than a century--a town, that is, in which
men live entirely, almost ignorant of the fields, observing only other
men, and forgetting the sky. The keen edge of such a life, its
bitterness, the mockery and challenge whereby its evils are borne, its
extended knowledge, the intensity of its spirit--all these are reflected
in Villon, and first reflected in him. Since his pen first wrote, a
shining acerbity like the glint of a sword-edge has never deserted the
literature of the capital.

It was not only the metropolitan, it was the Parisian spirit which
Villon found and fixed. That spirit which is bright over the whole city,
but which is not known in the first village outside; the influence that
makes Paris Athenian.

The ironical Parisian soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its
luminous profundity escapes one--so with Villon. Religion hangs there.
Humility--fatally divorced from simplicity--pervades it. It laughs at
itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting
upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, are commonly
comprehended, always appreciated, for the Faith is there permanent. All
this you will find in Villon, but it is too great a matter for so short
an essay as this.

THE DEAD LADIES.

It is difficult or impossible to compare the masterpieces of the world.
It is easy and natural to take the measure of a particular writer and to
establish a scale of his work.

Villon is certainly in the small first group of the poets. His little
work, like that of Catullus, like that of Gray, is up, high, completed
and permanent. And within that little work this famous Ballade is by far
the greatest thing.

It contains all his qualities: not in the ordinary proportion of his
character, but in that better, exact proportion which existed in him
when his inspiration was most ardent: for the poem has underlying it
somewhere a trace of his irony, it has all his ease and
rapidity--excellent in any poet--and it is carried forward by that
vigour I have named, a force which drives it well upwards and forward to
its foaming in the seventh line of the third verse.

The sound of names was delightful to