othing but
artistic evil; and by the principle of the art, those should have
written of the man, and not I. Where you see no good, silence is the
best. Though this penitence comes too late, it may be well, at least, to
give it expression.

The spirit of Villon is still living in the literature of France. Fat
Peg is oddly of a piece with the work of Zola, the Goncourts, and the
infinitely greater Flaubert; and, while similar in ugliness, still
surpasses them in a native power. The old author, breaking with an
_eclat de voix_ out of his tongue-tied century, has not yet been touched
on his own ground, and still gives us the most vivid and shocking
impression of reality. Even if that were not worth doing at all, it
would be worth doing as well as he has done it; for the pleasure we take
in the author's skill repays us, or at least reconciles us to the
baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg (_La Grosse Margot_) is typical of
much; it is a piece of experience that has nowhere else been rendered
into literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's plainness
mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the business. I shall
quote here a verse of an old student's song; worth laying side by side
with Villon's startling ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy
mistress, but he did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it
is thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:--

Nunc plango florem
AEtatis tenerae
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire praecipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Caecos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa.[1]

But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to deceive; it
was the flight of beauty alone, not that of honesty or honour, that he
lamented in his song; and the nameless mediaeval vagabond has the best of
the comparison.

There is now a Villon Society in England; and Mr. John Payne has
translated him entirely into English, a task of unusual difficulty. I
regret to find that Mr. Payne and I are not always at one as to the
author's meaning; in such cases I am bound to suppose that he is in the
right, although the weakness of the flesh withholds me from anything
beyond a formal submission. He is now upon a larger venture, promising
u