Choshu, whose
eagerness betrayed the plot. It is exhilarating to have lived in the
same days with these great-hearted gentlemen. Only a few miles from us,
to speak by the proportion of the universe, while I was droning over my
lessons, Yoshida was goading himself to be wakeful with the stings of
the mosquito; and while you were grudging a penny income-tax, Kusakabe
was stepping to death with a noble sentence on his lips.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Yoshida, when on his way to Nangasaki, met the soldier and
talked with him by the roadside; they then parted, but the soldier
was so much struck by the words he heard, that on Yoshida's return
he sought him out and declared his intention of devoting his life to
the good cause. I venture, in the absence of the writer, to insert
this correction, having been present when the story was told by Mr.
Masaki.--F. J. [Fleeming Jenkin.] And I, there being none to settle
the difference, must reproduce both versions.--R. L. S.

[5] I understood that the merchant was endeavouring surreptitiously to
obtain for his son instruction to which he was not entitled.--F. J.

VI

FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER

Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the
sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on the obscure existence of
Francois Villon[6]. His book is not remarkable merely as a chapter of
biography exhumed after four centuries. To readers of the poet it will
recall, with a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which
he bequeaths his spectacles--with a humorous reservation of the case--to
the hospital for blind paupers known as the Fifteen-Score. Thus
equipped, let the blind paupers go and separate the good from the bad in
the cemetery of the Innocents! For his own part, the poet can see no
distinction. Much have the dead people made of their advantages. What
does it matter now that they have lain in state beds and nourished
portly bodies upon cakes and cream! Here they all lie, to be trodden in
the mud; the large estate and the small, sounding virtue and adroit or
powerful vice, in very much the same condition; and a bishop not to be
distinguished from a lamplighter with even the strongest spectacles.

Such was Villon's cynical philosophy. Four hundred years after his
death, when surely all danger might be considered at an end, a pair of
critical spectacles have been applied to his own remains; an