o be dismissed without expression; and
he could draw at full length the portrait of his own bedevilled soul,
and of the bleak and blackguardly world which was the theatre of his
exploits and sufferings. If the reader can conceive something between
the slap-dash inconsequence of Byron's "Don Juan" and the racy humorous
gravity and brief noble touches that distinguish the vernacular poems of
Burns, he will have formed some idea of Villon's style. To the latter
writer--except in the ballades, which are quite his own, and can be
paralleled from no other language known to me--he bears a particular
resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a
brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local
personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often
despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also,
in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and
obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the
absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great
masters of expression who keep sending their readers to a glossary.

"Shall we not dare to say of a thief," asks Montaigne, "that he has a
handsome leg?" It is a far more serious claim that we have to put
forward in behalf of Villon. Beside that of his contemporaries, his
writing, so full of colour, so eloquent, so picturesque, stands out in
an almost miraculous isolation. If only one or two of the chroniclers
could have taken a leaf out of his book, history would have been a
pastime, and the fifteenth century as present to our minds as the age of
Charles Second. This gallows-bird was the one great writer of his age
and country, and initiated modern literature for France. Boileau, long
ago, in the period of perukes and snuff-boxes, recognised him as the
first articulate poet in the language; and if we measure him, not by
priority of merit, but living duration of influence, not on a comparison
with obscure forerunners, but with great and famous successors, we
shall instal this ragged and disreputable figure in a far higher niche
in glory's temple than was ever dreamed of by the critic. It is, in
itself, a memorable fact that before 1542, in the very dawn of printing,
and while modern France was in the making, the works of Villon ran
through seven different editions. Out of him flows much of Rabelais; and
through Rabelais, directly and indirectly, a deep, p