ermanent, and
growing inspiration. Not only his style, but his callous pertinent way
of looking upon the sordid and ugly sides of life, becomes every day a
more specific feature in the literature of France. And only the other
year, a work of some power appeared in Paris, and appeared with infinite
scandal, which owed its whole inner significance and much of its outward
form to the study of our rhyming thief.

The world to which he introduces us is, as before said, blackguardly and
bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks
and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry;
the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; people with
patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary
transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling
students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward;
the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux
and Montigny hang draggled in the rain. Is there nothing better to be
seen than sordid misery and worthless joys? Only where the poor old
mother of the poet kneels in church below painted windows, and makes
tremulous supplication to the Mother of God.

In our mixed world, full of green fields and happy lovers, where not
long before Joan of Arc had led one of the highest and noblest lives in
the whole story of mankind, this was all worth chronicling that our poet
could perceive. His eyes were indeed sealed with his own filth. He dwelt
all his life in a pit more noisome than the dungeon at Meun. In the
moral world, also, there are large phenomena not cognisable out of
holes and corners. Loud winds blow, speeding home deep-laden ships and
sweeping rubbish from the earth; the lightning leaps and cleans the face
of heaven; high purposes and brave passions shake and sublimate men's
spirits; and meanwhile, in the narrow dungeon of his soul, Villon is
mumbling crusts and picking vermin.

Along with this deadly gloom of outlook, we must take another
characteristic of his work, its unrivalled insincerity. I can give no
better similitude of this quality than I have given already: that he
comes up with a whine and runs away with a whoop and his finger to his
nose. His pathos is that of a professional mendicant who should happen
to be a man of genius; his levity that of a bitter street arab, full of
bread. On a first reading, the pathetic passages preoccupy the reader,
and he i