g here in the
street, but I would not go down a dark road with him for a large
consideration.

The second of the points on which he was genuine and emphatic was common
to the middle ages; a deep and somewhat snivelling conviction of the
transitory nature of this life and the pity and horror of death. Old age
and the grave, with some dark and yet half-sceptical terror of an
after-world--these were ideas that clung about his bones like a disease.
An old ape, as he says, may play all the tricks in its repertory, and
none of them will tickle an audience into good humour. "_Tousjours vieil
synge est desplaisant._" It is not the old jester who receives most
recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow, fresh and handsome,
who knows the new slang, and carries off his vice with a certain air. Of
this, as a tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly conscious. As
for the women with whom he was best acquainted, his reflections on their
old age, in all their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original for
me. Horace has disgraced himself to something the same tune; but what
Horace throws out with an ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an
almost maudlin whimper.

It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration; in the swift and
sorrowful change that overtakes beauty; in the strange revolution by
which great fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
churchyard dust; and in the utter passing away of what was once lovable
and mighty. It is in this that the mixed texture of his thought enables
him to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to enhance pity
with ridicule, like a man cutting capers to a funeral march. It is in
this also that he rises out of himself into the higher spheres of art.
So, in the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the changes on
names that once stood for beautiful and queenly women, and are now no
more than letters and a legend. "Where are the snows of yester year?"
runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous, he passes in review
the different degrees of bygone men, from the holy Apostles and the
golden Emperor of the East, down to the heralds, pursuivants, and
trumpeters, who also bore their part in the world's pageantries and ate
greedily at great folks' tables: all this to the refrain of "So much
carry the winds away!" Probably, there was some melancholy in his mind
for a yet lower grade, and Montigny and Colin de Cayeux clattering their
bones on Paris g