traits where I saw nothing 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 éclat 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 15 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:—

15

Nunc plango florem

Ætatis teneræ

Nitidiorem

Veneris sidere:

Tunc columbinam

Mentis dulcedinem,

Nunc serpentinam

Amaritudinem.

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