whose poetry, full of imagination, is no doubt on account of those
presentiments which the ancients attributed to their fates, continually
marked by a singular foreboding of the gallows, on which the said Villon
one day nearly swung in a hempen collar for having looked too closely at
the color of the king's crowns. This same Villon, who more than once
outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of
the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt,
this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the
heartbreaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most
pitiless and make them forget the ruffian, the vagabond and the
debauchee, before this muse drowned in her own tears.

Besides, amongst all those whose but little known work has only been
familiar to men for whom French literature does not begin the day when
"Malherbe came," François Villon has had the honor of being the most
pillaged, even by the big-wigs of modern Parnassus. They threw
themselves upon the poor man's field and coined glory from his humble
treasure. There are ballads scribbled under a penthouse at the street
corner on a cold day by the Bohemian rhapsodist, stanzas improvised in
the hovel in which the "belle qui fut haultmire" loosened her gilt
girdle to all comers, which now-a-days metamorphosed into dainty
gallantries scented with musk and amber, figure in the armorial bearing
enriched album of some aristocratic Chloris.

But behold the grand century of the Renaissance opens, Michaelangelo
ascends the scaffolds of the Sistine Chapel and watches with anxious air
young Raphael mounting the steps of the Vatican with the cartoon of the
Loggie under his arm. Benvenuto Cellini is meditating his Perseus,
Ghiberti is carving the Baptistery doors at the same time that Donatello
is rearing his marbles on the bridges of the Arno; and whilst the city