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 students'
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:-

Nunc plango florem
AEtatis tenerae
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire praecipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Caecos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa. (1)

(1) GAUDEAMUS: CARMINA VAGORUM SELECTA. Leipsic. Trubner.
1879.

But our illustrious writer of ballades it was unnecessary to