he had abandoned himself, he fled, perhaps to Angers, bidding his
friends a jesting farewell in the bequests of his _Petit Testament_.
Betrayed by one who claimed him as an associate in robbery, Villon
is lost to view for three years; and when we rediscover him in 1461,
it is as a prisoner, whose six months' fare has been bread and water
in his cell at Meun-sur-Loire. The entry of Louis XI., recently
consecrated king, freed the unhappy captive. Before the year closed
he had composed his capital work, the _Grand Testament_, and proved
himself the most original poet of his century. And then Villon
disappears; whether he died soon after, whether he lived for half
a score of years, we do not know.

While he handles with masterly ease certain of the fifteenth-century
forms of verse--in particular the ballade--Villon is a modern in his
abandonment of the traditional machinery of the imagination, its
convention of allegories and abstractions, and those half-realised
moralisings which were repeated from writer to writer; he is modern
in the intensity of a personal quality which is impressed upon his
work, in the complexity of his feelings, passing from mirth to despair,
from beauty to horror, from cynical grossness to gracious memories
or aspirations; he is modern in his passion for the real, and in those
gleams of ideal light which are suddenly dashed across the vulgar
surroundings of his sorry existence. While he flings out his scorn
and indignation against those whom he regarded as his ill-users, or
cries against the injuries of fortune, or laments his miserable past,
he yet is a passionate lover of life; and shadowing beauty and youth
and love and life, he is constantly aware of the imminent and
inexorable tyranny of death. The ideas which he expresses are few
and simple--ideas common to all men; but they take a special colour
from his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with a
poignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate
imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in itself--that
of the _enfant perdu_ of genius--and so typical of a class, that the
temptation to create a Villon legend is great; but to magnify his
proportions to those of the highest poets is to do him wrong. His
passionate intensity within a limited range is unsurpassed; but
Villon wanted sanity, and he wanted breadth.

In his direct inspiration from life, co-operating with an admirable
skill and science in li