d though he
left behind him a sufficiently ragged reputation from the first, it is
only after these four hundred years that his delinquencies have been
finally tracked home, and we can assign him to his proper place among
the good or wicked. It is a staggering thought, and one that affords a
fine figure of the imperishability of men's acts, that the stealth of
the private inquiry office can be carried so far back into the dead and
dusty past. We are not so soon quit of our concerns as Villon fancied.
In the extreme of dissolution, when not so much as a man's name is
remembered, when his dust is scattered to the four winds, and perhaps
the very grave and the very graveyard where he was laid to rest have
been forgotten, desecrated, and buried under populous towns,--even in
this extreme let an antiquary fall across a sheet of manuscript, and the
name will be recalled, the old infamy will pop out into daylight like a
toad out of a fissure in the rock, and the shadow of the shade of what
was once a man will be heartily pilloried by his descendants. A little
while ago and Villon was almost totally forgotten; then he was revived
for the sake of his verses; and now he is being revived with a vengeance
in the detection of his misdemeanours. How unsubstantial is this
projection of a man's existence, which can lie in abeyance for centuries
and then be brushed up again and set forth for the consideration of
posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's inkpot! This precarious tenure
of fame goes a long way to justify those (and they are not few) who
prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present.

A WILD YOUTH

Francois de Montcorbier, _alias_ Francois des Loges, _alias_ Francois
Villon, _alias_ Michel Mouton, Master of Arts in the University of
Paris, was born in that city in the summer of 1431. It was a memorable
year for France on other and higher considerations. A great-hearted girl
and a poor-hearted boy made, the one her last, the other his first
appearance on the public stage of that unhappy country. On the 30th of
May the ashes of Joan of Arc were thrown into the Seine, and on the 2nd
of December our Henry Sixth made his Joyous Entry dismally enough into
disaffected and depopulating Paris. Sword and fire still ravaged the
open country. On a single April Saturday twelve hundred persons, besides
children, made their escape out of the starving capital. The hangman, as
is not uninteresting to note in connection with Master Fr