Villon

Francois, a French poet. As nearly as can be ascertained he lived 1431-1484. The certainties are that he lived a wild, dissolute, Bohemian life and wrote exquisite poetry. Of unknown parentage, like enough his father may have been some nobleman, Villon was educated by a wealthy guardian, received the degree of master of arts, and had influential friends. He forfeited standing by getting into an affray with a priest and killing him. Out of a jumble of affrays, imprisonments, pardons, escapes, banishments, forgeries, thefts, burglaries of chapels, and murders, we find him ever turning up in Paris, the associate of pickpockets, blackguards, and vagabonds. The lowest dives in Paris were his delight, the lowest barrooms rang with his songs. He was an expert in the slang of thieves. He led his companions to the treasure chest of the cathedral, yet clothed the highest sentiments in the most beautiful language known to man. He has been termed a gutter genius, an inspired blackguard, poet of the slums and all that; but it is admitted that his poetry ranks with the best that the world has produced. The wonder is that such poetic beauty and delicacy grew in social mire. Villon's career only goes to prove that real inspiration--original genius--springs from the soil, from the heart of the people,--not from the crust we are pleased to term society. Villon was educated in the Latin tongue of course; he wrote in French. On one occasion he secured his release from prison by addressing a poem to a princess of the royal household. At another time, while lying in jail, broken by torture, and under sentence of death, he excited commiseration and obtained release by writing a Ballade of the Hanged. All in all, Villon merits the mantle of charity with which Shelley so skillfully covered his faults in his Defense of Poetry. "Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate,--their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time."