that the hitherto unconfirmed observations deserve to be repeated. No one can read Braid's work without being impressed by the care and candour with which, amid violent opposition from all quarters, his investigations were pursued; and now, when, after a lapse of nearly forty years, his results are beginning to receive the confirmation which they deserve, the physiologists who yield it ought not to forget the credit that is due to the earliest, the most laborious, and the hitherto most extensive investigator of the phenomena of what he called Hypnotism.

G. J. ROMANES.

FRANÇOIS VILLON.

THERE are few names in the history of literature over which the shadow has so long and so persistently lain as over that of the father of French poetry. Up to no more distant period than the early part of the year 1877, it was not even known what was his real name, nor were the admirers of his genius in possession of any other facts relative to his personal history than could be gleaned, by a painful process of inference and deduction, from those works of the poet that have been handed down to posterity. The materials that exist for the biography of Shakespeare or Dante are indeed scanty enough, but they present a very harvest of fact and suggestion compared with the pitiable fragments upon which, until the publication of M. Longnon's Etude Biographique, we had alone to rely for our personal knowledge of Villon. Even now the facts and dates, that M. Longnon has so valiantly and so ingeniously rescued for us from the vast charnel-house of medieval history, are in themselves scanty enough; and it is necessary to apply to their connection and elucidation no mean amount of goodwill and faithful labour, before anything like a definite framework of biography can be constructed from them. Such as they are, however, they enable us for the first time to catch a glimpse of the strange mad life and dissolute yet attractive. personality of the wild, reckless, unfortunate Parisian poet, whose splendid if erratic verse flames out like a meteor from the somewhat dim twilight of French fifteenth-century literature.

François de Montcorbier, better known as Villon (from the name of his life-long patron and protector), was born in the year 1431. It is uncertain what place may claim the honour of his birth, but the probabilities appear to be in favour of his having been born at some village near Pontoise, in the diocese of Paris. The only relative who appears to have had any share in Villon's life was his mother; his father he only mentions to tell us he is dead, nor have we any information as to his condition or the position in which he left his family. However, the want of living and available family connections was amply compensated to Villon by the protecting care of a patron who seems to have taken him under his wing, and perhaps

'Etude Biographique sur François Villon. Par Auguste Longnon, Paris, 1877.

even adopted him at an early age. Guillaume de Villon, the patron in question, was a respectable and apparently well-to-do ecclesiastic, belonging to a family established at a village of the same name, Villon, near Tonnerre, in the dominions of the ducal house of Burgundy. We first hear of him as one of the chaplains of the parish church of the little village of Gentilly, near Paris, during his occupancy of which cure he probably formed an acquaintance with the poet's family, which afterwards led to his undertaking the charge of their son. About the year of François' birth, the priest was appointed to a stall in the cathedral church of St. Benoît le Bétourné or Bientourné at Paris, a lucrative benefice, involving, besides a handsome residence called L'Hôtel de la Porte Rouge, in the close or cloister of St. Benoît, a considerable piece of land and a stipend sufficient to enable him to live at his ease. In this position he remained till his death, which occurred in 1468; and there is every reason to believe that he survived his protégé, towards whom, during the whole of his life, he appears never to have relaxed from untiring and unobtrusive benevolence. Of no other person does Villon speak in the same unqualified terms of grateful affection, as of the canon of St. Benoît, calling him his more than father, who had been to him more tender than mothers to their sucking babes.'

Of the early life of Villon we know nothing whatever, except that he must have entered at the University of Paris about the year 1446, when he was fifteen years of age. In March 1450 he was admitted to the baccalaureate, and became licentiate in theology or ecclesiastical law and Master of Arts in the summer of 1452. The period that elapsed between his matriculation and the year 1455 is an almost complete blank for us. The only materials we have to enable us to follow him during this interval are the allusions and references to be gleaned from a study of his poems. It was certainly during this period of his life that he contracted the disreputable acquaintances that exercised so culminating an influence over his future history, and at the same time became intimate with many persons of a more worthy class, to whom his merry devil-may-care disposition, and probably also his wit and genius, made him acceptable whilst he and they were young. Of these, some were fellow-students of his own, others apparently people of better rank and position -those gracious gallants' whom, as he himself tells us, he frequented in his youth. Some of these, says he, afterwards became 'masters and lords, and great of grace; and it was no doubt to the kindly remembrance that these latter cherished of the jolly, brilliant companion of their youth that he owed something of his comparative immunity from punishment for the numberless faults and follies which he committed at a subsequent and less favoured period. This early period of Villon's life, extending at least up to his twentyfourth year, appears to have been free from crime or misconduct of any

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very gross character. At all events it seems certain that, up to the early part of the year 1455, he committed no act that brought him under the unfavourable notice of the police; and we find indeed, by a subsequent document under the royal seal, that Villon's assertion that 'he had up till then well and honourably governed himself, without having been attaint, reproved, or convicted of any ill case, blame, or reproach,' was accepted without question, as certainly would not have been the case had he been previously unfavourably known to the police. Yet it is evident, both from his own showing and on the authority of popular report and especially of the curious collection of anecdotes in verse known as Les Repues Franches or Free Feeds (of which he was the hero, not the author), that his life during this interval, if not trenching upon the limits of strictly punishable offences, was yet one of sufficiently disreputable character and marked by such license and misconduct as would assuredly, in more settled and law-abiding times, have earlier brought his career to a disgraceful close. He himself tells us that he lived more merrily than most in his youth; and we need only refer to the remarkable list of wineshops, rogues, and women of ill fame, with which he shows so familiar an acquaintance in his works, to satisfy ourselves that much of his time must have been spent in debauchery and wantonness of the most uncompromising character.

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It was therefore to provide for the satisfaction of his inclinations towards debauchery that he became gradually entangled in complications of bad company and questionable acts, that step by step led him to that maze of crime and disaster in which his whole after-life was wrecked. In Les Repues Franches, a work not published till many years after his probable death and apparently founded upon popular tradition, we find Villon represented as the head of a band of scholars, poor clerks and beggars, learning at others' expense,' all 'gallants with sleeveless pourpoints,' having perpetual occasion for gratuitous feeds, both winter and summer,' who are classed under the generic title of Les Sujets François Villon,' and into whose mouths the author puts this admirable dogma of despotic equality, worthy of that hero of our own times, the British working man himself, He who has nothing, it behoves that he fare better than any one else.' 'Le bon Maître François Villon' comforts his 'compaignons,' who are described as not being worth two sound. onions, with the assurance that they shall want for nothing, but shall presently have bread, wine, and roast meat à grant foyson, and proceeds to practise a series of tricks, after the manner of Till Eulenspiegel, by which, chiefly through the persuasiveness of his honeyed tongue, he succeeds in procuring them the wherewithal to make merry and enjoy great good cheer. From tricks of this kind, devoted to obtaining the materials for those orgies in which his soul delighted, there is no reason to suppose that he did not easily pass to others

more serious, or shrank from the employment of more criminal means of obtaining the money that was equally necessary for the indulgence of the licentious humours of himself and his companions. In the words of the anonymous author of Les Repues Franches, 'He was the nursing mother of those who had no money: in swindling behind and before he was a most diligent man.' So celebrated was he indeed

as a man of expedients, that he attained the rare honour of becoming a popular type; and the word 'villonerie' was long used among the lower classes of Paris to describe such sharping practices as were traditionally attributed to Villon as the great master of the art, even as from the later roguish type of Till Eulenspiegel, Gallicè Ulespiègle (many of the traditional stories of whose rogueries are founded upon Villon's exploits), was derived the still extant word 'espiéglerie.'

career.

At this period, in all probability, came into action another personage, whose influence seems never to have ceased to affect Villon's life, and who (if we may trust to his own oft-repeated asseverations) was mainly responsible for his ill-directed and untimely ended This was a young lady, named Catherine de Vaucelles or Vaucel, who (according to M. Longnon's plausible conjecture) was either the niece or cousin of one of the canons of St. Benoît, Pierre de Vaucel, who occupied a house in the cloister within a door or two of L'Hôtel de la Porte Rouge, and through her connection with the cloister was afforded to Villon the opportunity of forming an intimate acquaintance with her, which speedily developed into courtship. She appears to have been a young lady of good or at least respectable family, and it would seem also that she was a finished coquette. Throughout the whole of Villon's verse, the remembrance of the one chaste and real love of his life is ever present, and he is fertile in reproaches against the cruelty and infidelity of his mistress. According to his own account, however, the love seems to have been entirely on his side. She appears, indeed, to have taken delight in making a mock of him and playing with his affections; but often as he made up his mind to renounce his unhappy attachment, to resign and be at peace,' he seems, with the true temperament of a lover, to have always returned before long to his vainly caressed hope. No assertion does he more frequently repeat than that this his early love was the source of all his misfortunes and of his untimely death. 'I die a martyr to love,' he says, 'enrolled among the saints thereof;' and the expression of his anguish is often so poignant that we can hardly refuse to put faith in the reality of his passion.

This early period of comparative innocence, or at least obscurity, was now drawing to a close, and its conclusion was marked for Villon by a disaster that in all probability arose from his connection with Catherine de Vaucelles, and which fell like a thunderbolt on the