This last thing of his, then, I say, is the most characteristic of him and of his Valois blood, and of the national spirit in general to which he belonged: for he, and it, and they, loved and love contrast, and the extra-meaning of words. _THE FAREWELL._ _Saluez moy toute la compaignie Ou a present estes a chiere lie, Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye Avecques eulx, mais estre n'y porroye, Pour Vieillesse qui m'a en sa baillie. Au temps passe, Jeunesse si jolie Me gouvernoit; las! or n'y suis je mye, Et pour cela pour Dieu, que excuse soye; Saluez moy toute la compaignie Ou a present estes a chiere lie, Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye. Amoureux fus, or ne le suis je mye, Et en Paris menoye bonne vie; Adieu Bon temps ravoir ne vous saroye, Bien sangle fus d'une estroite courroye. Que, par Aige, convient que la deslie. Saluez moy toute la compaignie._ VILLON. I have said that in Charles of Orleans the middle ages are at first more apparent than the advent of the Renaissance. His forms are inherited from an earlier time, his terminology is that of the long allegories which had wearied three generations, his themes recall whatever was theatrical in the empty pageantry of the great war. It is a spirit deeper and more fundamental than the mere framework of his writing which attaches him to the coming time. His clarity is new; it proceeds from natural things; it marks that return to reality which is the beginning of all beneficent revolutions. But this spirit in him needs examination and discovery, and the reader is confused between the mediaeval phrases and the something new and troubling in the voice that utters them. With Villon, the next in order, a similar confusion might arise. All about him as he wrote were the middle ages: their grotesque, their contrast, their disorder. His youth and his activity of blood forbad him any contact with other than immediate influences. He was wholly Northern; he had not so much as guessed at what Italy might be. The decrepit University had given him, as best she could, the dregs of her palsied philosophy and something of Latin. He grew learned as do those men who grasp quickly the major lines of their study, but who, in details, will only be moved by curiosity or by some special affection. There was nothing patient in him, and nothing applied, and in all this, in the matter of his scholarship as in his acquirement of it, he is of the dying middle ages entirely.