It is the way this is printed that makes some miss its value. It is, like all the best he wrote, a song; it needs the varying time of human expression, the effect of tone, the repose and the re-lifting of musical notes; illuminated thus it greatly charmed, and if any one would know the order of such a tune, why, it should follow the punctuation: a cessation at the third line; a rise of rapid accents to the thirteenth, and then a change; the last three lines of the whole very much fuller and strong. So I would hear it sung on a winter evening in an old house in Auvergne, and re-enter the sixteenth century as I heard. _TO HIS LADY IN SICKNESS._ _Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour. Le sejour, C'est prison. Guerison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Vostre porte Et qu'on sorte Vistement; Car Clement Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras Et perdras L'embonpoint. Dieu te doint, Sante bonne, Ma mignonne._ THE VINEYARD SONG. (_The 4th of the Chansons._) Here is Marot's best--even though many of his native critics will not admit it so; but to feel it in full one must be exiled from the vines. It is a tapestry of the Renaissance; the jolly gods of the Renaissance, the old gods grown Catholic moving across a happier stage. Bacchus in long robes and with solemnity blessing the vine, Silenus and the hobbling smith who smithied the Serpe, the Holy Vineyard Knife in heaven, all these by their diction and their flavour recall the Autumn in Herault and the grapes under a pure sky, pale at the horizon, and labourers and their carts in the vineyard, and these set in the frame of that great time when Saturn did return.