have suffered their impress than in the valour of those who have sought to change their shape. Now, Charles D'Orléans and François Villon were not great actors: were scarce actors at all. But, while essentially passive, they were yet not dumb. Each of them received the impress of his age upon his life, and each revealed it, a little transfigured by personal reaction, in his song. The imprisonment of Charles, and its effect on his life, the life of Villon, and its result in his imprisonment, show the very image of the Middle Age after the vanishing of its soul. Their poetry is as it were the mask from a dead face.

The son of an Italian mother, Valentina Visconti, Charles D'Orléans was born in the midst of the Hundred Years' War (1391). Doubtless this parentage affected his personal taste, and lent a gracious refinement to the turn of his French ballades and rondels. Doubtless, too, when a hundred years later, Louis XII., the child of his old age, came to the throne, by conferring on that king a claim to the Duchy of Milan it led to a further expansion of Italian influence in France. Yet during his life it was powerless to push on the hands of time. It could not change the necessity of his own or his country's misfortune. He was yet a boy when his father's murder by the Duke of Burgundy fastened an hereditary quarrel on him, and divided the great feudatories of France into the historic factions of Armagnac and Burgundian: so that thenceforward there could be nothing but that blind frenzy of civil war, which led to Agincourt and the English occupation. And at Agincourt Charles was caught up out of the strife to be a captive for a quartercentury, an idler growing old in idleness even while

his own party grew to be the national partybecame, indeed, the nation itself, brought to this late birth by the last and longest agony of feudalism. From his prison in England he might hear of victory or of defeat, of the capture of his own town by the English or of its delivery by Joan of Arc, of the crowning of an English king in Paris or of a French king's return to his capital. But for year after year and decade after decade he could hear little of ransom, and nothing at all of peace. During this spell of lost life it was that he made that series of ballades set in a framework of allegory, which, after M. Charles d'Héricault-who bases his opinion on certain MSS. bearing the note, 'Ici finit le livre que Monseigneur d'Orléans écrit dans sa prison,' and on many very obvious references to exile, to imprisonment, to the hopes of ransom-I have called his Poème de la Prison.

The two series of ballades and the setting in which they are placed form one work of art. Throughout, the elaborate machinery of allegorical abstraction, first employed in the Roman de la Rose, is most dexterously imitated and sustained. But what a difference in the informing spirit of the two poems! The Roman de la Rose, for all the irony of the second and longer part, does at least show the final consummation of Desire. And, again, the enemies that for a time debar the lovers from enjoyment, are far from subtle they are but Danger, Shame, Fear, and Slander, which every young heart must expect to face, and may hope to outwit or to overthrow. Now the later poem opens, likewise, with the glorious morning of a young life. But the brave heart is soon vestu de noir': he languishes in distress; the ship of 'Good News,' for which he desires a fair

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wind, never comes for all his calling; if Fortune turn her wheel in his favour, soon she turns it back ; and the Beloved of the allegory, who should save him, dies. So the hope is never achieved, and the high heart is conquered. Yet not by Danger nor Fear. The new and victorious enemies of manhood's endeavour are Melancholy and Weariness. They were first noted by Charles in his northern prison; but they are many since his time who have seen the sun of their life's promise stealing, unseen, to west with this disgrace.' Merencolie, Ennuy, and, at last, Nonchaloir, the apathy of a heart tout enrouillé-eaten with rust: that is his rendering of the Preacher's lament.

It is not alone that the cast of the allegory reappears, but also all the current forms of French mediæval verse are with it. And all are changed, are coloured from within by a charge of personal sorrow. 'Le premier jour du mois de May' comes round again and again: but it is an English May reflecting the troubled passion of his heart, and it is utterly unlike the May he remembers. It is

Troublé plain de vent et de pluie :

Estre souloit tout autrement

Ou temps qu'ay congneu en ma vie.'

In another ballade he writes of the 'Flower and the Leaf,' and chooses the leaf for his wear; but not on the moral grounds given in the innumerable versions of this medieval allegory. He chooses it because of his personal sorrow :

Who was this flower, the Beloved, the Princess, mistress, sole friend, of the poem? Some have said his wife, Bonne D'Armagnac, others France, or his liberty, or the memory of the women who had loved him when he was young. Yet, as I think, since the poem is but one sustained allegory, it is all these and more. It is the spirit of his youth: it is all of love, ambition, and hope, that was in him on the fatal morning of Agincourt. Anyhow, the Beloved dies. In Ballade LV. news reaches him : she is dangerously ill. In the next she recovers. In the next she is no more. He used to think, 'at the beginning of the year,' of what gift he could give his lady, 'la bien aimée,' and now death has laid her in the grave; so at last, in Ballade LXIX., he celebrates her obsequies :

'I made my lady's obsequies

Within the minster of desire,

And for her soul sad diriges

Were sung by Dule behind the choir;
Her sanctuary was one fire

With many cierges lit by grief;

And on her tomb in bold relief

Were painted tears, hemmed with a girth

Of jewelled letters all around

That read: Here lyeth in the ground

The treasure of all joys on earth.'

A slab of gold upon her lies

With saphirs set in golden wire;

Gems that are loyalty's devise,

And gold well known for joy's attire.

Both were the handmaids of her hire;

For joy and loyalty were chief

Among the virtues God was lief

To show in fashioning her birth,

That to his praise it might redound,
She being wonderfully found

The treasure of all joys on earth.

Say no word more. In ecstasies

My heart is raptured to expire,
Hearing the noble histories.

Of deeds she did. Whom all aspire
To set on high and ever higher.

God, binding up death's golden sheaf,
Drew her to heaven, in my belief,

So to adorn with rarer mirth
His paradise where saints stand round;
For joy there was in her renowned,
The treasure of all joys on earth.

ENVOY

Tears and laments are nothing worth,

All soon or late by death are bound;
And none for long hath kept and crowned
The treasure of all joys on earth.'

So henceforward he will worship Nonchaloir. So after his release he withdraws from the battle of life to write rondels with his friends, seeking to forget the old-time tragedy of his youth and the present misery of his native land. 'I could not believe,' Petrarch had written, that this was the same France I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated, houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude.' 1 That was in 1360; and eighty more years of invasion and civil broil had come and gone in the hapless land since then.

As we have seen, some seeds of the Renaissance were sown in Charles's parentage, but only to lie

1 Green, History of the English People, i. 438.