xxiv
Preface, by way of Criticism.
reconciles us to the baseness of his attitude. Fat Peg (La Grosse Margot) is typical of much; it is a piece of experience that has nowhere else been rendered into literature; and a kind of gratitude for the author's plainness mingles, as we read, with the nausea proper to the business. I shall quote here a verse of an old students' song, worth laying side by side with Villon's startling ballade. This singer, also, had an unworthy mistress, but he did not choose to share the wages of dishonour; and it is thus, with both wit and pathos, that he laments her fall:—
Nunc plango florem
Ætatis teneræ
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire præcipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Cæcos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa.[1]
Ætatis teneræ
Nitidiorem
Veneris sidere:
Tunc columbinam
Mentis dulcedinem,
Nunc serpentinam
Amaritudinem.
Verbo rogantes
Removes ostio,
Munera dantes
Foves cubiculo,
Illos abire præcipis
A quibus nihil accipis,
Cæcos claudosque recipis,
Viros illustres decipis
Cum melle venenosa.[1]
- ↑ Gaudeamus: Carmina vagorum selecta. Leipsic. Trübner. 1879.
