and with no sign in it of his having lived later than the date (1461) of the Grand testament. It would be easy to dismiss these Rabelaisian mentions of Villon as mere humorous inventions, if it were not that the author of Pantagruel was born almost soon enough to have actually seen Villon if he had lived to anything that could be called old age, that he almost certainly must have known men who had known Villon, and that the poet undoubtedly spent much time in Rabelais's own country on the banks of the lower Loire.
The obscurity, the unhappiness and the evil repute of Villon's life would not be in themselves a reason for the minute investigation to which the events of that life have been subjected, and the result of which has been summed up here. But his poetical work, scanty as the certainly genuine part of it is, is of such extraordinary quality, and marks such an epoch in the history of European literature, that he has been at all times an interesting figure, and, like all very interesting figures, has been often praised for qualities quite other than those which he really possessed. Boileau's famous verses, in which Villon is extolled for having first known how to smooth out the confused art of the old romancers, are indeed a prodigy of blundering or ignorance or both. As far as art or the technical part of poetry goes, Villon made not the slightest advance on his predecessors, nor stood in any way in front of such contemporaries as his patron Charles d'Orléans. His two Testaments (so called by the application to them of a regular class-name of medieval poetry and consisting of burlesque legacies to his acquaintances) are made up of eight-line stanzas of eight-syllables verses, varied in the case of the Grand testament by the insertion of ballades and rondeaux of very great beauty and interest, but not formally different in any way from poems of the same kind for more than a century past. What really distinguishes Villon is the intenser quality of his poetical feeling and expression, and what is perhaps arrogantly called the modern character of his subjects and thought. Medieval poetry, with rare exceptions, and, with exceptions not quite so rare, classical poetry, are distinguished by their lack of what is now called the personal note. In Villon this note sounds, struck with singular force and skill. Again, the simple joy of living which distinguishes both periods—the medieval, despite a common opinion, scarcely less than the ancient—has disappeared. Even the riot and rollicking of his earlier days are mentioned with far less relish of remembrance than sense of their vanity. This sense of vanity, indeed, not of the merely religious, but of the purely mundane and even half-pagan kind, is Villon's most prominent characteristic. It tinges his narrative, despite its burlesque bequests, all through; it is the very keynote of his most famous and beautiful piece, the Ballade des dames du temps jadis, with its refrain, “Mais où sont les neiges d'antan ?” as well as of his most daring piece of realism, the other ballade of La Grosse Margot, with its burden of hopeless entanglement in shameless vice. It is nowhere more clearly sounded than in the piece which ranks with these two at the head of his work, the Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière, in which a woman, once young and beautiful, now old and withered, laments her lost charms. So it is almost throughout his poems, including the grim Ballade des pendus, and hardly excluding the very beautiful Ballade pour sa mère, with its description of sincere and humble piety. It is in the profound melancholy which the dominance of this note has thrown over Villon's work, and in the suitableness of that melancholy to the temper of all generations since, that his charm and power have consisted, though it is difficult to conceive any time at which his poetical merit could be ignored.
His certainly genuine poems consist of the two Testaments with their codicil (the latter containing the Ballade des pendus, or more properly Épitaphe en forme de ballade, and some other pieces of a similarly grim humour), a few miscellaneous poems, chiefly ballades, and an extraordinary collection (called Le Jargon ou jobelin) of poems in argot, the greater part of which is now totally unintelligible, if, which may perhaps be doubted, it ever was otherwise. Besides these, several poems of no inconsiderable interest are usually printed with Villon's works, though they are certainly, or almost certainly, not his. The chief are Les Repues Franches, a curious series of verse stories of cheating tavern-keepers, &c., having some resemblance to those told of George Peele, but of a broader and coarser humour. These, though in many cases “common form” of the broader tale-kind, are not much later than his time, and evidence to reputation if not to fact. Another of these spurious pieces is the extremely amusing monologue of the Franc Archier de Bagnolet, in which one of the newly constituted archers or regularly trained and paid soldiery, who were extremely unpopular in France, is made to expose his own poltroonery. The third most important piece of this kind is the Dialogue de Mallepaye et de Baillevent, a dramatic conversation between two penniless spendthrifts, which is not without merit. These poems, however, were never attributed to Villon or printed with his works till far into the 16th century.
It has been said that the first dated edition of Villon is of 1489, though some have held one or more than one undated copy to be still earlier. Between the first, whenever it was, and 1542 there were very numerous editions, the most famous being that (1533) of Clément Marot, one of whose most honourable distinctions is the care he took of his poetical predecessors. The Pléiade movement and the classicizing of the grand siècle put Villon rather out of favour, and he was not again reprinted till early in the 18th century, when he attracted the attention of students of old French like Le Duchat, Bernard de la Monnoye and Prosper Marchand. The first critical edition in the modern sense—that is to say, an edition founded on MSS. (of which there are in Villon's case several, chiefly at Paris and Stockholm)—was that of the Abbé J. H. R. Prompsault in 1832. The next was that of the “Bibliophile Jacob” (P. Lacroix) in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne (Paris, 1854). The standard edition is Œuvres complètes de François Villon, by M. Auguste Longnon (1892). This contains copies of the documents on which the story of Villon's life is based, and a bibliography. The late M. Marcel Schwob discovered new documents relating to the poet, but died before he could complete his work, which was posthumously published in 1905. See also A. Campaux, F. Villon, sa vie et ses œuvres (1859); A. Longnon, Étude biographique (1877); and especially G. Paris, François Villon (1901), a book of the first merit. A complete translation of Villon was written by Mr John Payne (1878) for the Villon Society. There are also translations of individual poems in Mr Andrew Lang's Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872) and in the works of D. G. Rossetti and Mr Swinburne. Among critical studies of Villon may be mentioned those by Sainte-Beuve in the Causeries du lundi, vol. xiv., by Théophile Gautier in Grotesques, and by R. L. Stevenson in his Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882). An unedited ballad by Villon, with another by an unknown poet of the same date, was published by W. G. C. Bijvanck (1891) as Un poète inconnu. M. Pierre d'Alheim published (1892) an edition of Le Jargon with a translation into ordinary French. (G. Sa.)
VILNA, or Wilno, a Lithuanian government of West Russia, having the Polish government of Suwalki on the W., Kovno and Vitebsk on the N., and Minsk and Grodno on the E. and S. Area, 16,176 sq. m.; pop. (1906 estimate) 1,806,300. Vilna lies on the broad marshy swelling, dotted with lakes, which separates Poland from the province of East Prussia and stretches E.N.E. towards the Valdai Plateau.
Its highest parts are a little more than 1000 ft. above sea-level. On its western and eastern boundaries it is deeply trenched by the valleys of the Niemen and the S. Dvina. It is chiefly built up of Lower Tertiary deposits, but in the north Devonian sandstones appear on the surface. The Tertiary deposits consist of Eocene clay, slates, sandstones, limestones and chalk, with gypsum, and are partly of marine and partly of terrene origin. The whole is overlain with thick layers of Glacial boulder clay and post-Glacial deposits, containing remains of the mammoth and other extinct mammals. Interesting discoveries of Neolithic implements, especially of polished stone, and of implements belonging to the Bronze Age and the early years of the Christian epoch, have been made. Numerous lakes and marshes, partly covered with forests, and scarcely passable except when frozen, as well as wet meadowland, occupy a large area in the centre of the government. The Niemen, which flows along the southern and western borders for more than 200 m., is the chief artery of trade, and its importance in this respect is enhanced by its tributary the Viliya, which flows west for more than 200 m. through the central parts of Vilna, receiving many affluents on its course. Among the tributaries of the Niemen is the Berezina, which acquired renown during Napoleon's retreat in 1812; it flows in a marshy valley in the south-east. The S. Dvina for 50 m. of its course separates Vilna from Vitebsk. The climate of the government is only slightly tempered by its proximity to the Baltic Sea (January, 21° 8; July, 64° 5); the average temperature at the town of Vilna is only 43° 5. But in winter the thermometer descends very low, a minimum of -30° F. having been observed. The flora and fauna are intermediate between those of Poland and middle Russia.
The government is divided into seven districts, the chief towns of which are Vilna, Vileiki, Disna, Lida, Oshmyany, Zventsyany and Troki.
VILNA, or Wilno, a town of Russia, capital of the government of the same name, 436 m. S.S.W. of St Petersburg, at the intersection of the railways from St Petersburg to Warsaw and from Libau to the mouth of the Don. Pop. (1883) 93,760; (1900) 162,633. With its suburbs Antokol, Lukishki, Pogulyanka and Sarechye, it stands on and around a knot of hills (2450 ft.) at the confluence of the Vileika with the Viliya. Its streets are in part narrow and not very clean; but Vilna is an old town, rich in historical associations. Its imperial palace, and the cathedral of St Stanislaus (1387, restored 1801), containing the silver sarcophagus of St Casimir and the tomb of Prince Vitoft, are fine buildings. There is a second cathedral, that of St Nicholas, built in 1596–1604; also several churches dating
