Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
into good humour. ' Tousjours vieil synge est des-
plaisant' It is not the old jester who receives most
recognition at a tavern party, but the young fellow,
fresh and handsome, who knows the new slang, and
carries off his vice with a certain air. Of this, as a
tavern jester himself, he would be pointedly con-
scious. As for the women with whom he was best
acquainted, his reflections on their old age, in all
their harrowing pathos, shall remain in the original
for me. Horace has disgraced himself to something
the same tune ; but what Horace throws out with an
ill-favoured laugh, Villon dwells on with an almost
maudlin whimper.
It is in death that he finds his truest inspiration ;
in the swift and sorrowful change that overtakes
beauty ; in the strange revolution by which great
fortunes and renowns are diminished to a handful of
churchyard dust ; and in the utter passing away of
what was once loveable and mighty. It is in this
that the mixed texture of his thought enables him
to reach such poignant and terrible effects, and to
enhance pity with ridicule, like a man cutting capers
to a funeral march. It is in this also that he rises
out of himself into the higher spheres of art. So, in
the ballade by which he is best known, he rings the
changes on names that once stood for beautiful and
queenly women, and are now no more than letters
and a legend. 'Where are the snows of yester year ?'
runs the burden. And so, in another not so famous,
he passes in review the different degrees of bygone
men, from the holy Apostles and the golden Emperor
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