Worldly and
monkish elements were presented in a curious confusion, which
the youth might disentangle for himself. If he had an
opportunity, on the one hand, of acquiring much hair-drawn
divinity and a taste for formal disputation, he was put in
the way of much gross and flaunting vice upon the other. The
lecture room of a scholastic doctor was sometimes under the
same roof with establishments of a very different and
peculiarly unedifying order. The students had extraordinary
privileges, which by all accounts they abused
extraordinarily. And while some condemned themselves to an
almost sepulchral regularity and seclusion, others fled the
schools, swaggered in the street "with their thumbs in their
girdle," passed the night in riot, and behaved themselves as
the worthy forerunners of Jehan Frollo in the romance of
NOTRE DAME DE PARIS. Villon tells us himself that he was
among the truants, but we hardly needed his avowal. The
burlesque erudition in which he sometimes indulged implies no
more than the merest smattering of knowledge; whereas his
acquaintance with blackguard haunts and industries could only
have been acquired by early and consistent impiety and
idleness. He passed his degrees, it is true; but some of us
who have been to modern universities will make their own
reflections on the value of the test.
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