Page:Compromises (Repplier).djvu/173

 Rh and dalliance, and the glory of youth and spring. The fact that Boileau ignored and despised their song, and taught his obedient followers to ignore and despise it also, cannot silence those early notes. When he descended frigidly to his grave, Euterpe tucked up her loosened hair, and sandalled her bare white feet, and girdled her disordered robes into decent folds. Perhaps it was high time for these reforms. Nothing is less seductive in middle age than the careless gayety of youth. But once France was young, and Euterpe a slip of a girl, and no grim shadow of that classic urn rested on the golden days when Aucassin—model of defiant and conquering lovers—followed Nicolette into the deep, mysterious woods.

sang Charles d' Orléans, embodying in three lines the whole history of man and song. Youth was lusty and folly riotous when Ronsard's mistress woke in the morning, and found Apollo waiting patiently to fill his quiver with arrows from her eyes; or when Jacques Tahureau