Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/19

Rh sound of this personal and subjective note, — Villon, with his excellent differences from the pastoral poets of the day, forty feeding like one, his piercingly individual tone, his reckless egotism. When, however, we ask what Englishman first shows the imperious mood of the artist, we are asking a parlous question indeed. We find the thing, with all its pomp, in Shakspere's sonnets, and even in his plays. We find it, with a dramatic mask thinner than usual, in some verses by Tom Nash, where in startling felicity of phrase, — as well as in appeals to the famous dead, we note a parallel to Villon's best-known ballade. But we find it a century earlier in the verses of William Dunbar, who was the first of our poets to see his own work in that mightiest of aids to subjectivity, printer's ink ; and perhaps we shall not err if we assume that Dunbar forms a parallel to Villon in this as in many other respects,