SOURCE: "François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker," in The Cornhill Magazine, Vol. XXXVI, No. 212, August, 1877, pp. 215-34.

Stevenson was a Scottish novelist and poet. His novels Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) were considered popular literary classics upon publication and firmly established his reputation as an inventive stylist and riveting storyteller. Stevenson is also noted for his understanding of youth, which is evident both in his early "boy's novels," as they were known, and in his much-loved A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). In the following excerpt, Stevenson probes Villon's biography and verse, and finds him a disreputable and insecure scoundrel and poet.

Perhaps one of the most curious revolutions in literary history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon, only last winter, on the obscure existence of François Villon [in Etude Biographique sur François Villon]. His book is not remarkable...