the fantastic and extravagant, became a prominent feature of chivalry. The knight was accustomed to elect some fair one, as the object of his Platonic devotion, and to clothe her, in his enthusiastic imagination, with all ideal virtues and graces. In honor of her, he braved every hazard, and wrought all noble deeds; and to receive from her a smile, an approving word, or a simple coronet of flowers, was to him an exceeding great reward. Such views and sentiments were assiduously inculcated on the young candidate for knighthood, from his earliest years.

At fourteen, the page was usually advanced to the higher grade of Squire, and with the accompaniment of solemn religious rites, his short dagger was exchanged for the manly sword. The severity of his physical discipline was increased. The muscular strength and power of endurance, thus gradually formed, were such as, in these effeminate days, would seem incredible. We read of one fighting from noon till sunset, under the burning sun of Palestine, cased in thick iron, and another swimming against a torrent, armed cap-à-pie. The knights of the recent Eglintoun tournament, as we read, could not, without aid, mount on horse-back, when clad in that armor in which their prototypes were wont to mount without even putting foot in stirrup. The Squire, while he continued to perform many of the duties of the page, was also allowed to follow his lord to battle, and render various services there. In the ordinary course, he received the honor of knighthood at the age of twenty-one. For some great and gallant feat, he was often admitted into the order earlier, and on rare occasions, was made knight, with abridged ceremonies, even on the battle-field. But ordinarily his initiation took place at times of some great military ceremony, or on days consecrated by the church to some peculiar solemnity, as Easter, Pentecost, or Christmas. The ceremonial of his induction was of the most imposing description, and fitted to impress deeply the duties then voluntarily assumed. It was with similar views, that the German tribes were accustomed publicly to invest their young men with arms, on coming of age, as the Roman youth had, on the same occasion, been publicly clothed with the toga virilis.

Among the knight's vows at his induction, was an oath to protect, at his utmost risk, the cause of religion; to redress such wrongs, and extirpate such evil customs, as fell within his reach; to defend the widow and the orphan, and protect the female sex generally; to be loyal to his king, chief, or lord; and finally, to hold fast to the strictest purity, temperance, and integrity.

The first thing after receiving knighthood was usually a long journey into foreign countries, for the trial of his strength and skill in jousting with other knights; for perfecting himself in the requisitions of chivalry, by studying the demeanor of such celebrated champions as he met; and for fuelling his chivalrous ardor by the hearing of the famous exploits of the day, which, through these knightly rovers, were sounded over the world. The romantic literature of the middle ages, dealing so largely in giants, enchanters, and diablerie, owes not a little to this custom of knights wandering armed through Europe. It required no great stretch of imagination to find enchanted castles in the strong-holds of the robber-chiefs perched among the difficult

crags, or buried in the pathless forests; to see in these barbarous chiefs, giants delighting in the groans of helpless innocence shut up in prison by devilish magic; and in the knight, whose strong arm unbarred the dungeon, and set free the prisoned warrior, or lady bright, to behold a more than mortal prowess.

Another means of strengthening chivalrous sentiments, and of perfecting the knight in the use of arms, was the tournament, in its several kinds. After the descriptions of this exercise furnished by more than one writer of our day, we shall not, as we need not, attempt it. Suffice it to say, it was a scene most imposing and animating, and admirably suited to effect its aim. It was indeed, a rough sport (for rarely did one pass without loss of life,) but then silken plays would ill have matched an age of iron.

Such was the education of the knights; such the spirit of chivalry. Within the compass of the eleventh century, chivalry wrought its way through the several countries of Europe. Allied, as it was with the two leading principles of society, the church and the feudal system, one thing only was needed to enthrone it as the predominant power of the European world, and that was some great enterprise, of which it should be both the origin and the actuating soul. At the close of this century, such an enterprise did in fact offer itself. That Palestine, the scene of such transcendant manifestations of the divine power and purposes, should be an object of reverence to Christians, was natural enough. Accordingly, from the recognition of Christianity by Constantine, at the beginning of the fourth century, we find the subjects of the Roman empire esteeming it almost a sacred duty to visit the scenes of our Saviour's earthly career. While the Holy Land was a Roman province, this pilgrimage was tolerably easy and safe. But, about the middle of the seventh century, it passed beneath the sway of the Saracens. Still a considerable measure of tolerance was extended to Christian pilgrims, by several successive Califs, especially by Haroun al Raschid, the hero of oriental story, and contemporary of Charlemagne, between whom and himself there passed many acts of friendly courtesy, refreshing to witness in that barbarous age. But under the Califs of the Fatemite dynasty, commencing A. D., 878, the pilgrims began to suffer persecution, and with the subjugation of Palestine, A. D., 1065, by the Turks from Central Asia, the insults, extortions, and cruelties heaped on the pilgrims, made their journey extremely perilous and painful. The passion for pilgrimage was not, however, thus extinguished, and about this time, it was tenfold augmented by the misinterpretation of an Apocalyptic prophecy, whence it was inferred that the millenium of Christ's earthly reign being completed, the day of judgment was at hand. The survivors of this hazardous pilgrimage brought back accounts of gross insults cast on the Christian faith, and of savage cruelties inflicted both on the pilgrims and on the Christian inhabitants of Palestine. By these narratives all Europe came at length to be agitated, and a train was laid, needing but a fit hand to fire it, in order to explode in desolating wrath on the persecuting infidel.

The identical man for the crisis had been fashioned by the times, in Peter the Hermit, a native of Amiens, in Northern France. Of his early history little is known, save that, being first a soldier, he be

came afterward a priest, and finally a hermit, noted far and near for his sanctity. Like others, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and his vehement temper was wrought up to frenzy by witnessing Turkish sacrilege and cruelty. He conferred much with Simeon, the Christian patriarch of Jerusalem, and it was agreed between them that Peter should endeavor to stir up Europe to the redemption of the Holy City. Bearing letters from the patriarch to Pope Urban II. and the European princes, Peter sped back to Italy. The Pope entered warmly into his views, promised to second him with his whole influence, and despatched him through Europe to preach the deliverance of Palestine.

The Hermit's fervid eloquence was not poured forth in vain. The heart of Europe beat tumultuously with a sympathetic enthusiasm, and the loud and unanimous call of the nations was to arms. The Pope followed up the impulse thus communicated, by convoking two successive councils, and urging on the priests, princes, and nobles of Europe, with the whole power both of his office and his eloquence, the holy enterprise of redeeming the captivity of Zion. By these, the joint efforts of the Hermit and the Pope, a motion and direction were imparted to the enthusiasm of Europe, which issued in six successive crusades.

The history of these crusades neither our limits permit, nor our purpose requires us to relate. For a summary narrative, well executed, we would refer our readers to Mr. James. Their immediate result was to rescue the Holy Land, and to establish on the throne of David a dynasty of Christian kings. But only seventy years after Godfrey of Bouillon had grasped the sceptre of Jerusalem, the star of the splendid Saladin went up, and the cross veiled before the crescent. But though the labors and blood of millions were thus lavished in vain, as concerning their immediate object, the permanent deliverance of Palestine, yet it is not the less true, that the crusades were, on the whole, as beneficial in their effects, as worthy in their design. At the time of the preaching of the first crusade at the Council of Clermont, all Europe was in a state of convulsion. The feudal barons were universally at war, and mutual pillage, sack, and massacre, were the order of the day. The drawing off of their jarring energies into one great foreign enterprise, was followed by comparative domestic quiet, and some scope was afforded for the healing and illuminating ministrations of peace. The crusades, too, may be set down as causing the abolition of the worst features of the feudal system, and the more equal diffusion of liberty and property, since, in order to raise money for these expeditions, the barons had recourse to selling their estates, and kings to selling immunities to towns and corporations. The transportation of the immense multitudes of the crusaders from Europe to Asia, and the opening of a free intercourse between the east and west, communicated an impulse to ship-building, navigation, commerce, and the arts, to which we are indebted not a little for that immense commerce, which now girdles the globe, the physical science, which has explored so successfully the hiding-places of nature, and the arts, which have tamed the elements, and made them the bond-servants of man.

Again, the light of Roman civilization had not yet gone out in the

east, for a descendant of the Cæsars still held, though with an uncertain grasp, the sceptre of Constantinople. The crusading hosts, therefore, were brought in contact with modes of life, and social usages, far more refined and polished than their own. Some germs of civility were thus plucked from the very bosom of war, and being transplanted to Europe, there took root and sprang up, and contributed not a little to the furtherance of social improvement.

And then, as to the justice of the crusading wars, which it is fashionable to decry, and as to their ostensible grounds, which it is customary to pronounce altogether frivolous, it ought to be said plainly, that if ever wars are justifiable, these were so; and if ever the motives to war are praiseworthy, the motives to these deserve the title. The spirit which arrayed Europe against Asia, was compassion for brethren cruelly oppressed, and the object aimed at was to wrest from a barbarous race a territory which they held only by the right of the sword, and to roll back from Europe the encroaching tide of aggression, by a people whose invariable alternatives to the conquered were the Koran, bondage, or death. Compare the spirit and the avowed grounds of that thirty years' war, in which thousands died by fraternal hands to determine whether the white or the red rose should bloom on the brow of English royalty, or of that war, in which millions were sacrificed to decide whether a disgusting Bourbon, or a selfish Bonaparte, should wear the diadem of France; with the spirit and grounds of a war, to which men were urged by pity for the woes, and indignation at the wrongs, of their brethren; by the desire to secure for Christian piety the opportunity to pour itself out on the very spot sanctified by the footsteps of the Redeemer; make this comparison, and then pronounce whether the grounds of the great conflicts of the comparatively civilized fifteenth, and the vauntingly illuminated nineteenth centuries, do not, in the nobleness and elevation, fall far beneath those of the crusading wars of the benighted eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. But, in the crusades, we behold the culmination of chivalry. Its course thenceforward was one of decline. It had fulfilled its mission, and like all outward vehicles of human energy, must needs go down to its dust.

The first in date among the causes that wrought its downfall, was the substitution of worldly rewards for that simple glory which was the knight's original inspiration. Princes naturally coveted the aid of a body so potent as the knighthood, and to secure it, proposed external honors and motives, wholly at variance with the primitive spirit of chivalry. Thus metamorphosed into a political engine, chivalry fared as religion has ever done, when allied with the state; it lost its simplicity and its healthful energies.

Again the invention of gunpowder in the fourteenth century so revolutionized the art of war, as to render nought all knightly powers. For what availed individual bravery, and strength, and skill in arms, when the cowardly manikin, whose trembling finger could scarce pull his trigger, was an overmatch for Arthur Pendragon's self, with excalibar and casing steel?

And, finally, the development of civilization, by reducing to order the warring elements of society, and strengthening the hands of government and law, withdrew the very props on which the insti

tution of chivalry leaned. The functions of the knight were assumed by the civil magistrate, and the chastisement of wrong-doers, alas, for romance! was transferred to the hands of sheriff, jailor and hangman. And so chivalry, having fulfilled its allotment, went down into the cemetery of departed things:

"The knights are dust,

Their good swords rust,

Their souls are with the saints, we trust.'

It now remains only to trace the relation of chivalry and of the age in which it flourished, to modern civilization. It is the custom to speak of the middle ages, as times of barbarism unredeemed, presenting to the historical student little else than one solid mass of gloom. With this custom we cannot fall in. Be they called ages of darkness, but it was the darkness of a cloud burdened with the fertilizing treasures of the rain; the darkness of a current floating a bark freighted with all precious things. It ili beseems the lusty summer and foodful autumn to slur the barren winter and the immature spring. And, in the middle ages, what do we behold, but the winter and the spring, that preceded and prepared our riper time? A season when Nature was carrying on her mysterious processes in secret, and her central fire was burning and working toward the surface, there finally to break out in the green exuberance that gladdens our sight? The middle ages were not, indeed, marked by the diffusion and equalization of intelligence, that characterize our day. But its firmament was by no means bare of luminaries, as is avouched by the names of Charlemagne and Alfred, of Abelard and Aquinas, of Roger Bacon and Wickliff, and of Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, and Chaucer. Such men were no minims in the world of genius and learning, nor did the contemporaries of such stumble in utter darkness. In truth, of all those profuse and magnificent growths in science, literature and art, which are the enjoyment and glory of our time, there is scarce one for the planting of which we are not indebted to the middle ages. And therefore do we protest against the imputation of sheer barbarism, which it is customary to stamp upon them.

Milton has rendered a noble testimony to the influence of their literature, by reckoning it among the means of nourishing within him that sublime virtue which made him a glory to humanity. 'I betook myself,' says he, among those lofty fables and romances, which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from thence had in renown all over christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend, at the expense of his best blood, or of his life, if it so befel him, the honor and chastity of virgin or matron, from whence even then I learned what a noble virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so many worthies, by such a dear adventure of themselves, had sworn. So that these books proved to me so many incitements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue.'

We shall dismiss our subject with a brief consideration of the alleged defects of the institution of chivalry, and of the benefits it unquestionably conferred upon the world.

It has been one charge against chivalry, that it was warlike, and ever