actions of life. All the graces and virtues which we shall have occasion to witness hereafter, as illustrating the chivalrous character, proceeded from this principle. It was religion which induced many of the feudal lords to give liberty to their vassals. From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a vast number of acts remain in Rymer, beginning, "as from the first, God made all men free, we believe that it will be an act of piety, and meritorious be→ fore God, to deliver such persons as are subject to us from villainage. Know then, that we have set free these persons, and their children, to all posterity." Thus Charlemagne wrote to Athilhard, archbishop of Canterbury, in behalf of some exiles, entreating him to intercede with King Offa; and he concludes his letter, saying, "But I trust to the goodness of my brother, if you strongly intercede for them, that he will receive them kindly for love of us, or rather for the love of Christ *." "They loved men as in God, men, not as sons, or fathers, or brethren, but as ment." Honour, in all its fulness, was contained in their religion. Turenne, before his con❤ version, would not accept the office of constable of France from conscience. After his conversion, he refused it from a principle of honour. Petrarch speaks of being a Catholic as binding him to evince every virtue ‡. "Quid enim prodest si quis Catholice credat et gentiliter vivat?" said a father. Ereticus, a youth, remained for a long time in the school of Zeno. On his return, his father asked him what wisdom he had learned? The boy re→ plied, that he would shew him by the thing itself. The father, in a rage, inflicted stripes, which he bore patiently and with gentleness, and then said, "This is what I have learned, to bear the anger of my father §." So it was with the youth of Christian chivalry. They did not learn gestures and words, but how to bear and suffer. "Quid tam indecorum," said St. Bernard, "maxime adolescenti quam ostentatio sanctitatis || !" St. Francis Borgia, happen. ing to leave Valladolid very late one night, in the midst of a great fall of snow, attended by a bitter wind, to go to Simangues, where was the house of the noviciate; he ar Turner's Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, I. 404. + S. August. de vera religione. § Ælian Var. Hist. IX. 33. Famil. Epist. II. 1. IV. 6. In Cantica, Serm. 86. rived there at a time when the novices were asleep, and aš the gate was at a great distance from the main building, he had to remain in the deep snow and wind, knocking in vain for a long time, till at length being heard, and the novices opening the gates, and expressing their grief at having kept him in such suffering, the saint assured them that it was all well. The occasion was not too trifling for his religion to be in action. What sublime piety and humanity were evinced in the three secret prayers which King Charles VII. of France made in the chapel of Loches on All-Saints' day, of which the Maid of Orleans reminded him? What pure and effective morality, accompanying sublime devotion, was taught in the Paradise of the Soul by Albert the Great, bishop of Reynsburch, in 1234. The profound piety of Stanislaus I., king of Poland, operated in making him forgive the treacherous assassins who attempted to murder him in the forest as he went to perform his devotions in the abbey of Graventhal. So poor Crillon declared that he pardoned the Huguenot soldier who had tried to assassinate him, out of obedience to the commands of his religion. "Rends grace à ma religion qui m'ordonne de pardonner." Mark what is said in l'Arbre des Batailles; "If I take a mad Englishman prisoner, I must use him gently as a good Christian, and take care of his health." "Car non obstant qu'il soit Anglois toutesfois il est nostre frere en Jesu Christ comme saint pol le dit et recite en lune de ses epistres +." Again, suppose an English scholar at Paris falls sick, and writes to his father in England, to say that he is sick to death. "Adonc quant le pere voit les lettres il nest pas bien aise il fait tant par ses journees quil arrive en la cite de Paris, pour venir visiter et veoir son fils ainsi comme nature de le requiert. A knight at Paris knows him and takes him prisoner. Ought he so to do? No, he decides. Et la raison est telle, car statut ne guerre raisonnablement ne peut tollir les drois de nature ne le contredire. Et le pere comme vous savez assez est tenu de visiter son fils en telle necessite de maladie celui ne seroit pas homme naturel ne vray humain qui le yroit prendre et arrester prisonnier." Again, ought a clerk to kill a robber that would Chronique de la Pucelle d'Orleans, 9. pere + Chap. LXXXII. take away his goods? Surely not. "Car le scripture dit: Myeulx vault apres la cotte laisser la chappe et les biens vils et transitoires que mettre la main sur la creature de Dieu." What will our humane enlightened setters of spring-guns, in the nineteenth century, to preserve their apples, say to this? It was in the dark ages, but we have changed all that. Mark the humanity of Louis IX. when returning from Asia, and in danger of shipwreck off the island of Cyprus. The vessel had struck upon a sand bank, and the pilots were persuading the king to leave it with the royal family, but the heroic charity, the Christian spirit of the king refused to countenance a measure which would dishearten and endanger the other passengers. "II n'y a personne céans," said he, "qui n'aime autant son corps comme je fais le mien; si une fois je descends, ils descendront aussi, et de long-temps ne reverront leur pays; j'aime mieux mettre moi, la reine et mes enfants en la main de Dieu, que de faire tel dommage à un si grand peuple comme il y a céans." The discipline and ceremonial of the church tended to sweeten the temper, and to accustom men to the beauties of humanity: they taught men condescension to inferiors, and even respectful and courteous manners. In proces sions, boys of the first nobility walked with the other youth, and the daughters of princely houses were not distinguished from the children of the poor. The excellent and religious King Louis XVI. shewed his son the parish register of his baptism, and desired him to remark how his name was inserted among the names of the poor, in the same line, and without distinction, as he would have to appear in person before the throne of God. The Church directed her ministers to shew great reverence to each other as they attended at the altar. Hence, no doubt, Dante represents such expressions as not unworthy of the courts of Heaven, when, after addressing the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, with great ceremony, he says, "O slight respect of man's nobility! I never shall account it marvellous That our infirm affection here below Thou mov'st to boasting; when I could not choose E'en in that region of unwarp'd desire In heaven itself, but make my vaunt in thee *." *Paradise, XVI." Which Milton seems to have remembered when Satan to Uriel, The imitative disposition of youth would consequently be modelled to a gracious and respectful carriage towards all persons. Thus young Bignon, while at college, is said to have lived with his companions as if they had been sons of kings. In general it may be affirmed, that men in these ages adhered much more closely to nature than those who, in after time, adopted a new philosophy.. If Giordano Bruno had written nothing more contrary to the religion of the Church than these lines, "Si cum naturâ sapio et sub numine he would never have been ranked by her in the list of those who erred. This opens a path for curious enquiry, which, after one suggestion, I shall leave the reader to fol. low at his leisure. It is well known that a distinguishing characteristic of every thing belonging to the early and middle ages of Christianity, is the picturesque. Those who now struggle to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses, of this period. As soon as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change with their religion, for architects had no longer to provide for the love of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in apartments with the lancet casement. They were not to study duration and solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the reach of the * Paradise Lost, III, senses, and who wished to believe that there was nothing in the world but what they saw and touched. When money was to be the recognized object of even poetic ambition, no marvel that merchants required a quicker communication by more artificial roads, that citizens were eager to pull down gates and impending studies of Friar Bacon's and Crosses, and whatever might impede the operation of commerce; as men no longer made vows of poverty, or rather as poverty became a disgrace, every object was to affect that neat glaring varnished surface of wealth which is so intractable to the pencil. The revival of the epicurean philosophy which Cicero thought so unfavourable to eloquence *, must quickly appear in the furniture, in the whole plan, and form of life; that of the cynic in the shew of outward hideousness in dress, which purposely sets grace and gentleness at defiance, in the very gait and countenance of men. This was all na tural and unavoidable; and so completely is it beyond the skill of the painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the moderns, after all their pains, for the moderns take great pains to embody their conceptions, such as they are, and they spare no money in the cause; and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian an tiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; men will lose the sense as well as objects to at tract it; for when children are taught in Infant Schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to study political economy before they have heard of the Red-cross Knight, or the Wild Hunter, the manners and taste of such an age will smother the sparks of nature, "et opinioni confir matæ natura ipsa cedat t." Yet, notwithstanding, we might be led, from a forgetfulness of the oneness of wisdom and of beauty, and from an unwillingness to cling to the mere bones of antiquity, and from hearing the incessant praises which the moderns pass on their own pro ductions and tastes, to concede at last that a love for the picturesque might be a false, or only an artificial passion; but when we find that it is invited by every work of nature, for no one competent to judge of beauty will deny * Brutus, 35. + Cicero, Tuscul. III. 2. |