And yet he was "quick to learn"; a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers ; but there was a generous credulity in his heart.

And so did our Peasant show himself among us; 66 a soul like an Æolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody." And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and gauging alebarrels! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred years may pass on, before another such is given us to waste.

THOMAS CARLYLE: 1795

CHIVALRY OF THE BLACK PRINCE.

THE Prince of Wales, who had been carried away in pursuit of the flying enemy, finding the field entirely clear, had ordered a tent to be pitched, and was reposing himself after the toils of battle; inquiring still, with great anxiety, concerning the fate of the French monarch. He dispatched the Earl of Warwick to bring him intelligence; and that nobleman came happily in time to save the life of the captive prince, which was exposed to greater danger than it had been during the heat of the action. The English had taken him by violence from Morbec: the Gascons claimed the honour of detaining the royal prisoner; and some brutal soldiers, rather than yield the prize to their rivals, had threatened to put him to death. Warwick overawed both parties, and, approaching the King with great demonstrations of respect, offered to conduct him to the prince's tent.

Here commences the real and truly admirable heroism of Edward : for victories are vulgar things in comparison of that moderation and humanity displayed by a young prince of twenty-seven years of age, not yet cooled from the fury of battle, and elated by as extraordinary and as unexpected success as had ever crowned the arms of any commander. He came forth to meet the captive King with all the marks of regard and sympathy; administered comfort to him amidst his misfortunes; paid him the tribute of praise due

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to his valour; and ascribed his own victory merely to the blind chance of war, or to a superior Providence, which controls all the efforts of human force and prudence. The behaviour of John showed him not unworthy of this courteous treatment: his present abject fortune never made him forget a moment that he was a king: more touched by Edward's generosity than by his own calamities, he confessed that, notwithstanding his defeat and captivity, his honour was still unimpaired, and that, if he yielded the victory, it was at least gained by a prince of such consummate valour and humanity.

Edward ordered a repast to be prepared in his tent for the prisoner; and he himself served at the royal captive's table, as if he had been one of his retinue: he stood at the King's back during the meal; constantly refused to take a place at the table; and declared that, being a subject, he was too well acquainted with the distance between his own rank and that of royal majesty, to assume such freedom. All his father's pretensions to the crown of France were now buried in oblivion: John in captivity received the honours of a king, which were refused him when seated on the throne: his misfortunes, not his title, were respected; and the French prisoners, conquered by this elevation of mind more than by their late discomfiture, burst into tears of admiration; which were only checked by the reflection, that such genuine and unaltered heroism in an enemy must certainly in the issue prove but the more dangerous to their native country.

The Prince of Wales conducted his prisoner to Bordeaux; and, not being provided with forces so numerous as might enable him to push his present advantages, he concluded a two years' truce with France; which was also become requisite, that he might conduct the captive King with safety to England. He landed at Southwark, and was met by a great concourse of people of all ranks and stations. The prisoner was clad in royal apparel, and mounted on a white steed, distinguished by its size and beauty, and by the richness of its furniture. The conqueror rode by his side in meaner attire, and carried by a black palfrey. In this situation, more glorious than all the insolent parade of a Roman triumph, he passed through the streets of London, and presented the King of France to his father, who advanced to meet him, and received him with the same courtesy as if he had been a neighbouring potentate

that had voluntarily come to pay him a friendly visit. It is impossible, in reflecting on this noble conduct, not to perceive the advantages which resulted from the otherwise whimsical principles of chivalry, and which gave men, in those rude times, some superiority even over people of a more cultivated age and nation.

DAVID HUME: 1711-1776.

DECAY OF CHIVALRY.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. O, what a revolution and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she would ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

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But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glony of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in its

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appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the States of Asia, and possibly from those States which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be subdued by manners.

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide and parricide and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, is only common homicide; and, if the people are by any chance, or in any way, gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

EDMUND BURKE: 1728-1797.

MINISTERIAL PERVERSITY.

I THINK I can trace all the calamities of this country to the single source of our not having had steadily before our eyes a general, comprehensive, well-connected, and well-proportioned view of the whole of our dominions, and a just sense of their true bearings and relations. After all its reductions, the British empire is still vast and various. After all the reductions of the House of Commons, enough is yet left to furnish us, if we please, with means of showing to the world, that we deserve the superintendence of as large an empire as this kingdom ever held. But, if we make ourselves too little for the sphere of our duty; if, on the contrary, we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object; be well assured, that every thing about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimension of our minds. It is not a predilection to mean, sordid, home-bred cares, that will avert the consequences of a false estimation of our interest, or prevent the shameful dilapidation into which a great empire must fall, by mean reparations upon mighty ruins.

I confess I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country. There is now a bill in this House, appointing a rigid inquisition into the minutest detail of our offices at home. The collection of sixteen millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety, and credit have their reliance; the whole order of criminal jurisprudence, which holds together society itself,

has at no time obliged us to call forth such powers; no, nor any thing like them. There is not a principle of the law and Constitution of this country that is not subverted to favour the execution of that project.

And for what is all this apparatus of bustle and terror? Is it because any thing substantial is expected from it? No. The stir and bustle itself is the end proposed. The eye-servants of a shortsighted master will employ themselves, not on what is most essential to his affairs, but on what is nearest to his ken. Great difficulties have given a just value to economy; and our Minister of the day must be an economist, whatever it may cost us. But where is he to exert his talents? At home, to be sure; for where else can he obtain a profitable credit for their exertion? It is