156
times,” yet possessed virtues and characteristics for which
these enlightened days would be all the better. If Burke’s
crushingly sarcastic declaration, that the age of chivalry
is gone, be true, it will be well for us all to travel some-
times in the company of those denizens of the dark ages,
who were enlightened enough to hold that truth before
God, and woman’s honour, were to be upheld at any cost.
“The Talisman,” and “The Betrothed,” carry us back to
the period of the Crusades. We are born in imagination
to the times of Gregory VII. and Urban II., and the
first beginning of that great movement, half of piety,
half of selfish expediency, which sent men like Godfrey
of Bouillon, Frederic Barbarossa, Philip of France,
Richard of England, and chivalrous St. Louis, to spend
their time and money, and often their health and life, in
ill-managed and mistaken expeditions. No one was better
qualified than Scott to treat of the Crusaders; his intimate
acquaintance with the old romance ballads, his anti-
quarian and medieval lore joined to the spirit of poetry
which animated him, fitted him to become the most
perfect guide through the tournaments, battles, and sieges
of that warlike period. In his company the history of the
Crusaders shows us no mere fossil remains of a bygone age,
we are not walking through a museum of dead and gone
antiquities, but all is life and motion; we hear the
armour clash and see the plumes wave as Kenneth of
Scotland, or Conrad of Montserrat, or Richard Ceeur de
Lion pass by; life-like and interesting as the descriptions
of Gibbon and Hallam and our other great medixyal
historians may be, they have not the same power of
calling these mailed heroes from their tombs and invest-
ing them with life as the pages of Scott. We admit at
once that the great novelist is not a safe guide to history,
we do not expect to obtain technical accuracy and stern
fact in a romance, but we may safely affirm, from our own
experience and that of many others, that the first childish
interest in history, and the earliest and most enduring
acquaintance with the great events of former times, are
derived from the historical novels of Walter Scott. It is
very hard for us to give up the heroes of our unsophisti-
cated days, and deprive them of the nimbus of splendour
with which we had invested them. To learn, for instance,
that Richard of the lion heart, whom we admire so much
in the pages of “The Talisman” and “ Ivanhoe,” was
“a blood-thirsty savage,” is a sore blow to us; yet the
| author who makes this terrible declaration is an historian
| whom we may not lightly dispute, though we may fairly
quarrel with him for dispelling many a pleasant illusion;
| we used to believe in William Wallace and Robert Bruce,
but the same ruthless iconoclast has dashed down the
cherished images, and made out the heroes of Scottish
history to be little better than criminals. To return,
| however, to our childish hero, King Richard; we cannot
but love and admire him, although our reverence is a
little mixed with fear, when we read of his defying the
Austrian chivalry and hurling its champion from beside
the standard on St. George’s Mount; or when he rides in
| his sable armour into the memorable lists at Ashby, and
_ shows by his prowess how ill-chosen was his sobriquet of
| Le noir Fainéant.
| It is hard, after this, to read what Sismondi affirms,
that “ Richard was a bad father, a bad son, a bad brother,
a bad husband, and a bad king, but the prince and
flower of knights errant.” It is some comfort to re-

member that it was in his last character that Scott |

J

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

describes him, and that we may learn a lesson of true
chivalrous courage and manly virtue from the knight
errant, however much we may have to deplore in the
king. Guizot says of Richard that “he was a feudal
king par excellence, in other words, the most daring,
reckless, passionate, most brutal and most heroic adven-
turer of the middle ages.” Another writer says, “he
was the creation and impersonation of his own age;” and
Matthew Paris, speaking of his death, declares “cum
quo, multorum judicio, decus et honor militie pariter
sepulta sunt.” In spite, however, of all the hard things
said about him, the lion-hearted king of Scott’s novels
will ever be a friend of the young, and will pleasantly
insinuate himself into their notice, instead of appearing
as their natural enemy in the pages of some modern Mrs.
Trimmer. We love to recall him here as “the yellow-
haired king of the west,” as his eastern foes styled him,
to think of him as a troubadour and a brave gentleman,
although we are forced to admit the truth of the com-
parison instituted betweeen Richard and Saladin, that
“the one was a bad Christian, the other a good heathen.”
King Johnis painted in “Ivanhoe” very truthfully; we can
quite indorse the verdict of his having been “a braggart,
a coward, at once a knave and a hair-brained coxcomb.”
Time and space would fail us to ramble hand in hand
with the fair company of “The Talisman,’ “The
Betrothed,” and “Ivanhoe,” through the sands of.
Palestine and the green woods of England, when—

In summer when the shawes be shene,

And leaves be large and long,

It is full merry in fair forést

To hear the fowlé’s song.

To see the deer draw to the dale,
And leave the hillés hee (high),

And shadow them in the leyés green,
Under the greenwood tree,

Yet it is very tempting to ride forth with the disin-
herited knight, pure, noble gentleman, with trembling
old Isaak, a Shylock in his love for his daughter and
his ducats, but infinitely more noble and generous; to
join that merry company “under the greenwood tree,”
and mingle in the boisterous fun of sturdy Friar Tuck,
the brave, manly talk of Robin Hood (who, outlaw as he
was, was a very different kind of man from the fashionable
and seductive villain of the modern novel, without one
redeeming point in his character). It is very pleasant to
listen to honest Wamba’s wit and folly, and to see him
playing the hero on occasion, as when the Black Knight
was beset in the forest; or again when he gave his liberty
and his chance of life for his master’s sake in the dungeon
at Torquilstone. We may not indeed linger among these
medizval scenes of chivalry, but before leaving them we
would earnestly advise our readers to transfer their in-
terest from the brutal force and gentlemanly cruelty of
heroes of “the cool captain” school, and from heroines
with impossible-coloured hair and very confused notions
of morality, to such brave, honest, and noble men and
women as those whom Scott paints in his chivalrous ro-
mances of the middle ages. We have not yet taken leave
of mediwvalism, however; “ Quentin Durward,” and “ Anne
of Geierstein,” carry us back to the period before the re-
vival of learning, the Reformation, and one or two other
notable events, marked a new era in history. In “ Quentin
Durward” we have an historical romance founded on the
quaint history of his time recorded in the memoirs of