were very useful, no doubt, especially where heavy armour had to be carried, but once on the horse’s back the gallant steed supplied the muscles.  In an English hunting-field many a doddering old man, when he is once firmly seated in his familiar saddle, can give points to the youngsters at the game.  So it was among the knights, and those who had outlived all else could still carry to the wars their wiliness, their experience with arms, and, above all, their cool and undaunted courage.

Beneath his varnish of chivalry, it cannot be gainsayed that the knight was often a bloody and ferocious barbarian.  There was little quarter in his wars, save when a ransom might be claimed.  But with all his savagery, he was a light-hearted creature, like a formidable boy playing a dreadful game.  He was true also to his own curious code, and, so far as his own class went, his feelings were genial and sympathetic, even in warfare.  There was no personal feeling or bitterness as there might be now in a war between Frenchmen and Germans.  On the contrary, the opponents were very softspoken and polite to each other.  “Is there any small vow of which I may relieve you?” “Would you desire to attempt some small deed of arms upon me?” And in the midst of a fight they would stop for a breather, and converse amicably the while, with many compliments upon each other’s prowess.  When Seaton the Scotsman had exchanged as many blows as he wished with a company of French knights, he said, “Thank you, gentlemen, thank you!” and galloped away.  An English knight made a vow, “for his own advancement and the exaltation of his lady,” that he would ride into the hostile city of Paris, and touch with his lance the inner barrier.  The whole story is most characteristic of the times.  As he galloped up, the French knights around the barrier, seeing that he was under vow, made no attack upon him, and called out to him that he had carried himself well.  As he returned, however, there stood an unmannerly butcher with a pole-axe upon the side-walk, who struck him as he passed, and killed him.  Here ends the chronicler; but I have not the least doubt that the butcher had a very evil time at the hands of the French knights, who would not stand by and see one of their own order, even if he were an enemy, meet so plebeian an end.

De Comines, as a chronicler, is less quaint and more conventional than Froissart, but the writer of romance can dig plenty of stones out of that quarry for the use of his own little building.  Of course Quentin Durward has come bodily out of the pages of De Comines.  The whole history of Louis XI. and his relations with Charles the Bold, the strange life at Plessis-le-Tours, the plebeian courtiers, the barber and the hangman, the astrologers, the alternations of savage cruelty and of slavish superstition—­it is all set forth here.  One would imagine that such a monarch was unique, that such a mixture of strange qualities and monstrous crimes could never be matched, and yet