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ages it had ruled; controlling, together with the inferior classes which it had been purposely framed to curb, the whole hierarchy of nobles,-nay, the clergy themselves, at that epoch the lawgivers of the world.

No man that lived during the fourteenth century, ever had such opportunities, as the accident of his birth, his varied pursuits and motley fortunes, threw in the way of Froissart, not to study that system,-(abstract meditations were neither his habit, nor congenial to the cast of his mind)—but to view and depict his contemporaries in all the various relations of political, civil, and private life. Born of humble parents (as we infer since he began the study of heraldry, intending it as a profession) he was no stranger, however, to the interests, opinions, and manners of those whom we would now term the middle classes. He has sketched, with inimitable art, the characteristic traits of the Flemish burghers, a race whose posterity in the Hanseatic cities, and in the Netherlands, present to this day family features proving the early talent of Flemish artists for perfect imitation of their models. A priest afterwards, more through love of ease and elegant idleness, than from any real vocation for the arduous and stern duties of that holy station, his long intimacy with high dignitaries of the church, gave him, as subjects to paint from life, in unfading colors, those voluptuous abbots, wealthy bishops, and lordly prelates, always censured by the church, who vying with the sturdiest knights in brute strength and martial prowess, with the most unprincipled statesmen in crafty policy, with the most dissolute of the laity in licentiousness, united the rudeness of the soldier with the sloth of the monk; while lacking both the generous frankness of the one, and the ready devotion of faith of the other.

Having held honorable stations at the Court of England under Edward and Richard, at that of France under John, and Charles the Wise, he had associated there, in familiar intercourse, with those renowned feudal chieftains, the heroes of his Chronicles-an order of men having no parallel in antiquity

with habits, manners, and opinions, moulded by the institutions of the middle ages. He has shown us those warriors, sometimes in their fortified castles, built like eagles' nests on high peaks, the tyrants of their vassals, the dread of the peaceful trader; sometimes rushing to perilless battles encased in impenetrable armour. Loved and protected by Guy de Chatillon, Count of Blois,attached to the person of Winceslaus, Duke of Brabant, as his secretary,-a welcome and honored guest at the Court of Gaston, Count of Foix and Bearn,Froissart, in the characteristic traits he has recorded of the absolute authority exercised by these princes over their nearest relatives, as well as their dependants, has given us the only contemporary memorial we possess of the singular domestic life of those proud vassals, ever ready to defy the monarch to whom they yielded an unwilling obedience, and ever prepared to betray him to whosoever offered the highest bribe.

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The following passage, which, as by wizard art, rebuilds the ruined palace of Gaston de Foix, the Trouvère Prince; and, after four hundred and fifty years, reassembles within its gothic halls the motley crowd of visitors drawn there by the fame, the kingly hospitalities of the noble Chatelain, we transcribe as a fair example of Froissart's last and best manner and style. It is taken from a manuscript lately discovered, and is therefore not contained in the common editions of the Chronicles; it is a precious mediaval relic, a talisman by which we are brought into familiar communion with those illustrious dead, who furnished to Froissart, either themes for other chronicles, or information to render more perfect and authentic his earlier annals:

"Avant que je vinsse en sa cour je avois été en moult cours de Rois, de Dues, de Princes, de Comtes, et de Hautes qui mieux me plût, ni qui fut plus sur le Dames; mais je n'en fut oncques en nulle fait d'armes plus réjouie comme celle du Comte de Foix. On veoit en la Salle et es chambres et en la Cour, chevalier et Ecuyer d'honneur aller et marcher, et d'armes et d'amour les oyoit-on parler. Tout honneur étoit lá dedans trouvée.

We refer the reader to the third volume of the Chronicles, in which the death of Gaston's only legitimate son, who died of a wound inflicted by his father, is told without any indignant remarks on so foul an act.

Nouvelles de quelque Royaume ni de quel que pays que ce fut, là dedans on y apprenoist; car de tout pays, pour la vaillance du Seigneur, elles y appleuvoient et venoient; Là, vis venir Chevaliers et Eucuyers de toutes nations, si m'en informois, ou par eux, ou par le Comte qui volontier m'en parloit."

To this rare combination of advantages for the execution of his mission, of mirroring his own age in imperishable reflection for the information and delight of succeeding ones, we owe the equally astonishing variety and life-like fidelity of his delineations. The Chronicles form indeed a complete gallery of the portraits of all his contemporaries; of all-except those of the serf, the working-man, the martyred peasant, of the fourteenth century. This exclusion of the laboring man, the personification of society itself, from the great pageant of an eventful epoch, like the absence of the images of the two last Romans from the funeral procession of the sister of one of them, fills the mind with a livelier vision of the banished figures!

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The motives of this studied silence we can easily explain. The moment an individual of the oppressed classes had learned to read and write, he became either a priest, a lawyer or a clerk and lost, in the selfish enjoyment of newly acquired privileges, all sympathies for, and communion with, the caste from which he had sprung. Hence it is, that, even in Froissart, we find but few passages, in which the proletary, the laborer, is even alluded to; though his subject led him necessarily to relate the insurrections of the peasants, or, rather, the servile wars which, towards the end of the thirteenth century, broke out, almost simultaneously, all over France, Germany, and England, threatening, even at that early stage of the second civilisation of Europe, the total subversion of kingly and oligarchic institutions,

with studied brevity, the chronicler dismisses the subject with these few words: "Those peasants were swarthy, badly clad, and ill armed." Such men, in the opinion of the secretary of Queen Philippa, the bard whose lays amused the leisure hours of the Black Prince, were only fit to be trampled down by iron-clad knights of high lineage. Even in the chapters which describe, with a simplicity of style that often reminds us of Herodotus, the varied scenes acted, both in the French and Flemish camps, during the night that preceded the battle of Rosbecques (so fatal to the popular cause throughout Europe) and the incidents of that dread conflict, between the French chivalry and the ill-disciplined infantry of Flanders led on by Artavelde, Froissart disdains to throw on the vanquished those funeral garlands, he so delights to weave for noble knights fallen in adverse fields. Compassion for the people-the low-born-seek not the expression of that feeling in the Chronicles! Froissart felt not those ennobling sympathies; he knew them not; in fact, at that period, they existed in the breast of no man capable of expressing them in writings that would have lived. Had the sacred love of the people dwelt in his heart, united with the varied talents he brought to the execution of his great work, instead of being the prince of chroniclers, Froissart would have stood by the side of Tacitus, and second to him alone among historians. Yet, even in the absence of that vivifying spirit, which would have thrown a nobler lustre over their pages, the Chronicles have a charm, a spell, in their artless simplicity, which, as soon as we have read the two preliminary chapters, holds the mind captive to the end of the volume. Is it that we feel that they were not written in the seclusion of a monastery, nor compiled from documents drawn from the dust of archives? They have the glow and

* "I had been entertained at many courts, of Kings, Dukes, Princes, Counts, and high-born Ladies; but never before had I been in one which so much delighted me, as that of the Count de Foix. In hall, in bower, in court, were always to be seen knight and squire of honor, sauntering and roving, discoursing the while of arms and love. Nothing that wins honor, nothing that spreads fame, but you might have found there. Of every kingdom, of every country, news was there to be heard; for such was the renown of the valiant Lord that they were showered upon him from every quarter. At his palace I saw knights and squires of all nations, from whom I could collect ample information, as well as from the Count, who was ever willing to discourse with me thereof."

freshness of fields and groves. We seem to hear, while we proceed, sometimes, the voice and the harp of the Trouvère; sometimes the din of arms, the tumult of the battle-field,-now, the war cry of French knights," a Guesclin, a Guesclin, for France!" and now the dread shout of "a Chandos, a Chandos, for St. George!" We live with the generation of which Froissart has written, with the men he heard speak, saw combatting, conquering, dying; we know the Black Prince, the two Artaveldes, Chandos, Edward, Duguesclin, the Clissons, as if we had sat with them in council, as if we had fought under their banners, at Crecy, Poictiers, and Rosbecques.

It is not in the Chronicles, however, that we should look for what is now termed "the Philosophy of History." The muse who dictated those annals sat not in a cell feebly lighted by the midnight lamp; a noble Chatelaine, she rode, graceful and fearless, a milkwhite palfrey. On her gloved arm perched the hooded gerfalcon; by her side bounded the hounds impatient to be unleashed for the chase. In her train followed the iron-clad knight,— the stout archer, bearing gallantly the deadly long bow, the priest neither stern nor rebuking, mirthfully himself enjoying the guiltless mirth of the young and happy, and the Troubadour, too, repining that the humble chronicler should share with him the task of recording high deeds of arms and tales of faithful, unrequited love.

Though commenced in 1357, when our author had scarcely attained his 20th year, and brought to a conclusion before the end of the century, the language of the Chronicles is not near so unartificial, notwithstanding its seeming ease and carelessness, as one not familiar with the style of the better writers of that epoch would imagine; nor does it differ so widely, as that of the Poets of the following century, from the idioms and forms of expression still used by such of the French authors as have preserved the native strength and raciness of Comines, Rabelais, Chatelain, Amelot and Montaigne, the noble fathers of French prose. It is not an uninteresting study, to trace in the pages of Froissart, as shadows cast before the coming day, sometimes the manly vigor of Pascal, his proud disdain of rules and shackles,when, with the chisel

of genius, he marks out the bold outlines of sublime thoughts; sometimes the unpretending and playful lightness of La Fontaine; and sometimes, too, that simplicity which spreads like garlands of sweet wild-flowers, over the grace-inspired letters of Sévigné. It requires, indeed, but slight and rare glances over a short glossary (always found in the best editions) to render the perusal of the Chronicles a recreation, instead of a dry study of obsolete idiomatic phrases, so little have words during four centuries lost their original meaning. As soon as we have become familiar with the manner of Froissart, and lost the uneasy sensation which unwonted turns of thought and an unusual mode of embodying them seldom fail to produce, we find an indescribable charm even in the strangeness of his periods, constructed, however, with more attention to euphonious sounds than we should expect in an age when the study of the master works of antiquity had not yet disciplined writers to the practice of polished diction.

In order to free ourselves from all suspicion of blind admiration for a favorite author, we intend to use the original instead of the translation, in the very short quotations we may make; nor will our readers censure, we trust, this homage paid to the Prince of Chroniclers.

They must not forget that the language of Froissart, harsh and uncouth as it may at first sound to modern ears, was once spoken in court and bower. It was the language in which Edward III. avowed to the fair Salisbury the sudden love kindled by her matchless beauty, and vainly urged, with kingly pride, the fruition of his guilty hopes. Even in that early dawn of its destined dominion over science, fashion and valor, the idiom of France, when Froissart wrote the Chronicles, was the only modern tongue used by statesmen in councils; by chroniclers (save in Italy, where Dante, in the preceding century, had at once created and perfected the Tuscan) to record noble adventures and high deeds of arms; and by Trouvères in minstrelsy.

Few men, in an age when travelling peacefully with a view to study society in its varied aspects was nearly as perilous as traversing a country as one of an invading host, had seen so many parts of feudal Europe as Froissart, in the many journeys he performed

purposely to obtain materials for the Chronicles, as he expressly states:

"Et vous dis, certes, que pour faire ces Chroniques, je fus en mon temps moult par le monde, comme pour enquérir avantures et les armes, lorsqu'elles sont escriptes en ce livre. Si, ai pu voir, apprendre et retenir de moult d' états. Et ayant, Dieu merci! sens mémoire et

bonne souvenance de toutes les choses passeés; Engin clair et aigu, pour concevoir tous les faits dont je pourrois être informé, touchant à ma principale matière -age, corps, et membre pour souffrir peine. Pour savoir la vérité des lointaines besognes, sans ce que j'y envoyasse personne en aucun lieu de moi; je prie voie et achoison raisonnable d' aller dever Hauts Princes, et redoutés Seigneurs."

Besides France, where he resided many years, he journeyed all over Holland and Flanders. In the first, he witnessed the early prosperity of a people whose sturdy toils had subdued the ocean (ever threatening, however, to invade a soil it had but partially receded from) centuries before they began their heroic strife against Spain; in the last, he beheld the young splendor of those great cities where commerce and municipal institutions, comparatively free and liberal, had hastened the second birth of all social arts. He saw Antwerp, then the most opulent city in Europe, receiving in its spacious harbor the produce of the known world, and sending to the most distant regions, in her own ships, the varied tributes of her unrivalled industry. He prayed, perhaps himself celebrated mass (for he was an ordained priest) in those majestic_cathedrals, of Brussels, Antwerp, Bruges and Malines, in which an architecture unknown to Egypt and to Greece seemed to have brought out of the forest petrified trees, with all their far-spread boughs and luxuriant foliage, to form the arched vaults of lofty temples. He saw at Ghent, Artavelde, the precursor of the Medici; he sat at the social board by the side of his son, Philip Van Artavelde, a merchant prince, with the wisdom, eloquence and valor of Pericles; marching the equal of the haughty Edward; commanding armies of fifty thousand men, all raised and equipped within one single city,- Artavelde, who afterwards at Rosbecques-fatal field!but at that time he was young,

successful, victorious; monarchs sought his alliance; nay, beauteous dames said that his " was a sweet name, and musical to hear."

He had sojourned long in Germany; in that age, as now, presenting to the meditative observer, in the features of its inhabitants, in the mystic wildness those neighboring nations which had of its tradition, striking contrasts with more thoroughly received the impress of Roman conquest. While residing in England, where he had followed, as he, tells us "Haute et puissante Dame Philippa de Heynault, dont fus clerc en ma jeunesse," he lived in the intimacy of those valiant knights whom the victories of Poictiers and Crecy have made so renowned. One of those frequent and short cessations of hostilities between the English and the Scotch afforded him an opportunity of visiting Scotland. There he obtained from warriors, statesmen, and minstrels, recent traditions of the wars waged by Robert Bruce, and by that dread Douglas of the Bloody Heart, against the Percies of Northumberland, the noble rivals of those heroes. It is from the Chronicles, then a virgin unwrought mine of feudal lore, that Scott took, in handfuls, the rich ore which, thrown into his crucible, freed by his weird art from the dross that dimmed its lustre, and chiselled by his hand, will shine now for ever in the beauteous forms his genius bade it assume.

The wild sublimity of the Caledonian mountains, so strikingly contrasting with the tame and monotonous aspect of Netherland scenery-the graceful garb of their bold inhabitants-their manners, so different from those of the continental nations of Europe-their proud untaught valor, disdaining even what little existed of military art and discipline in that age, seem to have made a deep impression on the mind of Froissart. He often recurs to that journey, and whenever alluding to it his style glows with the inspiration of that land of poetry and valour.

Conscious of high abilities-(and who possesses genius, without a warning that it dwells within him?)-Froissart, determined, even in early youth, though another muse invited, enticed, inspired him, to worship only at the shrine of the most austere of the virgin sisters. He resolved to write "the Chronicles," we use his own words, as most expres

sive of the feelings that urged him to the task." I know well that after my death, in coming days, these beautiful annals will be held in high repute, affording to the noble and the valiant, both delight and incitement to virtue." Surveying the immense stage on which the great drama of a century was to be acted, he saw the spirit of reviving civilisation hovering over the age, like the mystic dove that brooded chaos into life, hurrying the birth of mighty events. A vague instinct of the future, always vouchsafed to minds of the highest order, revealing that he should immediately portray the existing society, before it had assumed other aspects and forms, he commenced the annals of the epoch before he had attained his 20th year.

Thus does the statuary hasten the modelling of a matron, still beauteous, but already arrived to that age when every month-nay, every day steals from her lips a smile, from her cheek a hue, from her limbs a grace, a charm.

It has been objected to Froissart, that he seldom gives the reader his own opinion on the causes of the events he records, or his own judgment on the motives of the actors he brings on the scene. To us, this unwillingness of the historian to give his conjectures, under the guise of the determining motives of action of some of the heroes of his narratives, is one of his chief merits. The frank declaration which so often recurs in the Chronicles, "what was said in the councils on that occasion, I have been unable to learn," or, "what were his motives for thus -acting, I know not," are so many pledges that we can rely on the authenticity of those deliberations or motives which he does minutely report as held in his presence, or disclosed to some contemporary whose testimony may safely be trusted. Another advantage grew naturally out of this rule, which Froissart appears to have marked out to himself, and inflexibly observed-his narrative is never interrupted by illtimed declamation. He brings before us, without ornaments, both the figure and the scene he portrays, so that the first lives, and the other rises to view in all the diversities and accidents of nature's lights, shades, and coloring. In France, science and learning did not awake simultaneously with poetry and the arts, from the long sleep, which, as

if produced by foul and dark_vapors exhaled from the grave of Boëtius, settled suddenly on the human mind, all over Europe; for there existed no glimmering of science, no vestige of real learning, either in France, England or Germany, when the Epistles of Héloise burst on her contemporaries sweet and melodious as a choir of angels. They were hailed as a token that another alliance had again been formed between earth and heaven, between mind and matter. This explains what would otherwise strike us as singular, we mean the total ignorance of Froissart (a priest, a poet, one to whom the Latin language of the epoch was familiar) of all classic lore. Even geography, now a universal science, was unknown to him, and the strange mistakes he falls into whenever he speaks of African, Asiatic, or even Grecian cities, have often baffled the persevering researches of Buchon, the industrious and learned editor of his works. And yet in spite of those imperfections there breathes from the Chronicles a native grace, light and sweet as the odors of wild-flowers. No remembrances of the past, in their magic pages. The eyes of the author, never directed toward distant objects, either in the past or in the future, view, perhaps for that very reason, with keener and more searching glances, all those that surround him. He is not like the eagle, who, beyond the reach of earthly vision, with the same organs that have reflected unmoved the full blaze of the sun, distinctly sees, in the dust below, the minutest insect; he resembles the bee, never rising high, never winging her flight to distant places, but, in that middle region where she ranges, no tree, no shrub, no grass, unvisited, unsearched; none from which the guiltless plunderer has not exacted her sweet and perfumed tribute.

The second moral childhood of European societies has secured to us of modern days the advantage of having obtained the unalloyed productions of two original literatures. The Greeks had no curtain drawn over their past. There were among them, previous to their two great poems of heroic and social life, no traditions of a higher civilisation, swept away by barbarians; none of a greater perfection of those arts they loved, and worshipped as divine, even in their first imperfect ef

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