little anachronisms of the same kind, which were
only rather stupid and ignorant. Then they
despised the classics; not because they were written
by men less advanced than themselves in the true
knowledge of human life, but because they were
written by dogs of unbelievers; and Disraeli
tells a pleasant story of certain silent monks,
who, when they went to the librarian to demand
the loan of one of these heathen authors,
made first the conventional sign that expressed
a book, then scratched under the left ear like a
dog, meaning thereby a book written by a dog
of an unbeliever—as the dog Virgil or the hound
Cicero; which was a modest manner with men
who did not know the first elements of art or
nature. It is often said by the lovers of the old
time, that we owe to the monks all we have had
preserved to us of the ancient authors, and that,
had it not been for these same dirty old fellows
in horsehair shirts, we should have lost every
trace of the divines of heathendom. That may
be, but on the other hand, owing to their
superstition or ignorance, or, in some cases,
dishonesty, we have lost much most valuable matter,
for they knew the worth of books about as
much as the Armenian monks of the present
day, who put priceless tomes under their feet to
protect them from the damp of the chapel floors,
and have thus destroyed no end of literary treasure,
because Eastern drainage is defective, and
a set of lazy old fellows will not make footstools
for themselves. So with the monks of former
days here in England. If they preserved with
the one hand, they ruined with the other; and
had they had more books of their own they
would have saved fewer of the heathens. I
think, then, we have gone ahead in the matter
of respect for literature.

Also in certain matters of religious taste
and common sense. For instance, we have
gone a step beyond the Gesta Romanorum.
Even our Apocalyptic divines can do better
than that; a step beyond Saint Francis of
Assissi and his stigmata, at least among the
educated and clear-headed; a step beyond
Saint Ignatius and his dirt, his clotted hair
and unpared nails; beyond Thomas à Becket
and his hair shirt swarming with vermin
beneath his costly pontifical robes; indeed
beyond all phases of dirt-deification under whatever
saintly garb appearing; a step beyond Saint
Philip Neri, whose ardent admiration of poverty
was such, that he used to pray God he might
be brought to want a penny and find no one
to give it him. We have stepped, too,
beyond belief in the value of ordeals and the
likelihood of getting moral justice out of a
hand-to-hand fight between two unequally
matched combatants, the champion and the
accuser; thinking that one or two solicitors, and
half a dozen Q.C.s, with a jury of twelve sane
men, and a bench of law lords, more likely
machinery for eliminating the truth, than walking
blindfold over burning ploughshares, or holding
red-hot bars of iron in the naked hand, or
thrusting the arms into a vessel of boiling oil, or
the bleeding of the murdered body at the touch
of the murderer—all of which methods our dear
old ancestors held of divine appointment to the
ruling of justice. We have gone a step beyond
the feudal suit and service of beating the waters
round the castle all through the night to prevent
the croaking of the frogs, that the lord might
have undisturbed sleep and pleasant dreams;
and beyond the tyrannous power which the law
allowed to lord and lady over their servants or
rather slaves. It was no unusual thing for these
female slaves to be scourged to death by the
order of their mistresses; and for offences which
we should pass over in silence, or which the
shrillest shrew among us would at most visit
with only a moderate rebuke, they were scourged
and fettered and tortured, with no more pity than
is shown now by the Southern chivalry to the
accursed sons of Ham. Wright, in his excellent
History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments,
tells the story of the servant of Teothic, the
bell-maker of Winchester, who, for a "slight
offence," was put in irons and chained up by the
hands and feet all night. In the morning
she was taken out and scourged, then
fettered again as before; but the next night
she escaped and took sanctuary at the tomb of
Saint Swithen— the law affording her no other
protection, and only the sanctuary of the church
open to her, together with thieves and murderers
and any other kind of malefactor. Another
girl was half murdered by her master because,
while washing linen at the river, she had been
set on by thieves and robbed of her master's
clothes. As he could not get at the thieves he
punished the maid: which did quite as well.
These are the knights and ladies whom it is the
present fashion to speak of as just, true, and
merciful.

Neither should we suffer now the once
honoured institution of the feudal guardians, those
"other fathers" who might marry off their
wards when mere babes and sucklings—marry
them, as they listed, to other babes and
sucklings, or to old grey-bearded dotards tottering
into the grave. If the poor wards did not take
kindly to these arrangements when they grew
up and had feelings and predilections of their
own, then the guardians were allowed to exact
from them the full value of the marriage
forfeited. This was a rich source of speculation
to many of those early guardians, and the
source, too, of many of the deepest tragedies
of the olden time. But women in those days
of chivalry and knight-errantry were held no
better than goods and chattels of rather a
superior kind, and the feudal lord who was their
husband was always more lord than husband,
and could do with them as he liked.

But the banquets! Oh! those "feasts in
hall and bower," where the chaste and loyal
knights sit in their plumed helmets and glaring
coats of mail, while blushing maidens hand
round the wine-cup, and fair, pure, dove-like
women sit meekly, scarce venturing to raise
their drooping lids. Alas, they were rather
different to what the illustrators of silly
ballads and the mock worshippers of the olden