Knights and their days

by Dr. Doran

One comfort in tracing the tortuosities of this chivalric romance is that the action is rapid; but then there is so much of it, and it is so astounding! We are first introduced to the three sons of St. George, who are famous hunters in England, and whose mother, the lady Sabra, “catches her death,” by going out attired like Diana, to witness their achievements. The chivalric widower thereupon sets out for Jerusalem, his fellow-champions accompany, and George’s three sons, Guy, Alexander, and David, upon insinuation from their mother’s spirit, start too in pursuit. The lads were knighted by the king of England before they commenced their journey, which they perform with the golden spur of chivalry attached to their heels. They meet with the usual adventures by the way: destroying giants, and rescuing virgins, who in these troublesome times seem to have been allowed to travel about too much by themselves. Meanwhile, their sire is enacting greater prodigies still, and is continually delivering his fellow-champions from difficulties, from which they are unable to extricate themselves. Indeed, in all circumstances, his figure is the most prominent; and although the other half-dozen must have rendered some service on each occasion, St. George makes no more mention of the same than Marshal St. Arnaud, in his letters on the victory at the Alma, does of the presence and services of the English.

It is said that Mrs. Radcliffe, whose horrors used to delight and distress our mothers and aunts, in their younger days, became herself affected by the terrors which she only paints to explain away natural circumstances. What then must have been the end of Richard Johnson? His scene of the enchantments of the Black Castle is quite enough to have killed the author with bewilderment. There is a flooring in the old palace of the Prince of Orange in Brussels, which is so inlaid with small pieces of wood, of a thousand varieties of patterns, as to be a triumph of its kind. I was not at all surprised, when standing on that floor, to hear that when the artist had completed his inconceivable labor, he gave one wild gaze over the parquet of the palace, and dropped dead of a fit of giddiness. I am sure that Richard Johnson must have met with some such calamity after revising this portion of his history. It is a portion in which it is impossible for the Champions or for the readers to go to sleep. The noise is terrific, the incidents fall like thunderbolts, the changes roll over each other in a succession made with electric rapidity, and when the end comes we are all the more rejoiced, because we have comprehended nothing; but we are especially glad to find that the knight of the Black Castle, who is the cause of all the mischief, is overcome, flies in a state of destitution to a neighboring wood, and being irretrievably “hard up,” stabs himself with the first thing at hand, as ruthlessly as the lover of the “Ratcatcher’s Daughter.”

Time, place, propriety, and a respect for contemporary history, are amusingly violated throughout the veracious details. Nothing can equal the confusion, nothing can be more absurd than the errors. But great men have committed errors as grave. Shakespeare opened a seaport in Bohemia, and Mr. Macaulay wrote of one Penn what was only to be attributed to another. And now, have the dramatists treated St. George better than the romancers?

The national saint was, doubtless, often introduced in the Mysteries; but the first occasion of which I have any knowledge of his having been introduced on the stage, was by an author named John Kirke. John was so satisfied with his attempt that he never wrote a second play. He allowed his fame to rest on the one in question, which is thus described on his title-page: “The Seven Champions of Christendome. Acted at the Cocke Pit, and at the Red Bull in St. John’s Streete, with a general liking, And never printed till this yeare 1638. Written by J. K.—London, printed by J. Okes, and are (sic) to be sold by James Becket, at his Shop in the Inner Temple Gate, 1638.”

John Kirke treats his subject melodramatically. In the first scene, Calib the Witch, in a speech prefacing her declarations of a love for foul weather and deeds, tells the audience by way of prologue, how she had stolen the young St. George from his now defunct parent, with the intention of making a bath for her old bones out of his young warm blood. Love, however, had touched her, and she had brought up “the red-lipped boy,” with some indefinite idea of making something of him when a man.

With this disposition the old lady has some fears as to the possible approaching term of her life; but, as she is assured by “Tarfax the Devill” that she can not die unless she love blindly, the witch, like a mere mortal, accounting that she loves wisely, reckons herself a daughter of immortality, and rejoices hugely. The colloquy of this couple is interrupted by their son Suckabud, who, out of a head just broken by St. George, makes complaint with that comic lack of fun, which was wont to make roar the entire inside of the Red Bull. The young clown retires with his sire, and then enters the great St. George, a lusty lad, with a world of inquiries touching his parentage. Calib explains that his lady mother was anything but an honest woman, and that his sire was just the partner to match. “Base or noble, pray?” asks St. George. To which the witch replies:—

“Base and noble too;

Both base by thee, but noble by descent;

And thou born base, yet mayst thou write true gent:”

and it may be said, parenthetically, that many a “true gent” is by birth equal to St. George himself.