[r] We must take for this the more favourable representations of the Indian nations. A deteriorating intercourse with Europeans, or a race of European extraction, has tended to efface those virtues which possibly were rather exaggerated by earlier writers.
[] Since this passage was written, I have found a parallel drawn by Mr. Sharon Turner, in his valuable History of England, between Achilles and Richard Cœur de Lion; the superior justness of which I readily acknowledge. The real hero does not indeed excite so much interest in me as the poetical; but the marks of resemblance are very striking, whether we consider their passions, their talents, their virtues, their vices, or the waste of their heroism.
The two principal persons in the Iliad, if I may digress into the observation, appear to me representatives of the heroic character in its two leading varieties; of the energy which has its sole principle, of action within itself, and of that which borrows its impulse from external relations; of the spirit of honour, in short, and of patriotism. As every sentiment of Achilles is independent and self-supported, so those of Hector all bear reference to his kindred and his country. The ardour of the one might have been extinguished for want of nourishment in Thessaly; but that of the other might, we fancy, have never been kindled but for the dangers of Troy. Peace could have brought no delight to the one but from the memory of war; war had no alleviation to the other but from the images of peace. Compare, for example, the two speeches, beginning Il. Z. 441, and Il. II. 49; or rather compare the two characters throughout the Iliad. So wonderfully were those two great springs of human sympathy, variously interesting according to the diversity of our tempers, first touched by that ancient patriarch,
à quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.
[t] Ingulfus, in Gale, XV Scriptores, t. i. p. 70. William Rufus, however, was knighted by Archbishop Lanfranc, which looks as if the ceremony was not absolutely repugnant to the Norman practice.
[] Du Cange, v. Miles, and 22nd Dissertation on Joinville, St. Palaye, Mém. sur la Chevalerie, part ii. A curious original illustration of this, as well as of other chivalrous principles, will be found in l'Ordene de Chevalerie, a long metrical romance published in Barbazan's Fabliaux, t. i. p. 59 (edit. 1808).
[x] Y eut huit cens chevaliers séant à table; et si n'y eust celui qui n'eust une dame on une pucelle à son ecuelle. In Launcelot du Lac, a lady, who was troubled with a jealous husband, complains that it was a long time since a knight had eaten off her plate. Le Grand, t. i. p. 24.
[y] Le Grand, Fabliaux, t. iii. p. 438; St. Palaye, t. i. p. 41. I quote St. Palaye's Mémoires from the first edition in 1759, which is not the best.
[z] Statuimus, quod omnis homo, sive miles sive alius, qui iverit cum dominâ generosâ, salvus sit atque securus, nisi fuerit homicida. De Marca, Marca Hispanica, p. 1428.
[a] Le Grand, t. i. p. 120; St. Palaye, t. i. p. 13, 134, 221; Fabliaux, Romances, &c., passim.