At about the age of twelve or thirteen the child’s rougher instincts begin to soften. Romance and sentiment develop. He becomes particular about his appearance. It is less of a task than formerly to get the boy to wash his face and hands, and he has not the antipathy toward civilized attire that he had in the days when Robinson Crusoe was the hero. Instead, he manifests a liking for being dressed according to prevailing modes, sometimes changing so suddenly from a dirty cave dweller into a dandy that it is like the metamorphosis from grub to butterfly. He craves socks and ties of bright colors and clothes that attract attention. If fashion prescribes peg-topped or straight, spare trousers, he wants them extremely wide or extremely narrow, and is willing to have his chin sawed unmercifully if high collars are the vogue, not because of a fit of hysteria, but because he has entered the period when sex awakens. He is becoming interested in the girls and wishes to be dressed in a manner that will cause them to be interested in him; and very often his taste for literature changes as completely as his personal habits. He desires stories of a higher type of heroism than those he craved in an earlier period, stories of romance and chivalry, and now is the time to give him the epic in its entirety, because of the deep racial emotions therein expressed.
He has had many of the adventure tales from the epics during the earlier period. Now he is ready for those tinged with romance, those pervaded by a spirit of fiery idealism in which knights risk limb and life in loyalty to principle, for fealty to king, or in defense of some fair lady. Percival seeking the Grail is a finer hero to him than Percival battling with the Red Knight, and the vow of the men of the Round Table means something because he can understand it. In a vague, indefinite way romance is touching his own life, and his noblest emotions are awakened by the noble words:
To reverence the king, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their king,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God’s,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,