Your request is reasonable; and I acknowledge the omission, in not acquainting you that my information was taken from its proper source, the old Romances. Not that I shall make a merit with you in having perused these barbarous volumes myself; much less would I impose the ungrateful task upon you. Thanks to the curiosity of certain painful collectors, this knowledge may be obtained at a cheaper rate. And I think it sufficient to refer you to a learned and very elaborate memoir of a French writer, who has put together all that is requisite to be known on this subject. Materials are first laid in, before the architect goes to work; and if the structure, I am here raising out of them, be to your mind, you will not think the worse of it because I pretend not, myself, to have worked in the quarry. In a word, and to drop this magnificent allusion, if I account to you for the rise and genius of Chivalry, it is all you are to expect; for an idea of what Chivalry was in itself, you may have recourse to tom. xx. of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.
And with this explanation I return, at length, to my proper business.
Supposing my idea of Chivalry to be fairly given, the conjecture I advance on the origin and nature of it, you incline to think, may deserve to be admitted. But you will, perhaps, admit it the more readily, if you reflect, “That there is a remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their great romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in books of modern knight-errantry.” A fact, of which no good account, I believe, can be given but by the assistance of another, not less certain, “That the political state of Greece, in the earlier periods of its story, was similar in many respects to that of Europe, as broken by the feudal system into an infinite number of petty independent governments.”
It is not my design to encroach on the province of the learned person[46], to whom I owe this hint, and who hath undertaken, at his leisure, to enlarge upon it. But some few circumstances of agreement between the Heroic and Gothic manners, such as are most obvious and occur to my memory, while I am writing, may be worth putting down, by way of specimen only of what may be expected from a professed inquiry into this curious subject.
And, FIRST, “the military enthusiasm of the Barons is but of a piece with the fanaticism of the Heroes.” Hence the same particularity of description, in the account of battles, wounds, deaths, in the Greek poet, as in the Gothic romancers: hence that perpetual succession of combats and deeds of arms, even to satiety, in the Iliad: and hence that minute curiosity, in the display of the dresses, arms, accoutrements of the combatants, which we find so strange, in that poem. The minds of all men being occupied and in a manner possessed with warlike images and ideas, were much gratified by the poet’s dwelling on the very slightest circumstances of these things, which now, for want of their prejudices, appear cold and unaffecting to modern readers.
But the correspondency holds in more particular considerations. For,
2. “We hear much of Knights-errant encountering Giants, and quelling Savages, in books of Chivalry.”
These Giants were oppressive feudal Lords; and every Lord was to be met with, like the Giant, in his strong hold, or castle. Their dependants of a lower form, who imitated the violence of their superiors, and had not their castles, but their lurking-places, were the Savages of Romance. The greater Lord was called a Giant, for his power; the less a Savage, for his brutality.
All this is shadowed out in the Gothic tales, and sometimes expressed in plain words. The objects of the Knight’s vengeance go indeed by the various names of Giants, Paynims, Saracens, and Savages. But of what family they all are, is clearly seen from the poet’s description:
What Mister wight, quoth he, and how far hence
Is he, that doth to travellers such harms?
He is, said he, a man of great defence,
Expert in battle, and in deeds of arms;
And more embolden’d by the wicked charms
With which his daughter doth him still support;
Having great Lordships got and goodly farms
Thro’ strong oppression of his power extort;
By which he still them holds and keeps with strong effort.