And daily he his wrong encreaseth more:
For never wight he lets to pass that way
Over his bridge, albee he rich or poor,
But he him makes his passage penny pay.
Else he doth hold him back or beat away.
Thereto he hath a Groom of evil guise,
Whose scalp is bare, that bondage doth bewray,
Which polls and pills the poor in piteous wise,
But he himself upon the rich doth tyrannize.
Spenser, B. V. C. ii.
Here we have the great oppressive Baron very graphically set forth: and the Groom of evil guise is as plainly the Baron’s vassal. The Romancers, we see, took no great liberty with these respectable personages, when they called the one a Giant, and the other a Savage.
“Another terror of the Gothic ages was, Monsters, Dragons, and Serpents.” These stories were received in those days for several reasons: 1. From the vulgar belief of enchantments: 2. From their being reported, on the faith of Eastern tradition, by the adventurers into the Holy Land: 3. In still later times, from the strange things told and believed, on the discovery of the new world.
This last consideration we find employed by Spenser to give an air of probability to his Fairy Tales, in the preface to his second book.
Now in all these respects Greek antiquity very much resembles the Gothic. For what are Homer’s Læstrigons and Cyclops, but bands of lawless savages, with, each of them, a Giant of enormous size at their head? And what are the Grecian Bacchus and Hercules, but Knights-errant, the exact counter-parts of Sir Launcelot and Amadis de Gaule?
For this interpretation we have the authority of our great poet:
Such first was Bacchus, that with furious might
All th’ East, before untam’d, did overcome,
And wrong repressed and establish’d right,
Which lawless men had formerly fordonne.
Next Hercules his like ensample shew’d,
Who all the West with equal conquest wonne,
And monstrous tyrants with his club subdu’d,
The club of justice drad, with kingly pow’r endu’d.
B. V. C. i.
Even Plutarch’s life of Theseus reads, throughout, like a modern Romance: and Sir Arthegal himself is hardly his fellow, for righting wrongs and redressing grievances. So that Euripides might well make him say of himself, that he had chosen the profession and calling of a Knight-errant: for this is the sense, and almost the literal construction, of the following verses:
Ἔθος τόδ’ εἰς Ἕλληνας ἐξελεξάμην
Ἀεὶ ΚΟΛΑΣΤΗΣ ΤΩΝ ΚΑΚΩΝ καθεστάναι.
Ἱκέτιδες, ver. 340.