It is thus that the particles of poetry, like those of matter, are in eternal circulation, and forming new combinations.
[67] The principal works on the subject of the Templars are Raynouard Monumens historiques relatifs à la Condamnation des Templiers; Dupuy Histoire de la Condamnation des Templiers; Münter Statutenbuch des Ordens der Tempelherren; and Wilike Geschichte des Tempelherrenordens. There is scarcely anything on the subject in English.
[68] On the subject of chivalry see Ste. Palaye Mémoires sur la Chevalerie, Sir W. Scott's Essay on the same subject, and Mills's and James's histories of chivalry. We do not recollect that any of these writers has fairly proved that the chivalry which they describe ever existed as an institution, and we must demur to the principle which they all assume of romances like Perceforest being good authority for the manners of the age in which they were composed.
[69] Michaud, Histoire des Croisades, I., p. 59.
[70] The other writers of that century agree in the account given above. Brompton's authority has been preferred by some modern writers, who probably wished to pay their court to the order of Malta.
[71] Wilken I. 28, gives 1135 as the year in which this piece was written.
[72] See p. 187. Sir W. Scott describes his Templar in Ivanhoe, as wearing a white mantle with a black cross of eight points. The original cross of the Hospitallers, we may observe, had not eight points. That of the order of Malta was of this form.
[73] Bauseant, or Bausant, was, in old French, a piebald horse, or a horse marked white and black. Ducange, Roquefort. The word is still preserved with its original meaning in the Scotch dialect, in the form Bawsent:
"His honest, sonsie, baws'nt face
Aye gat him friends in ilka place,"
says Burns, describing the "ploughman's collie," in his tale of the "Twa Dogs;" and in the Glossary, Dr. Currie explains Baws'nt as meaning "having a white stripe down the face." As, however, some notion of handsomeness or attractiveness of appearance seems to be involved in the epithet, Bauseant, or Beauséant, may possibly be merely an older form of the present French word, Bienséant.