Why, the Knight would have been no knight at all if he had been Richard Bentley or John Milton, and not, as there is every reason to hope he was, le noble et vaillant Chivaler Matheu de Gourney, whose marble tells us that he had fought at Benamaryn and Algezire, and been at abundance of battles and sieges, named and unnamed, in Christendom and Heathenesse—"en les quex il gaigna noblement graunt los et honour"—and who "died in 1406 at the age of 96." It is therefore Sir Matheu de Gourney who speaks, like a knight, of knighthood—and let him speak—
"Who never yet no vilainie ne sayde,
In all his life unto no manere wight."—
Let him speak, justifying his eulogist, and showing us, as well as may be by his words, what his deeds showed the world, that—
"He was a veray parfit gentil knight!"
The first transaction that is related with some full process, is the chivalrous enterprise of Theseus against Creon; King of Thebes. This dispiteous and abominable tyrant prohibits the bodies of the warriors fallen in the celebrated siege of that city from burial. The widows of the slain princes and nobles move Theseus for vengeance and redress, which he instantly undertakes, and forthwith executes. And now mark the admixture of times and manners. In the first place, the heinousness of the crime, and even the imagination of such an impiety, are purely antique, as, in truth, the fact itself is on classical record in the "Antigone" of Sophocles. Again, the suppliant, bereaved, and woebegone wives have awaited Theseus's coming "in the temple of the goddess Clemency," than which nothing can be more classical; and the manner in which, at his return home from his victorious war upon the "Amasones," the sorrowful company receive him, kneeling by two and two clothed in black, along the highway, might persuade you that Sir Matheu had read the Œdipus Tyrannus, and successfully imitated Œdipus's dolorous and picturesque reception in the streets of Thebes, by the kneeling, plague-smitten population of the city.
On the other hand, the claim of redress at the hand of the warrior carries your imagination to the interesting volumes of St Palaye; and clearly refers to the obligation by which the knight, at his investiture, bound himself to redress all wrongs, especially those of the ladies. And Theseus is nothing slack in acknowledging the obligation. He dismounts, takes them each and all up in his arms,
"And swore his oth, as he was trewe knight,"
that he will do his endeavour that the world shall applaud the chastising of the "false king."—Again, when the one day's demolishing fight has given Creon to death, and his Land into Theseus's hand, and the two right Heroes of the Tale, the Theban cousins, Palamon and Arcite, are dragged out, half-alive and half-dead, from the heap of the slain, the "herauds" know them, by the "cote-armoure," to be of the blood-royal. Of course, they are designated "knights."—Again: Theseus will take no ransom for them. That is perhaps, indifferently, ancient or modern; but it sounds to our ears rather modern, that he shuts them up in a high tower, which overlooks the Garden of his Palace.
But now we plunge into the bosom of our own Heroic times. To do observance to the May is a rite that we find continually occurring in the poetry of the middle ages. It is on May morning that Emelie, going into the garden to gather flowers, and wreathe for herself a coronal, is first seen by the two captive Theban kinsmen. Again, when Arcite, liberated by the intervention of Pirithous, has returned, and is living unrecognized in the service of Theseus, it is precisely upon the same occasion of going into the wood to gather "grenes" for May morning, that he falls in with Palamon, who has the night before broken prison, and hides himself during the day in the forest—which encounter leads to their set encounter in arms the next day, and so to the interruption of their duel by Theseus himself, and so to all the consequent course of events. Whatever the true rites of returning May may have been, in classical antiquity, the observance comes into this tale from the manners of mediæval Europe, not of ancient Greece.
With what glad and light ritual, the Athenians, in the first years after the war of the Seven Chiefs against Thebes, did homage to their king and queen of the May, we do not remember to have seen distinctly described. At this day the young folk of old Hellas parade the streets, shouting the classical χελιδωνισμα, or song of the swallow, on the 1st of March. The Romans held their Floralia from the 28th of April to the 1st of May, danced and sang, and had games, and crowned themselves with garlands and with flowers. Nevertheless, you instinctively feel that the singularly graceful picture of Emelie, called up from slumber by the dawning May morning, and proceeding to pluck in the royal garden the dew-fresh and bright materials of her own coronal, owes nothing to the lore of books, but is breathingly imaged from some gracious original of our own good fourteenth century. You remain assured, that the trustworthy poet records his own proper love-experience in adjusting the occasion that is to vivify with a new passion the dolorous prison of the two Thebans, and turn the sworn brothers-in-arms into rivals at deadly feud with each other. That rougher age of the world—rude the day was not that produced and cherished Chaucer—had this virtue, that the grown-up men and women were still, by a part of their heart, children. The welcoming-in of the May is described by the old poets in different countries of Europe as a passion—seizing upon young and old, high and low. All were for the hour children—children of nature. When, therefore, that love at first sight, which immediately becomes a destiny to the two kinsmen, governing their whole after-life, is in this manner attached by our poet to the visit made upon this occasion by Emelie to the garden which their tower overlooks, the reader is entitled to understand that the poet does for him the very best thing any poet can do, that he infuses into his poetical dream his own pulsating life-blood.