Excerpt from Sketches and Studies: Descriptive and Historical

Chivalry is a wide word, and suggests very different ideas, according as it is viewed from different aspects. Good and evil grew up in it side, by side, in the same strange fellowship with which they appear in every institution of medi?val Christendom; lying, so to speak, in broad masses, rather than in the blended light and shadow of a later civilization. The good is recognised by Arnold, when he gives the title of "the best and holiest of kings" to Saint Lewis, - who nevertheless thought it right to smite the blaspheming Jew with his "bonne epee tranchante," and who especially patronized the most questionable of all orders, that of the Teutonic Knights; and by Sir Francis Palgrave, who traces, with whatever truth, all "the purer and nobler forms" of the chivalric sentiment to the nurture and discipline of Ancient Rome. The evil has been insisted on by Mr. Hallam and by Dean Milman, not less positively than the good. Neither good nor evil, however, are to be judged by the standard of our own times; and there is this broad difference between them: the Antichristian spirit of war and bloodshed, as well as those narrowed feudal relations against which Arnold protests, were both, to a great extent, necessary, inevitable features of the age; to soften which, as far as might be, came the courtesy, honour, and loyalty, making up the real good of chivalry.

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