MIDDLE AGES.

MANNERS CONTINUED.

VIGOUR AND END OF THE BARBAROUS AGES.

To endeavour to sketch methodically a picture of the manners of those times would be at once to attempt an impossibility and to belie the confusion of those manners. On the contrary, all those scenes must be thrown pell-mell, just as they followed each other, without order, or were entangled in one common action, at one and the same moment. There was no unity, but in the general impulsion which carried society onward to improvement, by the natural law of human existence.

On the one hand chivalry, on the other the insurrection of the rustic population, all sorts

of licentiousness in the clergy, together with all the ardour of religion. Itinerant monks, travelling on foot or riding on sorry mules, preached against all these scandals, and were burned alive for their pains by the priests, whom they reproached for their dissolute lives, and drowned by the princes whose tyranny they attacked. Gentlemen, lying in wait near the high roads, robbed travellers, whilst other gentlemen became in Spain, in Greece, in Dalmatia, lords of renowned cities, to whose history they were utter strangers. There were courts of love, in which arguments were held agreeably to all the rules of Scottism, and of which the canons were members; troubadours and minstrels, roving from castle to castle, lashing the men in satires, praising the ladies in ballads; citizens divided into guilds, holding festivals in honour of their patrons, in which the saints of Paradise were mingled with the deities of fable; dramatic representations, miracles and and mysteries in churches; feasts of fools; sacrilegious masses; gravy soups eaten upon the altar; the Ite missa est responded to by the three brayings of an ass; barons and knights engaging at these mysterious repasts to make war upon nations,

vowing upon a peacock or a heron to fight to the death for their ladye-loves; Jews slaughtered and slaughtering one another, conspiring with lepers to poison the wells and springs; tribunals of all sorts, sentencing, by virtue of all kinds of laws, to all sorts of punishments, accused persons of all classes, from the heretic flayed and burned alive, to adulterers bound together naked and led in public through the crowd; the complaisant judge, substituting an innocent prisoner, instead of the wealthy murderer, condemned to die; to crown the confusion, to complete the contrast, the old society civilized after the manner of the ancients perpetuating itself in the abbeys; the students at the universities reviving the philosophic disputes of Greece; the tumult of the schools of Athens and Alexandria mingling with the din of tournaments, feasts, and tiltings. Lastly, place, above and out of this so agitated society, another principle of action, a tomb the object of all affections, of all regrets, of all hopes, which was incessantly drawing beyond sea sovereigns and subjects, the valiant and the guilty, the former to seek enemies, kingdoms, adventures, the latter to fulfil vows, to atone for crimes, to appease remorse-and you have a picture of the middle ages.

Notwithstanding the ill success of the crusades, the East long continued to be, for the nations of Europe, the country of religion and glory: they turned their eyes incessantly towards that bright sun, towards those palms of Idumea, towards those plains of Rama, where the infidels reposed in the shade of the olive-trees planted by Baldwin, towards those fields of Ascalon which still retained traces of Godfrey of Bouillon, of Couci, of Tancred, of Philip Augustus, of RichardCoeur-de-Lion, of St. Louis, towards that Jerusalem delivered for a moment, but fallen again into her bondage, and which appeared to them, as to Jeremiah, insulted by the passenger, drowned in tears, deprived of her people, seated in solitude.

Such were those ages of imagination and of vigour, which moved on with all these accompaniments, amidst events the most diversified, amidst heresies, schisms, and wars, feudal, civil, and foreign; those ages doubly favourable to genius, either by the solitude of the cloister, when that was sought, or by a world the most strange and the most varied, when this was preferred to solitude. There was not a spot where some new circumstance was not occurring, for each lordship, lay or ecclesiastic, was a little state,

moving in its own orbit, and having its different phases; at ten leagues' distance, customs were totally dissimilar. This order of things, extremely detrimental to general civilization, imparted an extraordinary impulsion to the individual mind; hence all the great discoveries belonged to those ages. Never did the individual live so much; the sovereign dreamt of the aggrandisement of his dominions, the noble of the conquest of his neighbour's fief, the citizen of the extension of his privileges, the merchant of new channels for his trade. People were not thoroughly acquainted with any thing, they had not penetrated to the bottom of any thing, they believed every thing, they were at the entrance, at the threshold, of all hopes, in like manner as a traveller upon a mountain awaits the return of day-light, when he perceives its harbinger the dawn. They made researches into the past as well as the future; they felt the same joy on discovering an old manuscript and a new world; they proceeded with rapid steps towards unknown destinies, as in youth we have all our lives before us. The infancy of those ages was barbarism, their maturity full of passion and energy, and they have left behind them a rich inheritance to the civilized ages which they bore in their fertile womb.