wife; the rest of the gentlemen are
subalterns, younger sons without means, youths sent to learn their
military duty and the ways of the world: a whole pack of men without
wives, without homes, and usually without fortune. High above all this
deferential male crowd, moves the lady of the castle: highborn, proud,
having brought her husband a dower of fiefs often equal to his own, and
of vassals devoted to her race. About her she has no equals; her
daughters, scarcely out of the nurse's hands, are given away in
marriage; and her companions, if companions they may be called, are the
waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between the maid of honour and
the ladies' maid, like that Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her
intrigue with Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives over to the
squires of her lover Guillems; at best, the wife of one of her husband's
subalterns, or some sister or aunt or widow kept by charity. Round this
lady--the stately, proud lady perpetually described by mediaeval
poets--flutters the swarm of young men, all day long, in her path:
serving her at meals, guarding her apartments, nay, as pages, admitted
even into her most secret chamber; meeting her for ever in the
narrowness of that castle life, where every unnecessary woman is a
burden usurping the place of a soldier, and, if possible, replaced by a
man. Servants, lacqueys, and enjoying the privileges of ubiquity of
lacqueys, yet, at the same time, men of good birth and high breeding,
good at the sword and at the lute; bound to amuse this highborn woman,
fading away in the monotony of feudal life, with few books to read or
unable to read them, and far above all the household concerns which
devolve on the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman,
honourably employed as a servant. To them, to these young men, with few
or no young women of their own age to associate, and absolutely no
unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle
speedily becomes a goddess, the impersonation at once of that feudal
superiority before which they bow, of that social perfection which they
are commanded to seek, and of that womankind of which the castle affords
so few examples. To please her, this lazy, bored, highbred woman, with
all the squeamishness and caprice of high birth and laziness about her,
becomes their ideal; to be favourably noticed, their highest glory; to
be loved, these wretched mortals, by this divinity--that though