exclaim in another place: "Disorders
always go on gathering strength, and even incomparable knights like Du
Guesclin and Bayard cannot arrest the fatal course of the institution
toward ruin." Chivalry was destined to disappear.

It is very important that one should make one's self acquainted with the
true character of such a downfall. France and England in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries still boasted many high-bred knights. They
exchanged the most superb defiances, the most audacious challenges, and
proceeded from one country to another to run each other through the body
proudly. The Beaumanoirs, who drank their blood, abounded. It was a
question who would engage himself in the most incredible pranks; who
would commit the most daring folly! They tell us afterward of the
beautiful passages of arms, the grand feats performed, and the
inimitable Froissart is the most charming of all these narrators, who
make their readers as chivalrous as themselves.

But we must tell everything: among these knights in beautiful armor
there was a band of adventurers who never observed, and who could not
understand, certain commandments of the ancient chivalry. The laxity of
luxury had everywhere replaced the rigorous enactments of the old
manliness, and even warriors themselves loved their ease too much. The
religious sentiment was not the dominant one in their minds, in which
the idea of a crusade now never entered. They had not sufficient respect
for the weakness of the Church nor for other failings. They no longer
felt themselves the champions of the good and the enemies of evil. Their
sense of justice had become warped, as had love for their great native
land.

Again, what they termed "the license of camps" had grown very much
worse; and we know in what condition Joan of Arc found the army of the
King. Blasphemy and ribaldry in every quarter. The noble girl swept away
these pests, but the effect of her action was not long-lived. She was
the person to reestablish chivalry, which in her found the purity of its
now-effaced type; but she died too soon, and had not sufficient
imitators.

There were, after her time, many chivalrous souls, and, thank heaven,
there are still some among us; but the old institution is no longer with
us. The events which we have had the misfortune to witness do not give
us any ground to hope that chivalry, extinct and dead, will rise again
to-morrow to light and life.

In St. Louis' time, caricatur