ns; but Ivanhoe evaded the Duchess's offer,
by riding away from her capital secretly at midnight and hiding himself
in a convent of Knights Hospitallers on the borders of Poland. And it
is a fact that the Princess Rosalia Seraphina of Pumpernickel, the most
lovely woman of her time, became so frantically attached to him, that
she followed him on a campaign, and was discovered with his baggage
disguised as a horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female
blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more
austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably
with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the
courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes
sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of
battle was so terrible and admirable, that I promise you the youthful
libertines did not sneer THEN; and the most reckless of them often
turned pale when they couched their lances to follow Ivanhoe. Holy
Waltheof! it was an awful sight to see him with his pale calm face, his
shield upon his breast, his heavy lance before him, charging a squadron
of heathen Bohemians, or a regiment of Cossacks! Wherever he saw the
enemy, Ivanhoe assaulted him: and when people remonstrated with him, and
said if he attacked such and such a post, breach, castle, or army,
he would be slain, "And suppose I be?" he answered, giving them
to understand that he would as lief the Battle of Life were over
altogether.

While he was thus making war against the Northern infidels news was
carried all over Christendom of a catastrophe which had befallen the
good cause in the South of Europe, where the Spanish Christians had met
with such a defeat and massacre at the hands of the Moors as had never
been known in the proudest day of Saladin.

Thursday, the 9th of Shaban, in the 605th year of the Hejira, is known
all over the West as the amun-al-ark, the year of the battle of Alarcos,
gained over the Christians by the Moslems of Andaluz, on which fatal day
Christendom suffered a defeat so signal, that it was feared the Spanish
peninsula would be entirely wrested away from the dominion of the
Cross. On that day the Franks lost 150,000 men and 30,000 prisoners.
A man-slave sold among the unbelievers for a dirhem; a donkey for
the same; a sword, half a dirhem; a horse, five dirhems. Hundreds of
thousands of these various sorts of booty were in the possession of t