r a braggart, even if he were the owner of ten thousand acres. The
knight was encouraged to pay his address to any lady if he was
personally worthy of her love, for chivalry created a high estimate of
individual merit. The feudal lady ignored all degrees of wealth within
her own rank. She was as tender and compassionate as she was heroic. She
was treated as a superior, rather than as an equal. There was a poetical
admiration among the whole circle of knights. A knight without an object
of devotion was as "a ship without a rudder, a horse without a bridle, a
sword without a hilt, a sky without a star." Even a Don Quixote must
have his Dulcinea, as well as horse and armor and squire. Dante
impersonates the spirit of the Middle Ages in his adoration of Beatrice.
The ancient poets coupled the praises of women with the praises of wine.
Woman, under the influence of chivalry, became the star of worship, an
object of idolatry. We read of few divorces in the Middle Ages, or of
separations, or desertions, or even alienations; these things are a
modern improvement, borrowed from the customs of the Romans. The awe and
devotion with which the lover regarded his bride became regard and
affection in the husband. The matron maintained the rank which had been
assigned to her as a maiden. The gallant warriors blended even the
adoration of our Lord with adoration of our Lady,--the deification of
Christ with the deification of woman. Chivalry, encouraged by the Church
and always strongly allied with religious sentiments, accepted for
eternal veneration the transcendent loveliness of the mother of our
Lord; so that chivalric veneration for the sex culminated in the
reverence which belongs to the Queen of Heaven,--_virgo fidelis; regina
angelorum_. Woman assumed among kings and barons the importance which
she was supposed to have in the celestial hierarchy. And besides the
religious influence, the poetic imagination of the time seized upon this
pure and lovely element, which passed into the songs, the tales, the
talk, the thought, and the aspirations of all the knightly order.

Whence, now, this veneration for woman which arose in the Middle
Ages,--a veneration, which all historians attest, such as never existed
in the ancient civilization?

It was undoubtedly based on the noble qualities and domestic virtues
which feudal life engendered. Women were heroines. Queen Philippa in the
absence of her husband stationed herself in the Castle of Ba