ers. At
the famous ball at the Hotel de Saint Pol in Paris, in 1393,
King Charles VI. and five noblemen were dressed in
close-fitting suits of linen, thickly covered from head to foot
with tow or flax, the colour of hair, so as to look like
"savages." In this attire nobody recognized them, and the Duke
of Orleans, in his eagerness to make out who they were, brought
a torch too near, so that the flax took fire, and four of the
noblemen were burned to death. See Froissart's _Chronicles_,
tr. Johnes, London, 1806, vol. xi. pp. 69-76. The point of the
story is that savages were supposed to be men covered with
hair, like beasts, and Froissart, in relating it, evidently
knew no better. Whence came this notion of hairy men? Probably
from Hanno's gorillas (see above, p. 301), through Pliny, whose
huge farrago of facts and fancies was a sort of household Peter
Parley in mediaeval monasteries. Pliny speaks repeatedly of men
covered with hair from head to foot, and scatters them about
according to his fancy, in Carmania and other distant places
(_Hist. Nat._, vi. 28, 36, vii. 2).

Greek and Roman writers seem to have had some slight knowledge
of savagery and the lower status of barbarism as prevailing in
remote places ("Ptolomee dit que es extremites de la terre
habitable sont gens sauvages," Oresme, _Les Ethiques
d'Aristote_, Paris, 1488), but their remarks are usually vague.
Seldom do we get such a clean-cut statement as that of Tacitus
about the Finns, that they have neither horses nor houses,
sleep on the ground, are clothed in skins, live by the chase,
and for want of iron use bone-tipped arrows (_Germania_, cap.
46). More often we have unconscionable yarns about men without
noses, or with only one eye, tailed men, solid-hoofed men,
Amazons, and parthenogenesis. The Troglodytes, or
Cave-dwellers, on the Nubian coast of the Red Sea seem to have
been in the middle status of barbarism (Diodorus, iii. 32;
Agatharchides, 61-63), and the Ichthyophagi, or Fish-eaters,
whom Nearchus found on the shores of Gedrosia (Arrian,
_Indica_, cap. 29), were probably in a lower stage, perhaps
true savages. It is exceedingly cu