probably be the last.
It will be well to let it retire permanently to the rural districts of
Virginia, where, it is said, the fine mailed and plumed, noble-natured,
maiden-rescuing, wrong-redressing, adventure-seeking knight of romance
is accepted and believed in by the peasantry with pleasing simplicity,
while they reject with scorn the plain, unpolished verdict whereby
history exposes him as a braggart, a ruffian, a fantastic vagabond; and
an ignoramus.

All romance aside, what shape would our admiration of the heroes of
Ashby de la Zouch be likely to take, in this practical age, if those
worthies were to rise up and come here and perform again the chivalrous
deeds of that famous passage of arms? Nothing but a New York jury
and the insanity plea could save them from hanging, from the amiable
Bois-Guilbert and the pleasant Front-de-Boeuf clear down to the nameless
ruffians that entered the riot with unpictured shields and did their
first murder and acquired their first claim to respect that day. The
doings of the so-called "chivalry" of the Middle Ages were absurd
enough, even when they were brutally and bloodily in earnest, and
when their surroundings of castles and donjons, savage landscapes
and half-savage peoples, were in keeping; but those doings gravely
reproduced with tinsel decorations and mock pageantry, by bucolic
gentlemen with broomstick lances, and with muffin-rings to represent
the foe, and all in the midst of the refinement and dignity of a
carefully-developed modern civilisation, is absurdity gone crazy.

Now, for next exhibition, let us have a fine representation of one of
those chivalrous wholesale butcheries and burnings of Jewish women and
children, which the crusading heroes of romance used to indulge in in
their European homes, just before starting to the Holy Land, to
seize and take to their protection the Sepulchre and defend it from
"pollution."

CURIOUS RELIC FOR SALE

"For sale, for the benefit of the Fund for the Relief of the Widows
and Orphans of Deceased Firemen, a Curious Ancient Bedouin Pipe,
procured at the city of Endor in Palestine, and believed to have
once belonged to the justly-renowned Witch of Endor. Parties
desiring to examine this singular relic with a view to purchasing,
can do so by calling upon Daniel S.. 119 and 121 William street, New
York"

As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I
had a go