, that they would not straiten
any knight or squire so that he should not live well and keep up his
honour."[776] Liberality, indeed, and disdain of money, might be
reckoned, as I have said, among the essential virtues of chivalry. All
the romances inculcate the duty of scattering their wealth with
profusion, especially towards minstrels, pilgrims, and the poorer
members of their own order. The last, who were pretty numerous, had a
constant right to succour from the opulent; the castle of every lord,
who respected the ties of knighthood, was open with more than usual
hospitality to the traveller whose armour announced his dignity, though
it might also conceal his poverty.[777]

[Sidenote: Justice.]

Valour, loyalty, courtesy, munificence, formed collectively the
character of an accomplished knight, so far as was displayed in the
ordinary tenor of his life, reflecting these virtues as an unsullied
mirror. Yet something more was required for the perfect idea of
chivalry, and enjoined by its principles; an active sense of justice, an
ardent indignation against wrong, a determination of courage to its
best end, the prevention or redress of injury. It grew up as a salutary
antidote in the midst of poisons, while scarce any law but that of the
strongest obtained regard, and the rights of territorial property, which
are only rights as they conduce to general good, became the means of
general oppression. The real condition of society, it has sometimes been
thought, might suggest stories of knight-errantry, which were wrought up
into the popular romances of the middle ages. A baron, abusing the
advantage of an inaccessible castle in the fastnesses of the Black
Forest or the Alps, to pillage the neighbourhood and confine travellers
in his dungeon, though neither a giant nor a Saracen, was a monster not
less formidable, and could perhaps as little be destroyed without the
aid of disinterested bravery. Knight-errantry, indeed, as a profession,
cannot rationally be conceived to have had any existence beyond the
precincts of romance. Yet there seems no improbability in supposing that
a knight, journeying through uncivilized regions in his way to the Holy
Land, or to the court of a foreign sovereign, might find himself engaged
in adventures not very dissimilar to those which are the theme of
romance. We cannot indeed expect to find any historical evidence of such
incidents.

[Sidenote: Resemblance of chivalrous to eastern manners.]