If he wishes sincerely to follow
their example, he should describe the manners of his own time, and not
of theirs. They painted from observation, and not from study; and the
familiarity and _naivete_ of their delineations, transcribed with a
slovenly and hasty hand from what they saw daily before them, is as
remote as possible from the elaborate pictures extracted by a modern
imitator from black-letter books, and coloured, not from the life, but
from learned theories, or at best from mouldy monkish illuminations, and
mutilated fragments of painted glass.
But the times of chivalry, it may be said, were more picturesque than
the present times. They are better adapted to poetry; and everything
that is associated with them has a certain hold on the imagination, and
partakes of the interest of the period. We do not mean utterly to deny
this; nor can we stop, at present, to assign exact limits to our assent:
but this we will venture to observe, in general, that if it be true that
the interest which we take in the contemplation of the chivalrous era,
arises from the dangers and virtues by which it was distinguished,--from
the constant hazards in which its warriors passed their days, and the
mild and generous valour with which they met those hazards,--joined to
the singular contrast which it presented between the ceremonious polish
and gallantry of the nobles, and the brutish ignorance of the body of
the people:--if these are, as we conceive they are, the sources of the
charm which still operates in behalf of the days of knightly adventure,
then it should follow, that nothing should interest us, by association
with that age, but what serves naturally to bring before us those
hazards and that valour, and gallantry, and aristocratical superiority.
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