II.

The romances of chivalry sprang to life a logical production of the
times. Their authors seized on the character of a king and a
warrior--their highest conception of greatness, in the persons of
Charlemagne and Arthur. Regardless of anachronism, they represented
their heroes as the centre of a chivalric court, accoutred in the arms,
and practising the customs of later centuries; they created in fact a
new Arthur and a new Charlemagne, adapted to the new times. They
brought to light the almost forgotten characters of antiquity. They
represented Jason and Alexander invested with chivalric attributes and
affected by mediæval superstitions. Hercules, according to them,
performed his labors, not because of the wrath of Juno or the command
of Jove, but, like a true knight-errant, to gain the favor of a
Boeotian princess. Virgil the poet was transformed into Virgil the
enchanter. The chief heroes were surrounded with restless knights,
whose romantic adventures afforded unlimited range to the imagination,
and delighted the chivalric mind. The romancers mingled with their
endless tales of "arms and amours," the superstitions and myths which
occupied the minds of men to the exclusion of all real knowledge and
inquiry. The gloomy and terrible fictions which had adorned the songs
of Northern scalds, the bright and fanciful imagery contained in the
tales of Arabia and the East which the crusaders brought back with them
into Europe, the superstitions of Christianity itself, were given only
a greater influence in the lives of fictitious heroes than they were
supposed to have in those of living men. Perfectly suited to the times,
and in fact born of them, the romances took at once a powerful hold on