the turbulent independence and ferocity, belonging to old habits of
violence, still influencing the manners of a people who had been so
lately in a barbarous state; yet, on the other hand, the characters
and sentiments of many of the actors may, with the utmost probability,
be described with great variety of shading and delineation, which
belongs to the newer and more improved period, of which the world has
but lately received the light.

The reign of James I. of England possessed this advantage in a
peculiar degree. Some beams of chivalry, although its planet had been
for some time set, continued to animate and gild the horizon, and
although probably no one acted precisely on its Quixotic dictates, men
and women still talked the chivalrous language of Sir Philip Sydney's
Arcadia; and the ceremonial of the tilt-yard was yet exhibited, though
it now only flourished as a Place de Carrousel. Here and there a high-
spirited Knight of the Bath, witness the too scrupulous Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, was found devoted enough to the vows he had taken, to
imagine himself obliged to compel, by the sword's-point, a fellow-
knight or squire to restore the top-knot of ribbon which he had stolen
from a fair damsel;[Footnote: See Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs.]
but yet, while men were taking each other's lives on such punctilios
of honour, the hour was already arrived when Bacon was about to teach
the world that they were no longer to reason from authority to fact,
but to establish truth by advancing from fact to fact, till they fixed
an indisputable authority, not from hypothesis, but from experiment.

The state of society in the reign of James I. was also strangely
disturbed, and the license of a part of the community was perpetually
giving rise to acts of blood and violence. The bravo of the Queen's
day, of whom Shakspeare has given us so many varieties, as Bardolph,