not carry the weapons, or practise the exercises of knighthood, laid aside, at the same time, the habits and sentiments peculiar to the order.

Another change, of vital importance, arose from the institution of the bands of gens-d'armes, or menat-arms in France, constituted, as we have observed, expressly as a sort of standing army, to supply the place of bannerets, bachelors, squires, and other militia of early times. It was in the year 1445, that Charles VII. selected from the numerous Chivalry of France fifteen companies of men-at-arms, called Les Compagnies d'Ordonnance, which were to remain in perpetual pay and subordination, and for the purpose of enabling the sovereign to dispense with the services of the tumultuary forces of Chivalry, which, arriving and departing from the host at pleasure, collecting their subsistence by oppressing the country, and engaging in frequent brawls with each other, rather weakened than aided the cause they professed to support. The regulated companies, which were substituted for these desultory feudal levies, were of a more permanent and manageable description. Each company contained an hundred men-at-arms, and each man-at-arms was to be what was termed a lance garnie, that is, a mounted spearman, with his proper attendants, being four archers and a varlet, called a coustillier, from the knife or dagger with which he was armed. Thus, each company consisted of six hundred horse, and the fifteen bands amounted to fifteen thousand cavalry. The charge of national defence was thus transferred from the Chivalry of France, whose bold and desperate valour was sometimes rendered

useless by their independent wilfulness and want of discipline, to a body of regular forces, whose officers (a captain, lieutenant, and an ensign in each company) held command, not in virtue of their knighthood or banner-right, but as bearing direct commissions from the crown, as in modern times. At first, indeed, these bands of regulated gens-d'armes were formed of the same materials as formerly, though acting under a new system. The officers were men of the highest rank; the archers, and even the varlets, were men of honourable birth. When the Emperor Maximilian proposed that the French gens-d'armes should attempt to storm Padua, supported by the German lance-knechts or infantry, he was informed by Bayard, that, if the French menat-arms were employed, they must be supported by those of the Germans, and not by the lance-knechts, because, in the French companies of ordonnance, every soldier was a gentleman. But, in the reign of Charles IX., we find the change natural to such a new order of things, was in complete operation. The king was content to seek, as qualifications for his men-at-arms, personal bravery, strength, and address in the use of weapons, without respect to rank or birth; and, probably, in many instances, men of inferior birth were preferred to fill up the ranks of these regulated bands. Monluc informs us in his Commentaries, that he made his first campaign, as an archer, in the Maréchal de Foix's company of gens-d'armes; it was a situation much esteemed in those days, when many nobles served in that capacity. At present, the rank is greatly degenerated." The complaints of the old noblesse,

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says Mezerai, were not without reason. Mean carabineers, they said, valets and lacqueys, were recruited in companies, which were put on the same footing with the ancient corps of gens-d'armes, whose officers were all barons of high rank, and almost every man-at-arms a gentleman by birth. These complaints, joined with the charge against Catharine of Medicis, that she had, by the creation of twenty-five new members of the order of Saint Michael, rendered its honours as common as the cockle-shells on the sea-shore, serve to show how early the first rude attempt at establishing a standing and professional army operated to the subversion of the ideas and privileges of Chivalry. According to La Noue, it would seem that, in his time, the practice still prevailed of sending youths of good birth to serve as pages in the gens-d'armes ; but, from the sort of society with whom they mixed in service of that sort, their natural spirit was rather debased, and rendered vulgar and brutal, than trained to honour and gallantry.

4

A more fatal cause had, however, been for some time operating in England as well as France, for the destruction of the system we are treating of. The wars of York and Lancaster in England, and those of the Huguenots and of the League, were of a nature so bitter and rancorous, as was utterly inconsistent with the courtesy, fair play, and gentleness, proper to Chivalry. Where different nations are at strife together, their war may be carried on with a certain degree of moderation.

"During the foreign wars between France and Spain, espe · cially in Piedmont," says La Noue, "we might often see a body

of spears pass a village, where the peasants only interrupted their village dance to offer them refreshments; and, in a little after, a hostile troop receive, from the unoffending and unoffended inhabitants, the same courtesy. The two bodies would meet and fight gallantly, and the wounded of both parties would be transferred to the same village, lodged in the same places of accommodation, receive the same attention, and rest peaceably on each other's good faith till again able to take the field."

He contrasts this generosity with the miserable oppression of the civil wars, carried on by murdering, burning, and plundering friend and foe, armed and unarmed, alleging, all the while, the specious watch-words of God's honour, the King's service, the Catholic religion, the Gospel, our Country. In the end, he justly observes, "the soldiers become ravenous beasts, the country is rendered desert, wealth is wasted, the crimes of the great become a curse to themselves, and God is displeased." The bloody wars of the Rose in England, the execution of prisoners on each side, the fury and animosity which allowed no plea of mercy or courtesy, were scarce less destructive of the finer parts of the spirit of Chivalry in England, than those of the Huguenots in France.

The Civil Wars not only operated in debasing the spirit of Chivalry, but in exhausting and destroying the particular class of society from which its votaries were drawn. To be of noble birth was not, indeed, absolutely essential to receiving the honour of knighthood, for men of low descent frequently attained it. But it required a distinguished display of personal merit to raise such persons out of the class where they were born, and the honours of Chivalry were, generally speaking, appropriated to those of fair and gentle parentage.

The noble families, therefore, were the source from which Chivalry drew recruits; and it was upon the nobles that the losses, proscriptions, and forfeitures, of the Civil Wars chiefly fell. We have seen, that, in France, their poverty occasioned their yielding up the privilege of military command to the disposal of the crown. In England it was, fortunately, not so much the crown as the commons who rose on the ruins of the feudal Chivalry. But it is well known, that the Civil Wars had so exhausted the English nobility, as to enable Henry VII. to pass his celebrated statutes against those hosts of retainers, which struck, in fact, at the very root of their power. And, thus, Providence, whose ways bring good out of evil, laid the foundation of the future freedom of England in the destruction of what had long been its most constitutional ground of defence, and, in the subjugation of that system of Chivalry, which, having softened the ferocity of a barbarous age, was now to fall into disuse, as too extravagant for an enlightened one.

In fact, it was not merely the changes which had taken place in the constitution of armies and fashion of the fight, nor the degraded and weak state of the nobles, but also, and in a great degree, the more enlightened manners of the times, and the different channels into which enthusiasm and energy were directed, which gradually abolished the sentiments of Chivalry. We have seen, that the abstract prin-ciples of Chivalry were, in the highest degree, virtuous and noble, nay, that they failed by carrying to an absurd, exaggerated, and impracticable point,. the honourable duties which they inculcated. Such