Quentin Durward [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The scene of this romance is laid in the fifteenth Century, wlhen the feudal system, which had been the sinews and nerves of national defence, and the spirit of chivalry, by which, as by a vivifying soul, that system was animateci, began to be innovated upon and abandoned by those grosser characters, who centred their sum of happiness in procuring the personal objects on which they had fixed their own exclusive attachment.* The same egotism had indeed displayed itself even in more primitive ages, but it was now for the first time openly avowed as a professed principie of action. The spirit of chivalry had in it this point of excellence, that, however overstrained and fantastic many of its doctrines may appear to us, they were ail founded on generosity and self-denial, of which, if the earth were deprived, it would be difficult to con-ceive the existence of virtue among the human race. Among those who were the first to ridicule and abandon the self-denying principies in which the young knight was instructed, and to which he was so carefully trained up, Louis the Xlth of France* was (the Chief. That Sover-eign was of a character so purely selfish—so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment, that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permit-ted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its