song among rogues and vagabonds, and appoints them to be punished as such; and the occupation, though a vestige of it was long retained in the habits of travelling ballad-singers and musicians, sunk into total neglect and contempt. Of this we shall have to speak hereafter; our business being at present with those romances which, while still in the zenith of their reputation, were the means by which the minstrels, at least the better and higher class among them, recommended themselves to the favour of their noble patrons, and of the audiences whom they addressed.

It may be presumed that, although the class of minstrels, like all who merely depend upon gratifying the public, carried in their very occupation the evils which first infected, and finally altogether depraved, their reputation; yet, in the earlier ages, their duties were more honourably estimated, and some attempts were made to introduce into their motley body the character of a regular establishment, subjected to discipline and subordination. Several individuals, both of France and England, bore the title of King of Minstrels, and were invested probably with some authority over the others. The Serjeant of Minstrels is also mentioned; and Edward IV. seems to have attempted to form a Guild or exclusive Corporation of Minstrels. John of Gaunt, at an earlier period, established (between jest and earnest, perhaps) a Court Baron of Minstrels, to be held at Tilbury. There is no reason, however, to suppose that the influence of their establishments went far in restraining the license of a body of artists so unruly as well as

numerous.

It is not, indeed, surprising that individuals, whose talents in the arts of music or of the stage rise to the highest order, should, in a special degree, attain the regard and affection of the powerful, acquire wealth, and rise to consideration; for, in such professions, very high prizes are assigned to pre-eminent excellence; while ordinary or inferior practisers of the same art may be said to draw in the lottery something more than a mere blank. Garrick, in his chariot, and whose company was courted for his wit and talent, was, after all, by profession, the same with the unfortunate stroller, whom the British laws condemn as a vagabond, and to whose dead body other countries refuse even the last rites of Christianity. In the same manner it is easy to suppose that, when, in compliance with the taste of their age, monarchs entertained their domestic minstrels,* those persons might be admitted to the most flattering intimacy with their royal masters; sleep within the royal chamber,† amass considerable fortunes, found hospitals,‡ and

* Berdic (Regis_Foculator), the jongleur or minstrel of William the Conqueror, had, as appears from the Doomesday record, three vills and five caracates of land in Gloucestershire without rent. Henry I. had a minstrel called Galfrid, who received an annuity from the Abbey of Hide.

t A minstrel of Edward I., during that prince's expedition to the Holy Land, slept within his tent, and came to his assistance when an attempt was made to assassinate him.

The Priory and Hospital of Saint Bartholomew, in London was founded in the reign of Henry I. by Royer, or Raher, a minstrel of that prince.

receive rewards singularly over-proportioned to the perquisites of the graver professions,* and even practise, in company with their royal masters, the pleasing arts of poetry and music, which all are so desirous of attaining ;† whilst, at the same time, those who ranked lower in the same profession were struggling with difficulty to gain a precarious subsistence, and incurring all the disgrace usually attached to a vagabond life and a dubious character. In the fine arts particularly excellence is demanded, and mere mediocrity is held contemptible; and, while the favour with which the former is loaded sometimes seems disproportioned to the utility of the art itself, nothing can exceed the scorn poured out on those who expose themselves by undertaking arts which they are unable to practise with success. Self-conceit, however, love of an idle life, and a variety of combined motives, never fail to recruit the lower orders of such idle professions with individuals, by whose performances, and often by their private characters, the art which they have rashly adopted can only be discredited, without any corresponding advantage to themselves. It is not, therefore, surprising that, while such distinguished examples of the contrary appeared amongst individuals, the whole body of minstrels, with the Romances which they composed and sung, should be reprobated by graver historians in such severe terms as often occur in the monkish chronicles of the day.

Respecting the style of their composition, Du Cange informs us that the minstrels sometimes devoted their strains to flatter the great, and sing the praises of those princes by whom they were protected; while he owns, at the same time, that they often recommended to their hearers the path of virtue and nobleness, and pointed out the pursuits by which the heroes of Romance had rendered themselves renowned in song. He quotes from the romance of Bertrand Guesclin, the injunc

* In 1441, the monks of Maxlock, near Coventry, paid a donation of four shillings to the minstrels of Lord Clinton for songs, harping, and other exhibitions, while, to a doctor who preached before the community in the same year, they assigned only sixpence.

The noted anecdote of Blondel and his royal master, Richard Cœur de Lion, will occur to every reader.

MINISTELLI dicti præsertim Scurræ, mimi, joculatores, quos etiamnum vulgo Menestreux vel Menestriers, appellamus.-Porro ejusmodi scurrarum erat Principes non suis duntaxat ludicris oblectare, sed et eorum aures variis avorum, adeoque ipsorum Principum laudibus, non sine assentatione, cum cantilenis et inusicis instrumentis, demulcere.-Interdum etiam virorum insignium et heroum gesta, aut explicata et jucunda narratione commemorabant, aut suavi vocis inflectione, fidibusque decantabant, quo sic dominorum, cæterorumque qui his intererant ludicris, nobilium animos ad virtutem capessendam et summorum virorum imitationem accenderent: quod fuit olim apud Gallos Bardorum ministerium, ut auctor est Tacitus. Neque enim alios à Ministellis, veterum Gallorum Bardos fuisse pluribus probat Henricus Valesius ad 15. Ammiani.-Chronicon Bertrandi Guesclini:

Qui veut avoir renom des bons et des vaillans
Il doit aler souvent à la pluie et au champ,
Et estre en la bataille, ainsy que fu Rollans,
Les quatre fils Haimon et Charlon li plus grans,
Li Dus Lions de Bourges, et Guion de Connans,
Perceval li Galois, Lancelot et Tristans,
Alexandres, Artus, Godefroy li sachans,

De quoy cils Menestriers font les nobles Romans.

tion on those who would rise to fame in arms to copy the valiant acts of the Paladins of Charles, and the Knights of the Round Table, narrated in Romances; it cannot be denied that those high tales in which the virtues of generosity, bravery, devotion to his mistress, and zeal for the Catholic religion, were carried to the greatest height of romantic perfection in the character of the hero, united with the scenes passing around them, were of the utmost importance in affecting the character of the age. The fabulous knights of romance were so completely identified with those of real history, that graver historians quote the actions of the former in illustration of, and as a corollary to, the real events which they narrate.* The virtues recommended in romance were, however, only of that overstrained and extravagant cast which consisted with the spirit of chivalry. Great bodily strength, and perfection in all martial exercises, was the universal accomplishment inalienable from the character of the hero, and which each romancer had it in his power to confer. It was also easily in the composer's power to devise dangers, and to free his hero from them by the exertion of valour equally extravagant. But it was more difficult to frame a story which should illustrate the manners as well as the feats of chivalry; or to devise the means of evincing that devotion to duty, and that disinterested desire to sacrifice all to faith and honour; that noble spirit of achievement which laboured for others more than itself—which form, perhaps, the fairest side of the system under which the noble youths of the middle ages were trained up. The sentiments of chivalry, as we have explained in our article on that subject, were founded on the most pure and honourable principles, but unfortunately carried into hyperbole and extravagance; until their religion approached to fanaticism, valour to frenzy, their ideas of honour to absurdity, their spirit of enterprize to extravagance, and their respect for the female sex to a sort of idolatry. All those extravagant feelings, which really existed in the society of the middle ages, were magnified and exaggerated by the writers and reciters of Romance; and these, given as resemblances of actual manners, became, in their turn, the glass by which the youth of the age dressed themselves; while the spirit of Chivalry and Romance thus gradually threw light upon and enhanced each other.

The Romances, therefore, exhibited the same system of manners which existed in the nobles of the age. The character of a true son of chivalry was raised to such a pitch of ideal and impossible perfection, that those who emulated such renown were usually contented to stop far short of the mark. The most adventurous and unshaken valour, a mind capable of the highest flights of romantic generosity, a heart

* Barbour, the Scottish historian, censures a Highland chief, when, in commending the prowess of Bruce in battle, he likened him to the Celtic hero Fin MacCoul, and says, he might in more mannerly fashion have compared him to Guadifer, a champion celebrated in the Romance of Alexander.

which was devoted to the will of some fair idol, on whom his deeds were to reflect glory, and whose love was to reward all his toils,—these were attributes which all aspired to exhibit who sought to rank high in the annals of chivalry; and such were the virtues which the minstrels celebrated. But, like the temper of a tamed lion, the fierce and dissolute spirit of the age often showed itself through the fair varnish of this artificial system of manners. The valour of the hero was often stained by acts of cruelty, or freaks of rash desperation; his courtesy and munificence became solemn foppery and wild profusion; his love to his lady often demanded and received a requital inconsistent with the honour of the object; and those who affected to found their attachment on the purest and most delicate metaphysical principles, carried on their actual intercourse with a license altogether inconsistent with their sublime pretensions. Such were the real manners of the middle ages, and we find them so depicted in these ancient legends.

So high was the national excitation in consequence of the romantic atmosphere in which they seemed to breathe, that the knights and squires of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries imitated the wildest and most extravagant emprises of the heroes of Romance; and, like them, took on themselves the most extraordinary adventures, to show their own gallantry, and do most honour to the ladies of their hearts. The females of rank, erected into a species of goddesses in public, and often degraded as much below their proper dignity in more private intercourse, equalled in their extravagances the youth of the other sex. A singular picture is given by Knyghton of the damsels-errant who attended upon the solemn festivals of chivalry, in quest, it may reasonably be supposed, of such adventures as are very likely to be met with by such females as think proper to seek them. "These tournaments are attended by many ladies of the first rank and greatest beauty, but not always of the most untainted reputation. These ladies are dressed in parti-coloured tunics, one-half of one colour, and the other half of another; their lirripipes, or tippets, are very short; their caps remarkably little, and wrapt about their heads with cords; their girdles and pouches are ornamented with gold and silver; and they wear short swords, called daggers, before them, a little below their navels; they are mounted on the finest horses, with the richest furniture. Thus equipped, they ride from place to place in quest of tournaments, by which they dissipate their fortunes, and sometimes ruin their reputation." (Knyghton, quoted in Henry's History, vol. viii., p. 402.)

The minstrels, or those who aided them in the composition of the romances, which it was their profession to recite, roused to rivalry by the unceasing demand for their compositions, endeavoured emulously to render them more attractive by subjects of new and varied interest, or by marvellous incidents which their predecessors were strangers to. Much labour has been bestowed, somewhat unprofitably, in endeavour

ing to ascertain the sources from which they drew the embellishments of their tales, when the hearers began to be tired of the unvaried recital of battle and tournament which had satisfied the simplicity of a former age. Percy has contended for the Northern Sagas as the unquestionable origin of the Romance of the middle ages; Warton conceived that the Oriental fables borrowed by those minstrels who visitec Spain, or who in great numbers attended the crusades, gave the principal distinctive colouring to those remarkable compositions; and a later system, patronised by later authors, has derived them in a great measure from the Fragments of Classical Superstition which continued to be preserved after the fall of the Roman Empire. All those systems seem to be inaccurate, in so far as they have been adopted, exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition, That fables of a nature similar to the Romances of Chivalry, modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and every country. "In reality," says Mr. Southey, who has treated this subject with his usual ability, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full account: for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason, in other words, wherever there is man. And in similar stages of civilization, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the differences of time and scene."*

To this it may be added, that the usual appearances and productions of nature offer to the fancy, in every part of the world, the same means of diversifying fictitious narrative by the introduction of prodigies. If in any Romance we encounter the description of an elephant, we may reasonably conclude that a phenomenon unknown in Europe, must have been borrowed from the East; but whoever has seen a serpent and a bird, may easily aggravate the terrors of the former by conferring on a fictitious monster the wings of the latter; and whoever has seen or heard of a wolf, or lion, and an eagle, may, by a similar exertion of invention, imagine a griffin or hippogriff. It is imputing great poverty to the human imagination, to suppose that the speciosa miracula, which are found to exist in different parts of the world, must necessarily be derived from some common source; and perhaps we should not err more grossly in supposing, that the various kinds of boats, skiffs, and rafts, upon which men have dared the ocean on so many various shores, have been all originally derived from the vessel of the Argonauts.

On the other hand, there are various romantic incidents and inventions of a nature so peculiar that we may boldly, and at once, refer * Preface to Southey's edition of the Morte D'Arthur, vol. ii., Lond. 1817.