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in the midst of his family and dependants, meeting CHAP equals and superiors only at rare intervals, these filled by ceremony and mistrust. No general or national authority existing or being effectual, each chief looked to himself for protection and maintenance. As he had learned to surround his dwelling with wall and moat, he covered his person with armour; and all arbitrage or judicial assembly being suspended or ignored, private war became the only mode of avenging injury or righting injustice. These circumstances and necessities. worked out in time a law of their own, and institutions to regulate them. Their basis was no doubt what has been since noted and lately stigmatised as individualism, —a great value set on personal energy, a great respect for personal worth, a deep feeling of personal pride. These have been assumed to preclude generosity, and to be the very deification of the selfish principle. Nothing

can be more untrue. Disinterestedness was as much the virtue of the knight as asceticism was of the monk. And by the side of that stern individual independence, which cast off all law and spurned all authority, there arose, what was almost unknown to the man of the ancient world, the voice of conscience, which perhaps was never so strong in any other age.

It is difficult to account for that striving after excellence, that idealisation of man, his duties, his nature, and his mission, which came to constitute chivalry. It was partly, no doubt, in imitation of that ascetic striving after sanctity which animated the monks, and which was transferred with such beauty and advantage to the men of the world of those days. Antiquity had no example of the kind since the decay of the Stoics. Christianity, as understood and acted upon by the generation, and even by the more eminent men of the decaying empire, was abject and unmanly; almost incompatible, indeed, with public or political duties. The Teutonic race re-introduced into the modern world a stoicism of its own: it

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CHAP. reinstated the manly virtues ; erected a high standard of honour, rendering courage and candour once more the attributes of the upper class; and raised woman to that degree of equality and consideration which has given the fair sex, with its gentler views of humanity, so large a share and influence in the public opinion and direction of the world.

There can be no doubt that it created a code of morality not altogether that of the Gospel, and taught a religion of pride which it contrived, somehow or another, to amalgamate with the religion of humility. But the world was all the better for being saved from monkery; and since religion was doomed for some centuries to fall into the hands of a caste of priests, it became advantageous that there should be established a system of morality, a standard of private honour and of public virtue, independent of them.

Another creation and peculiarity of the feudal system was the almost religious, at all events the poetical sentiment, which it threw into personal service or attachment. Indeed, when feudalism arose, there was nothing to which attachment was possible, save the person or the prince. There was not yet a France, and no longer a Gaul. What town was worthy of exclusive veneration? There was an interested as well as a sentimental motive. Princes gave fiefs; chiefs made conquests and distributed them. If a noble had himself appropriated or inherited church lands, it was only an emperor or a king who could by diploma validate the possession. Hence, the monarch grew in reverence, and attracted to him all that dignity and those prerogatives which were waifs for a time, and became the summit and the centre of that homage which all were willing to pay, because they were determined to exact it.

But all this was inchoate at the commencement of the eleventh century. The patent fact was the existence of from a dozen to a score of almost independent

princes, and the gradual establishment under them of a far larger number of counts and barons, who formed the true elements of the feudal system. The most powerful of the great princes was the Duke of Normandy, who had married Hugh Capet's sister. The county of Flanders was remote. To the north and east of the duchy of France extended the territories of the Beauvaisis, of Vermandois, and of Champagne, broken by recent succession, and fallen into the hands of the lesser noblesse; this was indeed also the case with Burgundy, the duke of which was a brother of Hugh. These accordingly gave the new monarch but little trouble. The chief who displayed most hostility towards him was William Count of Poitou. Hugh undertook a military expedition beyond the Loire, and even laid siege to Poictiers. In an encounter the French had the advantage over the Aquitans, but the superiority was not sufficient to reduce them. Subsequently the Count of Perigord took the lead beyond the Loire, humbled the Count of Poitou and captured Tours, which he gave in fief to the Count of Anjou. Hugh interfered, and indignantly asked the conqueror who had made him a count. "Who made you a king?" was the apt reply. In a few years this proud noble disappeared; a Count of Poictiers resumed the ascendancy of. his house, and apparently was not challenged by Hugh.

The king found a more formidable enemy in the Carlovingian prince whom he had dethroned. Hugh had won the clergy to his cause by conceding almost all their demands. The rich abbeys, hitherto sequestered in the hands of laymen, were restored; the church of Laon and Rheims were left all-powerful. The Bishop of Laon recovered a quantity of lands from the possession of the citizens. These had recourse, in consequence, to the dethroned Charles, and by the aid of Arnulph his kinsman, an ecclesiastic, attached to the Church, he got possession of Laon, a strong place.

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CHAP. Hugh laid siege to it, but could not dispossess his rival. On this occasion, in order to make head against his enemies both in north and south, the king associated with him his son Robert, who was crowned king, although Adalbero of Rheims, who consecrated the prince, was unwilling thus to sanction and secure the hereditary succession. Adalbero having died soon after, and the citizens and churchmen of the cathedral city expressing a wish to elect Arnulph, the same who had betrayed Laon, but who had since rallied to Hugh, and been recommended to him, the king thought it good policy to win such a partisan, and sanction his election. to the see of Rheims. Arnulph was Arnulph was no sooner in possession of this dignity, than he made use of it to put Charles in possession of Rheims, as he was already of Laon. The Carlovingian was thus able to raise an army and appear in the field with 4000 men. Hugh demanded aid, says Richer, from the Marne and the Garonne, that is, from those who lived beyond the duchy of France; but his strength was not sufficient to warrant an attack, and the armies separated. Hugh tried other means. He despatched the Bishop of Laon, another Adalbero, to Charles, affecting to have quitted Hugh in anger, in order to rally to his competitor. The bishop, being trusted in consequence, was able to plan and to execute a scheme for the seizure of Charles and Arnulph. It completely succeeded, and Hugh Capet consigned his Carlovingian rival to the prison of Orleans.

It is remarkable that the Carlovingian family should have fallen from the throne, and another dynasty slowly ascended it, without the Papal Power being invoked, or allowed to interfere in the revolution. But, during the tenth century, the Popes were under an eclipse. Distracted by civil war, crushed by the ascendancy of females such as Marozia, subjected to the tyranny of Alberic and Crescentius, and only

rescued from them to fall under that of the German Otho, the Papacy can scarcely be said to have existed in an age, too, of great religious revival. For never was the cry of conscience more powerful, impelling the rude man of those days to undertake the most distant and dangerous pilgrimages, in order to obtain remission of his sins. The belief which prevailed, of an extinction of the world in the year 1000, was more the result than the cause of the universal religious fear, which had fallen upon the minds of men. It must have been produced, in some measure, by the isolation in which persons lived, and by the consequent increase of rustic superstition. The ideas of the convent penetrated into the castle and the palace, and religious reverence was far greater and more universal, than when prelates were uncontrolled lords, and when the Popes intervened and fulminated in every cause and in every society of Christendom.

The resuscitation of the papal power in France took place on the occasion of Hugh Capet's deposition of Arnulph from the see of Rheims. The prelate had been false to two oaths, and in a solemn assembly of bishops he was deposed. Arnulph in defence appealed to Rome, and to the Pope as his only judge. But the plea was rebutted, and in language which would not have been misplaced in the mouth of Luther.

After recapitulating the disgraceful history of the Pontiffs during the last century, an ecclesiastical orator exclaimed, “Whom do you consider that man to be, sitting on a lofty throne, clothed in purple and fine gold? If he want charity, and is merely puffed up by knowledge, it is Antichrist, enthroned in purple, and claiming to be God." "Are the immaculate priests of God throughout the earth," exclaimed again the orator, conspicuous in learning and in worth, to be subjected to such monsters of human ignominy as the Popes to whom I have alluded?"

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