It would, however, be a mistake to imagine that Joinville's book is exclusively or even mainly a chronicle of small beer. If he is not a Villehardouin or a Carlyle, his battlepieces are vivid and truthful, and he has occasional passages of no small episodic importance, such as that dealing with the Old Man of the Mountain. But, above all, the central figure of his book redeems it from the possibility of the charge of being commonplace or ignoble. To St Louis Joinville is a nobler Boswell; and hero-worshipper, hero, and heroic ideal all have something of the sublime about them. The very pettiness of the details in which the good seneschal indulges as to his own weakness only serves to enhance the sublime unworldliness of the king. Joinville is a better warrior than Louis, but, while the former frankly prays for his own safety, the latter only thinks of his army's when they have escaped from the hands of the aliens. One of the king's knights boasts that ten thousand pieces have been "forcontés" (counted short) to the Saracens; and it is with the utmost trouble that Joinville and the rest can persuade the king that this is a joke, and that the Saracens are much more likely to have got the advantage. He warns Joinville against wine-bibbing, against bad language, against all manner of foibles small and great; and the pupil acknowledges that this physician at any rate had healed himself in these respects. It is true that he is severe towards infidels; and his approval of the knight who, finding a Jew likely to get the better of a theological argument, resorted to the baculine variety of logic, does not meet the views of the 20th century. But Louis was not of the 20th century but of the 13th, and after his kind he certainly deserved Joinville's admiration. Side by side with his indignation at the idea of cheating his Saracen enemies may be mentioned his answer to those who after Taillebourg complained that he had let off Henry III. too easily. "He is my man now, and he was not before," said the king, a most unpractical person certainly, and in some ways a sore saint for France. But it is easy to understand the half-despairing adoration with which a shrewd and somewhat prosaic person like Joinville must have regarded this flower of chivalry born out of due time. He has had his reward, for assuredly the portrait of St Louis, from the early collection of anecdotes to the last hearsay sketch of the woeful end at Tunis, with the famous _enseignement_ which is still the best summary of the theoretical duties of a Christian king in medieval times, is such as to take away all charge of vulgarity or mere _commérage_ from Joinville, a charge to which otherwise he might perhaps have been exposed.