I will add one more incident, before changing the topic, having reference as it has to knights, maladies, and baptism. In 1660, Sir John Floyer was the most celebrated knight-physician of his day. He chiefly tilted against the disuse of baptismal immersion. He did not treat the subject theologically, but in a sanitary point of view. He prophesied that England would return to the practice as soon as people were convinced that cold baths were safe and useful. He denounced the first innovators who departed from immersion, as the destroyers of the health of their children and of posterity. Degeneracy of race, he said, had followed, hereditary diseases increased, and men were mere carpet-knights unable to perform such lusty deeds as their duly-immersed forefathers. There are few volumes which so admirably illustrate what knights _should_ be, and what they sometimes were _not_, as De Joinville’s Chronicle of the Crusades of St. Louis--that St. Louis, who was himself the patron-saint of an order, the cross of which was at first conferred on princes, and at last on perruquiers. The faithful chronicler rather profanely, indeed, compares the royal knight with God himself. “As God died for his people, so did St. Louis often peril his life, and incurred the greatest dangers, for the people of his kingdom.” After all, this simile is as lame as it is profane. The truth, nevertheless, as it concerns St. Louis, is creditable to the illustrious king, saint, and chevalier. “In his conversation he was remarkably chaste, for I never heard him, at any time, utter an indecent word, nor make use of the devil’s name; which, however, now is very commonly uttered by every one, but which I firmly believe, is so far from being agreeable to God, that it is highly displeasing to him.” The King St. Louis, mixed water with his wine, and tried to force his knights to follow his example, adding, that “it was a beastly thing for an honorable man to make himself drunk.” This was a wise maxim, and one naturally held by a son, whose mother had often declared to him, that “she would rather he was in his grave, than that he should commit a mortal sin.” And yet wise as his mother, and wise as her son was, the one could not give wise religious instructors to the latter, nor the latter perceive where their instruction was illogical. That it _was_ so, may be discerned in the praise given by De Joinville, to the fact, that the knightly king in his dying moments “called upon God and his saints, and _especially_ upon St. James, and St. Genevieve, _as his intercessors_.”