The history of the last individual knight given in these imperfect pages (Guy of Warwick), showed how history and romance wove themselves together in biography. Coming down to a later period, we may find another individual history, that may serve to illustrate the object I have in view. The Chevalier de Bayard stands prominently forward. But there was before _his_ time, a knight who was saluted by nearly the same distinctive titles which were awarded to Bayard. I allude to Jacques de Lelaing, known as “the knight without fear and without doubt.” His history is less familiar to us, and will, therefore, the better bear telling. Besides, Bayard was but a butcher. If he is not to be so accounted, then tell us, gentle shade of Don Alonzo di Sotomayor, why thy painful spirit perambulates the groves of Elysium, with a scented handkerchief alternately applied to the hole in thy throat and the gash in thy face? Is it not that, with cruel subtlety of fence Bayard run his rapier into thy neck “four good finger-breadths,” and when thou wast past resistance, did he not thrust his dagger into thy nostrils, crying the while, “Yield thee, Signor Alonzo, or thou diest!” The shade of the slashed Spaniard bows its head in mournful acquiescence, and a faint sound seems to float to us upon the air, out of which we distinguish an echo of “_The field of Monervyne_.” JACQUES DE LELAING, THE GOOD KNIGHT WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT DOUBT. “Faites silence; je vais parler de _lui_!”--_Boileau._ Between the city of Namur and the quaint old town of Dinant there is as much matter of interest for the historian as of beauty for the traveller and artist. War has been the most terrible scourge of the two localities on the Meuse which I have just named. Namur has a present reputation for cutlery, and an old one for “slashing blades” of another description. Don John, the great victor at Lepanto, lies entombed in the city, victim of the poison and the jealousy of his brother Philip. There the great Louis proved himself a better soldier than Boileau did a poet, when he attempted to put the royal soldier’s deeds into rhyme. Who, too, can stand at St. Nicholas’s gate, without thinking of “my uncle Toby,” and the Frenchmen, for whose dying he cared so little, on the glacis of Namur? At present the place, it is true, has but a dull and dreamy aspect. Indeed, it may be said of the inhabitants, as of Molly Carew’s lovers, that “It’s dhrames and not sleep that comes into their heads.” Such, at least, would seem to be the case, if I may draw a conclusion from what I saw during the last summer, at the bookseller’s stall at the Namur station, where I found more copies of a work professing to interpret dreams than of any other production, whether grave or _gaillard_.