The contending parties went over and pleaded their most respective causes personally; the earl with calmness, as feeling that he had right on his side; Edmund with easy arrogance, springing from a conviction that the Pontiff would not give a layman a triumph over a priest. The archbishop, however, was mistaken. He not only lost his cause, but he was condemned in the expenses; and if any one thinks that this decree checked him in trespassing, such an idea would show that the holder of it knew little of the spirit which moved prelates fond of hunting. The archbishop became the most confirmed poacher in the country; and if he did not spoil the knight’s sport by riding in advance of the hounds with a red herring, he had resort to means as efficacious for marring the pleasures of others in the chase. He affected, too, to look down upon the earl as one inferior to him in degree, and when they encountered at court, the prelate exhibited no more courtesy toward the gallant knight than was manifested by Lord Cowley in Paris toward the English Exhibition Commissioners, when the mere men of intellect were kept at what the peer thought a proper distance by the mere men of rank. There is, however, no lack of instances of young knights themselves being brought up in arrogance and wilfulness. This sort of education lasted longer, perhaps, in France than elsewhere. As late as the last century this instruction prevailed, particularly where the pupil was intended for the army. Thus, the rearing of the little Vidame d’Amiens affords us an illustration. He was awkward and obstinate, but he might have been cured of both defects, had his mother been permitted to have some voice in his education. She was the last to be consulted, or rather, was never consulted at all. The more the little man was arrogant, the more delighted were his relatives with such manifestation of his spirit; and one day, when he dealt to his aunt, the Marquise de Belliere Plessis, a box of the ear which sent the old lady staggering, her only remark was, “My dear, you should never strike me with the left hand.” The courteous Vidame mortally hated his tutor, and expressed such a desire to kill him, that the pedagogue was asked to allow the little savage to believe that he had accomplished the desired act of homicide. Accordingly, a light musket was placed in the boy’s hands, from which the ball had been drawn, unknown to him, and with this, coming suddenly upon his instructor, who feigned the surprise he did not feel, the Vidame discharged the piece full at the breast of his monitor and friend. The servile sage pretended to be mortally wounded, and acted death upon the polished floor. He was quietly got rid of, and a pension of four hundred francs, just sixteen pounds a year, rewarded his stupid servility. The little chevalier was as proud as Fighting Fitzgerald of having, as he supposed, “killed his man.”