The romancers have treated St. George and his knightly confraternity after their own manner. As a sample of what reading our ancestors were delighted with, especially those who loved chivalric themes, I know nothing better than “The Famous History of the Seven Champions of Christendom, St. George of England, St. Denis of France, St. James of Spain, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. David of Wales. Shewing their honourable battles by sea and land. Their tilts, justs, tournaments for ladies; their combats with gyants, monsters, and dragons; their adventures in foreign nations; their enchantments in the Holy Land; their knighthoods, prowess, and chivalry, in Europe, Africa, and Asia; with their victories against the enemies of Christ; also the true manner and places of their deaths, being seven tragedies, and how they came to be called the Seven Saints of Christendom.” The courteous author or publisher of the veracious details, prefaces them with a brief address “to all courteous readers,” to whom “Richard Johnson wisheth increase of virtuous knowledge.” “Be not,” he says, “like the chattering cranes, nor Momus’s mates that carp at everything. What the simple say, I care not. What the spiteful say, I pass not; only the censure of the conceited,” by which good Richard means the learned, “I stand unto; that is the mark I aim at,”--an address, it may be observed, which smacks of the Malaprop school; but which seemed more natural to our ancestors than it does to us. For these readers Richard Johnson presents a very highly-spiced fare. He brings our patron saint into the world by a Cæsarean operation performed by a witch, who stole him from his unconscious mother, and reared him up in a cave, whence the young knight ultimately escaped with the other champions whom the witch, now slain, had kept imprisoned. The champions, it may be observed, travel with a celerity that mocks the “Express,” and rivals the despatch of the Electric Telegraph. They are scarcely departed from the seven paths which led from the brazen pillar, each in search of adventures, when they are all “in the thick of it,” almost at the antipodes. A breath takes St. George from Coventry, his recovered home, after leaving the witch, to Egypt. At the latter place he slays that terrible dragon, which some think to imply the Arian overcoming the Athanasian, and rescues the Princess Sabra, in whose very liberal love we can hardly trace a symbol of the Church, although her antipathies are sufficiently strong to remind one of the _odium theologicum_. George goes on performing stupendous feats, and getting no thanks, until he undertakes to slay a couple of lions for the Soldan of Persia, and gets clapped into prison, during seven years, for his pains. The biographer I suspect, shut the knight up so long, in order to have an excuse to begin episodically with the life of St. Denis.