More impressive, because more unusual, was the ceremony of his degradation, if he broke his plighted faith or forfeited his honor. He was exposed on a platform, stripped of his armor, which was broken to pieces and thrown upon a dunghill. His shield was dragged in the dirt by a cart-horse, his own charger’s tail was cut off, while he was himself carried into a church on a litter, and forced to listen to the burial service, since he was now to move among men as one who was dead to the honor for which he had vowed to live. The chief defect of Chivalry was that, while it displayed some of the finer sentiments of the soul in contrast with the general grossness of the age, it did not aspire to the highest motives as these were felt in the early days of Christianity and as they are again apprehended in modern times. Notwithstanding the vow of devotion, there was little that was altruistic about it. The thought of the devotee was ultimately upon himself, his renown and glory. His crested helmet, his gilded spurs, his horse in housing of gold, and the scarlet silk which marked him as apart from and above his fellows, were not promotive of that humility and self-forgetfulness from which all great moral actions spring. Our modern characterization of the proud man is borrowed from the knight’s leaving his palfrey and mounting his charger, or, as it was called, getting “on his high horse.” In battle the personality of the knight was not, as in the case of the modern soldier, merged in the autonomy of the brigade or squadron; he appeared singly against a selected antagonist of equal rank with his own, so that the field presented the appearance of a multitude of private combats. In the lull of regular warfare he sought solitary adventures for gaining renown, and often challenged his companions in arms to contest with him the palm of greater glory. Writers aptly liken the mediæval knights to the heroic chiefs of Arabia, and even of the American Indians, to whom personal prowess is more than patriotism. Hallam would choose as the finest representative of the chivalric spirit the Greek Achilles, who could fight valiantly, or sulk in his tent regardless of the cause, when his individual honor or right seemed to be menaced. The association of Chivalry with gallantry, though prompted by the benevolent motive of helping the weak or paying homage to woman as the embodiment of the pure and beautiful, did not always serve these high purposes. The “love of God and the ladies,” enjoined as a single duty, was often to the detriment of the religious part of the obligation. The fair one who was championed in the tournament was apt to be sought beyond the lists. The poetry of the Troubadours shows how the purest and most delicate sentiment next to the religious, the love of man for woman, became debauched by a custom which flaunted amid the brutal scenes of the combat the name of her whose glory is her modesty, and often made her virtue the prize of the ring.