Attention to the subjects of the middle ages of Europe has for many years been growing among us. It was first excited by Warton's history of our national verse, and Percy's edition of the Relics of ancient English Poetry. The romances of chivalry, both in prose and metre, and the numberless works on the Troubadour, and every other description of literature during the middle ages which have been published within the last few years, have sustained the interest. The poems of Scott convinced the world that the chivalric times of Europe can strike the moral imagination as powerfully and pleasingly in respect of character, passion, and picturesqueness of effect, as the heroic ages of Greece; and even very recently the glories of chivalry have been sung by a poetess whom Ariosto himself would have been delighted to honour.[3] Still, however, no attempt has been hitherto made to describe at large the institutions of knighthood, the foundation of all that elegant superstructure of poetry and romance which we admire, and to mark the history of chivalry in the various countries of Europe. Those institutions have, indeed, been allowed a few pages in our Encyclopædias; and some of the sketches of them are drawn with such boldness and precision of outline that we may regret the authors did not present us with finished pictures. Our popular historians have but hastily alluded to the subject; for they were so much busied with feudalism and politics, that they could afford but a small space for the play of the lighter graces of chivalry. For a description, indeed, of antique manners, our materials are not so ample as for that of their public lives. But still the subject is not without its witnesses. The monkish chroniclers sometimes give us a glimpse of the castles of our ancestors. Many of the knights in days of yore had their biographers; and, for the most interesting time of chivalry, we possess an historian, who, for vividness of delineation, kindliness of feeling, and naïveté of language, is the Herodotus of the middle ages. "Did you ever read Froissart?" "No," answered Henry Morton. "I have half a mind," rejoined Claverhouse, "to contrive that you should have six months' imprisonment, in order to procure you that pleasure. His chapters inspire me with more enthusiasm than even poetry itself."