to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other
lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and
keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with
walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and
guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed
vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude
and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of
gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all
the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm
by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches
borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle
were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor
was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady
slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the
empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields
about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay
down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some
neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his
wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.

In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built
here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only
distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted
above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow,
and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and
reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor
and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from
man's love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.

In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord's sepulchre from the
infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another,
each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine
and devastation,--wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated
prisoners,--that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated
mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A
hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and
unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and
sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever
upbraided a godless generation fo