everal times revised his work. Posterity has
nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which
is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.

But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian
which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great
authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century.
Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt
correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed
virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely
professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully
practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck,
for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which
permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on
prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled
with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes
himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by
his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his
unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet,
and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it
is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and
squires and men-at-arms about him.

There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to
remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age.
It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned
village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved
children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and
agonizing foot-soldiers,--all these consequences of war he sees and
occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever
mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss.
Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find
ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune
by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was
a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.

Froissart's merit, then, is not that he is a great political
historian, nor even a great historian of the culture of his time. He
did not see accurately enough to be the first, nor broadly and deeply
and independently enough to be the second. But kindly Nature made him
something els