y"--should confession be made that in the present
rendering a purely arbitrary title has been assigned this little book;
chiefly for commercial reasons, since the word "dizain" has been
adjudged both untranslatable and, in its pristine form, repellantly
_outre_.

2

You are to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide interpretation; and
are always to remember that in the bleak, florid age these tales
commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier significant of any
personal trait than of a world-wide code in consonance with which all
estimable people lived and died. Its root was the assumption
(uncontested then) that a gentleman will always serve his God, his honor
and his lady without any reservation; nor did the many emanating by-laws
ever deal with special cases as concerns this triple, fixed, and
fundamental homage.

Such is the trinity served hereinafter. Now about lady-service, or
_domnei_, I have written elsewhere. Elsewhere also I find it recorded
that "the cornerstone of Chivalry is the idea of vicarship: for the
chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and
goes about this world as his Father's representative in an alien
country."

I believe the definition holds: it certainly tends to explain the
otherwise puzzling pertinacity with which the characters in these tales
talk about God and act upon an assured knowledge as to Heaven's private
intentions and preferences. These people are the members of one family
engrossed, as all of us are apt to be when in the society of our kin, by
family matters and traditions and by-words. It is not merely that they
are all large children consciously dependent in all things upon a not
foolishly indulgent Father, Who keeps an interested eye upon the least
of their doings, and punishes at need,--not merely that they know
themselves to act under surveillance and to speak within ear-shot of a
divine eavesdropper. The point is, rather, that they know this
observation to be as tender, the punishment to be as unwilling, as that
which they themselves extend to their own children's pranks and
misdemeanors. The point is that to them Heaven is a place as actual and
tangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their living
is a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point is that
the Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with capital letters
in the Church Service; not an abstraction, not a sort of a something
vaguely desc