disappear--are fixed forever on an ample canvas, in moving form and
shifting color, to delight the backward-looking imagination of mankind.

Froissart, besides being chronicler, was something of a poet. It would
still be possible to confront one who should call this in question, with
thirty thousand surviving verses from the chronicler's pen. Quantity,
indeed, rather than quality, is the strong point of Froissart as poet.

He had no sooner finished the first part of his Chronicles, a
compilation from the work of an earlier hand, than he posted to England
for the purpose of formally presenting his work to the Queen, a princess
of Hainault. She rewarded him handsomely. Woman enough, too, she was,
woman under the queen, duly to despatch him back again to his native
land, where the young fellow's heart, she saw, was lost to a noble lady,
whom, from his inferior station, he could woo only as a moth might woo
the moon. He subsequently returned to Great Britain, and rode about on
horseback gathering materials of history. He visited Italy under
excellent auspices, and, together with Chaucer and with Petrarch,
witnessed a magnificent marriage ceremonial in Milan. Froissart
continued to travel far and wide, always a favorite with princes, but
always intent on achieving his projected work. He finally died at
Chimay, where he had spent his closing years in rounding out to their
completeness his "Chronicles of England, France, and the Adjoining
Countries."

Froissart is the most leisurely of historians, or, rather, he is a
writer who presupposes the largest allowance of leisure at the command
of his readers. He does not seek proportion and perspective. He simply
tells us all he had been able to find out respecting each transaction in
its turn as it successively comes up in the progress of his narrative.
If he goes wrong to-day, he will perhaps correct himself to-morrow, or
day after to-morrow,--this not by changing the first record where it
stands, to make it right, but by inserting a note of his mistake at the
point, whatever it may be, which he shall chance to have reached in the
work of composition when the new and better light breaks in on his eyes.
The student is thus never quite certain but that what he is at one
moment reading in his author, may be an error of which at some
subsequent moment he will be faithfully advised. A little discomposing,
this, but such is Froissart; and it is the philosophical way to take
your auth