before the living original vanished forever from the view
of history. How much the fiction of Sir Walter Scott owes to Froissart,
and to Philip de Comines after Froissart, those only can understand who
have read both the old chronicles and the modern romances.

It was one of the congenial labors of Sidney Lanier--pure flame of
genius that late burned itself out so swiftly among us!--to edit a
reduction or abridgment of Froissart's Chronicles dedicated especially
to the use of the young. "The Boy's Froissart," he called it. This book
is enriched with a wise and genial appreciation of Froissart's quality
by his American editor.

Whoever reads Froissart needs to remember that the old chronicler is too
much enamoured of chivalry, and is too easily dazzled by splendor of
rank, to be a rigidly just censor of faults committed by knights and
nobles and kings. Froissart, in truth, seems to have been nearly
destitute of the sentiment of humanity. War to him was chiefly a game
and a spectacle.

Our presentation of Froissart must close with a single passage
additional, a picturesque one, in which the chronicler describes the
style of living witnessed by him at the court--we may not unfitly so
apply a royal word--of the Count de Foix. The reader must understand,
while he reads what we here show, that Froissart himself, in close
connection, relates at full, in the language of an informant of his, how
this magnificent Count de Foix had previously killed, with a knife at
his throat, his own and his only son. "I was truly sorry," so, at the
conclusion of the story, Froissart, with characteristic direction of his
sympathy, says, "for the count his father, whom I found a magnificent,
generous, and courteous lord, and also for the country that was
discontented for want of an heir." Here is the promised passage; it
occurs in the ninth chapter of the third volume:--

Count Gaston Phoebus de Foix, of whom I am now speaking, was at
that time fifty-nine years old; and I must say, that although I
have seen very many knights, kings, princes, and others, I have
never seen any so handsome, either in the form of his limbs and
shape, or in countenance, which was fair and ruddy, with gray and
amorous eyes, that gave delight whenever he chose to express
affection. He was so perfectly formed, one could not praise him too
much. He loved earnestly the things he ought to love, and hated
those which it was be