dal barons were
obliged to sell liberty and privileges to part of their bondsmen to
obtain the wherewithal to maintain the remainder. The gradual growth of
the towns and of trade produced a class which, having all to lose and
nothing to gain by war, threw its influence against disorder. The
advance in the study and practice of law diminished habits of violence
by furnishing legal redress. But the most powerful agent in destroying
the old warlike taste was the invention of gunpowder. In the Middle
Ages the whole male population had been soldiers in spirit and in fact.
But the application of gunpowder to the art of war made it necessary
that men should be especially trained for the military profession. A
limited number were therefore separated from the main body of the
people, who occupied themselves exclusively with military affairs,
while the remainder were left to pursue the hitherto neglected arts of
peace. The love of war and the indifference to human suffering so long
nourished by feudalism could only be thoroughly extinguished by
centuries of gradual progress. The heads of queens and ministers of
state falling from the block attest the strength of these feelings in
Henry the Eighth's time. They were, however, fast losing ground before
the new growth of learning. Their decline is illustrated by the fiction
of the sixteenth century, as their full power was depicted in the early
romances of chivalry.

In the sixteenth century, chivalry as an institution, and even as an
influential ideal had entirely passed away. The specimens of romantic
fiction which were read during the reigns of Henry the Eighth and of
Elizabeth could no longer appeal to an entirely warlike and
superstitious class. They were modified to meet new tastes, and in the
process became superior in literary merit, but inferior in force and
interest. This is especially true of the romances translated from the
Spanish. Amadis of Gaul and Palmerin of England show merits of
narrative sequence and elegance of expression which did not belong to
the earlier romances, of which the "Morte d'Arthur" formed a
compendium. But the chivalry of Amadis and Palmerin was polished,
refined and exaggerated till it became entirely fanciful and lost the
old fire and spirit. In the so-called tales of chivalry produced or
adapted by English writers during this century there is no trace of the
poetry and interest of chivalric sentiments. In "Tom-a-Lincoln," the
Red Rose Knight, t