is
present with us; even Milton's

"store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain _influence_",

as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when we regard
them--and using this language, he intended we should--as the luminaries
of this lower sphere, shedding by their propitious presence strength and
valour into the hearts of their knights.

{Sidenote: '_Baffle_'}

The word even in its present acceptation may yield, as here, a
convenient and even a correct sense; we may fall into no positive
misapprehension about it; and still, through ignorance of its past
history and of the force which it once possessed, we may miss a great
part of its significance. We are not _beside_ the meaning of our author,
but we are _short_ of it. Thus in Beaumont and Fletcher's _King and no
King_, (Act iii. Sc. 2,) a cowardly braggart of a soldier describes the
treatment he experienced, when like Parolles he was at length found out,
and stripped of his lion's skin:--"They hung me up by the heels and beat
me with hazel sticks, ... that the whole kingdom took notice of me for a
_baffled_, whipped fellow". The word to which I wish here to call your
attention is 'baffled'. Were you reading this passage, there would
probably be nothing here to cause you to pause; you would attach to
'baffled' a sense which sorts very well with the context--"hung up by
the heels and beaten, all his schemes of being thought much of were
_baffled_ and defeated". But "baffled" implies far more than this; it
contains allusion to a custom in the days of chivalry, according to
which a perjured or recreant knight was either in person, or more
commonly in effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the mark and subject of
all kinds of indignities; such a one being said to be 'baffled'{202}.
Twice in Spenser recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote a
portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous punishment is
described:

"And after all, for greater infamy
He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
And _baffled_ so, that all which passed by
The picture of his punishment might see"{203}.

Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men were not so remote from
the days of chivalry, or at any rate from the literature of chivalry,
but that this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much more to
them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of the same, would those