jure up a vision, and listen to the strains of a young and noble poet, surrounded by the high atmosphere of chivalry-the presence of Beauty and Valour. Such were the boasted delights of Owen Glendower in his youth. For I was train'd up in the English court, Where, being but young, I framed to the Harp And gave the tongue a helpful ornament. The account given by M. Raynouard of those celebrated tribunals, the Courts or Parliaments of Love, is curious and amusing; though he seems to attach more importance to those institutions, than probably they ever claimed. Many authors had illustrated this subject by their researches before M. Raynouard, amongst whom Sismondi, in his Litterature du midi de 'Europe, and Ginguené, in his Histoire litterature d'Italie, are, perhaps, the best known in this country. Our author, however, has availed himself of some sources of information, which had escaped the attention of most of his predecessors; and from a neglected volume written by André, a chaplain to the Court of France, he has obtained much interesting matter on this obscure subject. In celebrating the charms of their respective mistresses, or in disputing the various abstruse questions with which la gaie science abounded, it was natural that the chivalrous rivals should wish to refer their contention to some arbitrament, to the authority of which both parties might submissively yield. The Courts of Love, where the fair judges never failed to exact and obtain the most implicit obedience, were accordingly instituted soon after the introduction of the Gay Science, and as early as the time of the Count of Poitiers, one of the first and noblest of the Troubadours. The courts were generally held under the authority of some lady distinguished by rank and beauty, who associated to herself a competent number of other judges, sometimes amounting to sixteen or twenty. André the Chaplain mentions, amongst others, the Courts of the Ladies of Gascony -of Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne-of the Queen Eleanore of the Countess of Champagne-and of the Countess of Flanders. This Queen Eleanore was married to Louis VII. of France, called the Young, and afterwards to our Henry II. Before these awful and lovely tribunals, the rival poets used to appear in person, and plead their cause; and the proceedings were, no doubt, assimilated very nearly to those of the courts of justice of that day, where all the pleadings were ore tenus, or conducted in open court, without the intervention of writing. These compositions were called Tensons, as it is supposed from the Latin conTENSionem, or jeux-partis; and the judgments of the court were called les arrets d'amour. André the Chaplain has given us a collection of the principal rules, by which these judicatures were guided, and which is said by him to have been revealed to a Breton knight in the following manner. The champion, wandering through a thick forest, in hopes of encountering the great Arthur, was met by a fair lady, who thus addressed him :-"I know whom you seek; but your search is vain without my aid. You have sought the love of a Breton lady, and she requires you to procure for her the celebrated faucon, which reposes on a perch in the court of Arthur. To obtain this bird, you must prove in combat the superior charms of the lady of your heart over those of the mistress of every knight in the court of Arthur." A number of romantic adventures follow. At last, the knight finds the faucon on a perch of gold: a paper is suspended to the perch by a golden chain; this paper contained the code of love, which it was necessary for the knight to promulgate, ere he might venture to bear away the falcon as a prize. This code of erotic laws was presented to a tribunal composed of many brilliant and beautiful judges. It was adopted by them, and ordered to be observed by all the suitors of their court, under the heaviest penalties. The code contained thirtyone articles, of which we shall give a few.* They are all mentioned by André the Chaplain. 1. Marriage is no excuse against another attachment. 2. He, who knows not how to conceal, knows not how to love. 3. No one can love two persons at one time. 4. Love must always increase or diminish. 16. At the sudden appearance of his mistress, the heart of a true lover trembles. 23. A true lover must eat and sleep sparingly. 28. A moderate presumption is sufficient to produce suspicion in the mind of a lover. -30. The image of his mistress is present, without intermission, to the mind of the true lover. It does not clearly appear what were the sanctions of these awful laws, or by what process the courts of love enforced obedience to their decrees; nor indeed is it very evident whether all the cases, which came within their cognizance, were not merely fictions of the imagination, for the purpose of displaying the poetical talents of the advocates, and the wit and beauty of the judges. M. Raynouard, however, seems to consider these tribunals as possessed of the power of enforcing their decrees, not indeed by the exertion of force, but by the stronger agency of opinion-of opinion, which permitted Some of these enactments are not very unlike the laws of Chaucer's Court of Love, which were twenty in number, but which are more free and more humourous than any contained in this code. not a knight to enjoy tranquillity in the bosom of his family, while his peers were waging war beyond the seas-of opinion, which compels the gamester to pay a debt of honour with the money, for want of which his industrious tradesman is starving-of opi nion, which does not permit a man to refuse a challenge, though the law has designated it a crime-of opinion, before the influence of which even tyrants tremble.* We shall give one of the cases, with the decision of the lady judges, for the edification of our fair readers, especially those who are casuistically and coquettishly inclined. CASE. A knight, betrothed to a lady, had been absent a considerable time beyond the seas. She waited, in vain, for his return, and his friends, at last, began to despair of it. The lady, impatient of the delay, found a new lover. The secretary of the absent knight, indignant at the infidelity of the lady, opposed this new passion. The lady's defence was this:"Since a widow, after two years of mourning,† may receive a new lover, much more may she, whose betrothed husband, in his absence, has sent her no token of remembrance or fidelity, though he lacked not the means of transmitting it." This question occasioned long debates, and it was argued in the court of the Countess of Champagne. The judgment was delivered as follows: The "A lady is not justified in renouncing her lover, under the pretext of his long absence, unless she has certain proof that his fidelity has been violated, and his duty forgotten. There is, however, no legal cause of absence, but necessity, or the most honourable call. Nothing should give a woman's heart more delight than to hear, in lands far distant from the scene of his achievements, the renown of her lover's name, and the reverence in which he is held by the warlike and the noble. circumstance of his having refrained from despatching a messenger, or a token of his love, may be explained on prudential reasons, since he may have been unwilling to trust the secret of his heart to every stranger's keeping; for though he had confided his despatches to a messenger, who might not have been able to comprehend them, yet, by the wickedness of that messenger, or by his death on the journey, the secret of his love might be revealed." The ingenuity, displayed by the pleaders on both sides, was considerable, and the decisions of the judges, which are gene * Raynouard, II. cxxiii. This was one of the laws of the court of love," Two years' widowhood, in case of death, shall be duly observed by the survivor.' The lady, who was the defendant in this cause, would not have found so easy an excuse in our law, which requires that seven years should pass after the absence of any one beyond sea, before the presumption of death can arise. rally pretty diffuse, are usually luminous and conclusive. Unfortunately for the fame of la gaie science, there were no reporters at that day to transmit to us the authentic records of the courts of love; and we must, therefore, be satisfied with the relics which have been casually preserved of these singular proceedings. We may remark, however, that the authority of the decisions which remain, are still unimpeached by any superior jurisdiction. ART. V.—SUNDAY. [New Monthly Magazine-April, 1821.] I am no herald to enquire of men's pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues." 44 SIDNEY. Sunday must needs be an excellent institution, since the very breaking of it is the BONNEL THORNTON. support of half the villages round town." If it were possible to trace back the current of an Englishman's blood to its early fountains, what a strange compound would the mass present! What a confusion and intermingling of subsidiary streams from the Britons, Romans, Danes, Saxons, and Normans; amalgamating with minor contributions from undiscoverable sources, mocking the chemist's power to analyse, and almost bewildering imagination to conceive! Being myself" no tenth transmitter of a foolish face," I have sometimes maliciously wished that a bona fide, genuine, scrupulously-accurate family tree, shooting its branches up into the darkness of antiquity, could be displayed before some of our boasters of high descent and genealogical honours. Heavens! how would it vary from their own emblazoned parchment and vellum records ! What confusion of succession-what scandal thrown upon Lady Barbaras and Lady Bridgets, all immaculate in their time-what heraldic bars in noble scutcheons, ancient and modern, from the now first-detected intrigues of chaplains, captains, pages, and serving-men, with their frail mistresses, whose long stomachers, stuck up in the picture-gallery of the old Gothic hall, look like so many insurance-plates against the fire of Cupid's torch!Strange that there should be a limit to this pride of ancestry! If it be glorious to trace our family up to Edward the First, it should be still more so to ascend to Edward the Confessor; yet pride seldom mounts higher than the first illustrious name, the first titled or celebrated progenitor, whom it chooses to call the founder of the family. The haughtiest vaunter of high pedigree and the honours of unbroken descent, from the time of William the Conqueror, would probably weep with shame at being enabled to follow his name three hundred years farther back, through a succession of ploughmen, labourers, or malefactors. As it cannot be denied that all families are, in point of fact, equally ancient, the distinction consists in possessing records to prove a certain succession; and even this, it appears, ceases to be a boast beyond a certain point. Fantastical vanity! which, while it cannot deny to the beggar at the gate the privilege of being equally descended from Adam and Eve, rests its own claim to superiority upon being enabled to prove a fiftieth part of the same antiquity, struts, like the jay in the fable, in others' finery, and piques itself upon the actions of ancestors, instead of its own. Give me the man who is an honour to his titles; not him whose titles are his honour! But, if an Englishman be such an heterogeneous compound as to his personal composition, he has the consolation of knowing, that his language is, at least, equally confused and intermingled with Teutonic, Celtic, and classical derivations. Let us consider, for instance, the hebdomadary (as Dr. Johnson would call it,) or the days of the week, named after the Sun, the Moon, Tuisco, Woden or Odin, Thor, Freya, and Saturn; four Scandinavian or northern deities, three Pagan gods worshipped in the south, and not one christian sponsor! Let the reader lift up the curtain of time, and, taking a hasty glimpse of the last ten or twenty centuries, suffer his imagination to wander amid the scenes and associations suggested by the enumeration we have just made. Perched on the crags of rocks and mountains, and frowning at the rolling clouds and snow-storms that lour beneath, he will mark the gigantic heroes of the north; the warriors of Ossian will stalk gloomily before him; he will roam through the five hundred and forty halls of Thor's palace, till he find him seated on his throne with his terrific wife, Freya, by his side, and in his hand the gigantic hammer of which he has read in the Runic poetry; and finally, he will ascend into the Scandinavian elysium, or palace of Valhalla, where he will behold the beatified warriors drinking mead out of the skulls of their enemies, administered by the fair hands of the Valkyriæ, those virgin Houris of the north, blessed with perpetual youth and never-fading beauty. Turning from the appalling sublimity of these cold, desolate, and warlike regions, let his fancy revel in the rich and sunny luxuriance of Grecian landscape, awakening from their long sleep all the beautiful realities and classical fictions connected with the glorious god of the Sun, the Apollo of the poets, the patron deity of Delphi and of Delos. How beautiful is the morning! Slowly rising above the mountains of Argos, the sun shoots a golden bloom over the undimpled waters of the Ægean and the sea of Myrtos, gilding every height of the Cycladean Islands, as if the very hills had caught fire to do honour to the quinquennial festival of Apollo, now celebrating at Delos. See! in every direction the green ocean is studded with the white sails of barks (like daisies in the grass) hastening |