Page:A note on Charlotte Brontë (IA note00swinoncharlottebrich).pdf/56

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of superstitious chivalry. Yet I for one, though not like to feel personally aggrieved or even ungratified by the most extravagant of English compliments addressed to France, should be sorry to suppose that it was even yet a taste exclusively reserved for men with French blood in their veins or French sympathies in their hearts, to prefer the old-world principle of mere chivalrous loyalty, of passion self-sacrificed and self-forgetting woman-worship, of knightly folly and faith shown even in the service of a lawless love—or lawless but for the law of honour, that worn-out spiritual mainspring and worthless moral motive of 'art with poisonous honey stolen from France'—to all the home-made treacle of the Laureate's morality. Poisonous as to certain tastes may be the