Points of Friction
under the levelling laws of Henry of Navarre.
In this vast and varied chronicle, war plays its appointed part. "We cannot," says Walter Savage Landor, "push valiant men out of history." We cannot escape from the truths interpreted, and the conditions established by their valour. What has been slightingly called the "drum-and-trumpet narrative" holds its own with the records of art and science. "It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism," said Macaulay, "to escape the fate of China."
The endless endeavour of states to control their own destinies, the ebb and flow of the sea of combat, the "recurrent liturgy of war," enabled the old historians to perceive with amazing distinctness the traits of nations, etched as sharply then as now on the imperishable pages of history. We read Froissart for human delight rather than for solid information; yet Froissart's observations
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