over the fall of such a pearl of knighthood, be it on the side he happens to favor or on the other! But truly, for sweeping from the face of the earth some few hundreds of villain churls, who are born but to plough it, the high-born and inquisitive historian has marvelous little sympathy"
I should like, out of my affection for the Chronicles, to feel that Sir Walter overstated the case when he put these cheerful words into the mouth of Dundee; but it is vain to deny that Froissart, living in a darkened age, was as indifferent to the fate of the rank and file as if he had been a great nineteenth-century general. To be sure, the rank and file were then counted by the hundreds rather than by the thousands, and it took years of continuous warfare to kill as many soldiers as perished in one of our modern battles. Moreover, the illuminating truth that Jack is as good as his master—by help of which we all live now in such striking brotherhood and amity—had not then dawned upon a proud and prejudiced world. Fighting was the grand business of life, and that Jack did not fight as well as his master was a fact
