strike one good blow with my sword!' They obeyed him, bound their horses to his, rushed with him headlong into the wildest of the fray, and the next morning all were found dead on their dead horses, all still bound together. And as this King of Bohemia perished with his knights, so the French fell at Cressy ; they died but on horseback. England won the victory, France the fame. Yes, even in their defeat, the French cast their conquerors into the shade. The triumphs of the English are ever a shame to humanity, from the days of Cressy and Poitiers to that of Waterloo. Clio is always a woman in spite of her impartial coolness, she is sensitive to knighthood and heroism, and I am convinced that it is with gnashing teeth that she inscribes in her tablets the victories of England.[1]
- ↑ Of this chapter it may be said emphatically, "fine writing but foolish." For there can be no greater folly than to rake into the remote past for reasons to ridicule the present conditions of society, which are now entirely changed. And when we consider that all this exaltation of pure aristocracy and chivalry over base mechanicals and mere money-making merchants comes from Heine, who elsewhere modestly requests the world to lay a sword on his grave because he had been such a brave soldier in the war against aristocracy and ancient wrongs in the cause of the people, this abuse of the English for not being knightly is simply comic. But when we find him wailing over the first great manifestation of the power of the people in the employment of infantry at Cressy, and speaking with blue-blooded, bitter scorn of vulgar foot-soldiers and cannon, the inconsistency rises to broad absurdity. Our author asserts that in this battle the victory was with the English and its glory to the French;
