The Monastery | Page 6

of personal gallantry seldom went
farther in Elizabeth's days than the tilt-yard, where barricades, called
barriers, prevented the shock of the horses, and limited the display of
the cavalier's skill to the comparatively safe encounter of their lances,
the language of the lovers to their ladies was still in the exalted terms
which Amadis would have addressed to Oriana, before encountering a
dragon for her sake. This tone of romantic gallantry found a clever but
conceited author, to reduce it to a species of constitution and form, and
lay down the courtly manner of conversation, in a pedantic book, called
Euphues and his England. Of this, a brief account is given in the text, to
which it may now be proper to make some additions.
The extravagance of Euphuism, or a symbolical jargon of the same
class, predominates in the romances of Calprenade and Scuderi, which
were read for the amusement of the fair sex of France during the long
reign of Louis XIV., and were supposed to contain the only legitimate
language of love and gallantry. In this reign they encountered the satire
of Moliere and Boileau. A similar disorder, spreading into private
society, formed the ground of the affected dialogue of the
_Praecieuses_, as they were styled, who formed the coterie of the Hotel
de Rambouillet, and afforded Moliere matter for his admirable comedy,
Les Praecieuses Ridicules. In England, the humour does not seem to
have long survived the accession of James I.

The author had the vanity to think that a character, whose peculiarities
should turn on extravagances which were once universally fashionable,
might be read in a fictitious story with a good chance of affording
amusement to the existing generation, who, fond as they are of looking
back on the actions and manners of their ancestors, might be also
supposed to be sensible of their absurdities. He must fairly
acknowledge that he was disappointed, and that the Euphuist, far from
being accounted a well drawn and humorous character of the period,
was condemned as unnatural and absurd. It would be easy to account
for this failure, by supposing the defect to arise from the author's want
of skill, and, probably, many readers may not be inclined to look
farther. But as the author himself can scarcely be supposed willing to
acquiesce in this final cause, if any other can be alleged, he has been
led to suspect, that, contrary to what he originally supposed, his subject
was injudiciously chosen, in which, and not in his mode of treating it,
lay the source of the want of success.
The manners of a rude people are always founded on nature, and
therefore the feelings of a more polished generation immediately
sympathize with them. We need no numerous notes, no antiquarian
dissertations, to enable the most ignorant to recognize the sentiments
and diction of the characters of Homer; we have but, as Lear says, to
strip off our lendings--to set aside the factitious principles and
adornments which we have received from our comparatively artificial
system of society, and our natural feelings are in unison with those of
the bard of Chios and the heroes who live in his verses. It is the same
with a great part of the narratives of my friend Mr. Cooper. We
sympathize with his Indian chiefs and back-woodsmen, and
acknowledge, in the characters which he presents to us, the same truth
of human nature by which we should feel ourselves influenced if placed
in the same condition. So much is this the case, that, though it is
difficult, or almost impossible, to reclaim a savage, bred from his youth
to war and the chase, to the restraints and the duties of civilized life,
nothing is more easy or common than to find men who have been
educated in all the habits and comforts of improved society, willing to
exchange them for the wild labours of the hunter and the fisher. The
very amusements most pursued and relished by men of all ranks, whose
constitutions permit active exercise, are hunting, fishing, and, in some

instances, war, the natural and necessary business of the savage of
Dryden, where his hero talks of being
--"As free as nature first made man, When wild in woods the noble
savage ran."
But although the occupations, and even the sentiments, of human
beings in a primitive state, find access and interest in the minds of the
more civilized part of the species, it does not therefore follow, that the
national tastes, opinions, and follies of one civilized period, should
afford either the same interest or the same amusement to those of
another. These generally, when driven to extravagance, are founded,
not upon any natural taste proper to the species, but upon the growth of
some peculiar cast of affectation, with which mankind