THE MENAGERIE. Photogravure from a Painting by T. R. Sunderland. "What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls."-Froebel. 6035 FROISSART (1337-1410?) BY GEORGE M'LEAN HARPER ROISSART is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings, tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage them in welldoing." Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, FROISSART The and over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. works of civilized communities-agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning, religion - were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad barbarians. This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years' War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly |