some personal accomplishments
not inconsistent with his public character. He was cheerful and witty in
society; caressed his victim like the cat, which can fawn when about to deal the
most bitter wound; and none was better able to sustain and extol the superiority
of the coarse and selfish reasons by which he endeavoured to supply those nobler
motives for exertion, which his predecessors had derived from the high spirit of
chivalry.
    In fact, that system was now becoming ancient, and had, even while in its
perfection, something so overstrained and fantastic in its principles, as
rendered it peculiarly the object of ridicule, whenever, like other old
fashions, it began to fall out of repute, and the weapons of raillery could be
employed against it, without exciting the disgust and horror with which they
would have been rejected at an early period, as a species of blasphemy. In the
fifteenth century a tribe of scoffers had arisen, who pretended to supply what
was naturally useful in chivalry by other resources, and threw ridicule upon the
extravagant and exclusive principles of honour and virtue, which were openly
treated as absurd, because, in fact, they were cast in a mould of perfection too
lofty for the practice of fallible beings. If an ingenuous and high-spirited
youth proposed to frame himself on his father's principles of honour, he was
vulgarly derided as if he had brought to the field the good old knight's
Durindarte, or two-handed sword, ridiculous from its antique make and fashion,
although its blade might be the Ebro's temper, and its ornaments of pure gold.
    In like manner, the principles of chivalry were cast aside, and their aid
supplied by baser stimulants. Instead of the high spirit which pressed every man
forward in the defence of his country, Louis XI. substituted the exertions of
the ever-ready mercenary soldier, and persuaded his subjects, among whom the
mercantile class began to make a figure, that it was better to leave to
mercenaries the risks and labours of war, and to supply the Crown with the means
of paying them, than to peril themselves in defence of their own substance. The
merchants were easily persuaded by this reasoning. The hour did not arrive, in
the days of Louis XI., when the landed gentry and nobles could be in like manner
excluded from the ranks of war; but the wily monarch commenced that system,
which, acted upon by his successors, at length threw the whole military defence
of the state into the hands of the Crown.
    He was equally forward in altering the principles which were wont to
regulate the intercourse