appealed to the sword to decide the conflicting pretensions of justice. Were chivalry to be looked at as an external and a permanent institution, the charge would be valid. But, regarded as an institution created by the circumstances of a particular age, and taking a shape suited to the wants of that age, the charge is nought. That the knight grasped the sword, was not from the impulse of the essential spirit of chivalry, but on compulsion of the times, that made him knight. Different states of society demand different means to work the same results. To effect certain purposes, both noble and useful, Chivalry grasped the instruments, and the only instruments, which the age had fashioned to its hands. These instruments were those of

war.

And what is war? Simply the shock of antagonist forces, be these what they may, opinions, passions, tastes, or what not. These opposing forces, by a natural necessity, covet the annihilation, or the subjection of each other, and this they may aim to effect either with or without the intervening concussion of physical masses. In the former case, we designate their collision by the technical term war; in the latter, by controversy, or some equivalent term. But it is clear they are both equally manifestations of the self-same radical principle. There is, therefore, as much war in the world now, though the Temple of Janus has so long been shut, as in any former age. And so long as men shall differ in opinion, feelings, or taste and when or how can it be otherwise? - so long must there be war on the earth.

However, in a highly civilized and thoroughly christianized society, such differences are put forward in the spirit of peace, and their collision serves to strike out truth, and open up the way of improvement. But in rude and primitive times, adverse principles are too vehement and sharp, environed with too few restraining and modifying influences, to adjust their hostility merely by argumentation, or any other weapon from the armory of spiritual conflict. The weapons of their warfare are carnal. Their antipathy betakes itself to the intermediation of physical masses; and differing men meet and impinge in the shock of battle.

Just so it is with the tamers of a virgin soil. They must needs struggle incessantly and fiercely with beast and reptile; with hunger, and cold, and storm; with sickness, privation, and casualty in its thousand forms. With the clearing up of the country, and the gathering of its population into villages, the wild animal is exterminated or expelled; and so, though a contest must still be waged with physical wants and elementary inclemencies, man is better furnished with appliances to wage it successfully. In the immaturity, then, of society, war, which, in some guise, holds perpetual fellowship with humanity, takes the peculiar modification of clashing physical forces. Chivalry, therefore, was warlike from the necessity of the times that produced it. It did not, however, stand forth as the advocate and friend of war, but rather as the friend and harbinger of peace to come. For it grasped a rod of chastisement for the spoiler and oppressor, and proclaimed itself the champion and vindicator of weakness, defencelessness, and right. It did, indeed, cast the sword into one side of the scales of justice, but, unlike the juggling Gaul, it did so because cru

elty and wrong weighed down the other. It mitigated the ferocity of war by mingling with its usages a courtesy, humanity, and fairness unknown before, and thus, by diminishing the springs that feed it, wrought toward its final extinction. So do our woodmen kindle on the outskirts of a burning forest antagonist fires, which serve to check the spread of the conflagration, and cause it to die out with the consumption of the material already seized upon. The military character of chivalry cannot, then, be counted a stigma on an institution born of an age of war, and aiming to work out peace by the only fitting implements in its possession. Little, therefore, too little to call for present notice, remains to qualify, in our contemplation, the nobleness of the spirit that produced it, and the beneficence of the results it accomplished.

One effect of chivalry was to redeem from almost a dead letter to life and vigorous activity, the second great law of the christian statute book; the law of brotherly love; the law of sympathy with, and interest in, man simply as man. To love their friends and hate their foes, was the prime precept of the Pagan code. The bounds of kindred and country, the lines traced by pride, interest, and other personal considerations, pagan charity rarely overstepped. Christian love was of a far other strain. It passed the flaming bounds of space and time;' it owned no restrictions on its exercise; it had a hearing ear, a responsive heart, and a helping hand, for wronged and suffering humanity, in whatever clime and under every sky. That a principle so high and pure should have been obstructed in its action, and indeed almost buried from sight by the falsities of the Pagan philosophy, and the crude notions of a thousand barbarous tribes, that obtruded their joint companionship on the religion of Christ, was in no wise to be marvelled at. It but shared the lot of its divine Author. In redeeming it from its thraldom, and sending it abroad on its mission of good, chivalry exerted a most conspicuous agency. For it openly and avowedly took its stand on the side of the innocent, the helpless, the wronged. It acknowledged their rightful and indefeasible claims to its services. And whether on the narrow field of an unsettled district, or on the broad battle-ground of the crusades, it put forth its best might from the impulse of a disinterestedness but slightly tainted with personal alloy.

Again, as we have hinted before, chivalry served as the agent of christianity in redeeming woman to the possession of something like equality in right and privilege with the stronger sex. By that might, which makes the right of ruder times, woman, inferior in brute strength to man, has been held by him in subjection. Save in the remarkable exception of the German tribes, we are not aware that savage life furnishes an instance, where woman has been dealt with as man's equal companion. Nor does heathen civilization much vary the picture. We, indeed, meet with individuals like Semiramis, Aspasia, and Zenobia, Volumnia, Portia, and Cornelia, women who have broken the bonds of proscription, and vindicated for themselves a determinate and equal allotment in society. But where do we find indications that the sex, as such, were ever counted worthy the confidence and equal companionship of man? It is a remark of the

profound and acute Schlegel, that even in the most spiendid models of the Greek literature, there is a lamentable deficiency, a lack of a certain indefinable charm and shadowy delicacy of tint, which characterize the best literature of a social state, wherein woman, holding her just place, and enjoying a proper culture, tinctures with her peculiar influence the springs of thought, sentiment, and feeling, in the popular mind.

It was reserved for chivalry, embodying the spirit of christianity, to demolish this old, moss-grown bastile of the social state, and restore its captives to freedom, and the rights and prerogatives of freedom. An institution having for its avowed aim to redress the injured and protect the weak, could not, of course, overlook the wrongs of a whole sex, reduced, through its mere weakness, to a slavish subjection. And herein did it give expression to the spirit of that religion, which proclaimed itself the friend of the friendless, and the helper of the helpless, and which assigned to moral qualities an everlasting superiority over physical force.

The first result of these efforts in behalf of the sex was, naturally enough, a strong reaction in its favor, and from a slave woman was exalted to a demi-goddess, and more invested with the sanctity of worship, than approached with the freedom of equal companionship. But this exaggeration of sentiment gradually wore away, without carrying with it the valuable results of which it was the factitious accompaniment.

And so chivalry bequeathed to the world the woman of modern society; the equal associate and friend of man; the ornament of his prosperity, and the immoveable pillar of his adversity; his counsellor in straits, in despondency his availing consolation; the life and charm. of the social group, and the queen and presiding genius of that little happiest of kingdoms, home; the nurse, guardian, and inspiration of the rising age, and the missionary bearing refinement and humanizing influences to the remotest nooks and recesses of society.

Such are in part the benefits for which modern times stand indebted to chivalry. The institution, in its outward form, has departed with the age that gave it life. But its spirit yet lives, for it was of a higher than mortal strain. Nor lives alone. Its name is no longer Jacob, but Israel, for it has mightily prevailed. It now wears not one, but a thousand forms; for wherever you witness disinterested, self-denying endeavors put forth in behalf of man, there you see impersonated the spirit of chivalry. Wheresoever you behold the missionary, having no breast-plate but that of righteousness, no shield but that of faith, no helmet but that of salvation, and no sword save the sword of the Spirit, going out to encounter the giant shapes of superstition and vice, for the rescue of oppressed and degraded man; wherever you behold a Howard 'plunging into the depths of dungeons, and diving into the infection of hospitals, in his circumnavigation of charity;' wherever you behold a Fry rising superior to the shrinking delicacy of her sex, to bear a message of love and redemption to the debased and lost; wherever you behold a man of God penetrating the squalid recesses where hopeless Poverty hides itself, and presenting the key that unlocks treasures which no rust can cor

SONG.

WRITTEN BY COLONEL WILLIAM L. STONE, FOR MR. HENRY RUSSELL.

THOSE locks, those ebon locks, now playing
In clust' ring ringlets round thy brow,
Or down thy snowy bosom straying,
In dark and glossy tresses now;
Those eyes, those brilliant eyes, now beaming
In living light, like yonder star,

Or like the liquid diamond gleaming,

As shoot their glances bright and far:

Those cheeks, those cheeks, through which is rushing

The rosy current, mantling there,

Now like the damask sweetly blushing,

Now like the fragrant lily fair:

Those lips, those lips, that smile in gladness,
Sweet as the nectar they distil,

That lisp nor thought nor word of sadness,
And shame the nightingale at will:

That form, that form, of beauty's moulding,
That moves in light and loveliness,
Each proud, elastic step unfolding

In every line, a sweeter grace;

Ah, what are all!- those tresses darkling
That form, those lips, and cheeks so fair,

Those star-lít eyes, like diamonds sparkling,
Unless the MIND is radiant there?

AN

THE BERMUDAS.

RESEARCH: BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SKETCH-BOOK

till within these foure yeares, but that these islands had been rather a habi-
t for men to dwell in?
he was on the seas?
ence hath now told

Who did not hate the name, when hee was on land, But behold the misprision and conceits of the world! us, it is one of the sweetest paradises that be upon 'A PLAINE DESCRIPT. OF THE BARMUDAS: 1613.