and once-cherished beliefs, in the reduction of our hopes to truths that appear harsh and bare, but in the doubt lest these too should be but phantasms, and the substratum of the whole a monstrous illusion.

The first care of the intellect in its relation to illusion should be recognition, the distinguishing of what we see, know, or think, from what we dream, surmise, or imagine. Why believe a miracle on the authority of a number of persons, no half-dozen of whom can be brought to report alike on the most ordinary scene or occurrence? Why, if judgments so vary, accept our own as an absolute criterion? Our senses make conflicting reports, the key-board of our impressions gives out true or false notes, most resonant under the action of the nerves, which play the louder the more they are out of tune. Have they not lied to us time and again? Do they not bring from a wooden leg messages of a suffering foot? And shall we leave it to our nerves, fearfully and wonderfully as they are made, to love, hate, judge, and act for us? Yet an enormous amount of human intercourse is conducted by these overworked switch-tenders. A wholesome distrust of hearsay and of one's own impressions is an aid to security. How significant is the attitude toward illusion preserved by old Samuel Johnson! He was baptized into it, as it were, being almost the last child in England to receive the royal touch for scrofula; he was subject all his life to hypochon

dria; he was naturally credulous; the question of the return of departed spirits to this earth remained to him always an open and a haunting one; yet illusion knocked at the door of his sturdy mind for threescore and ten years in vain. For above all wavering and susceptibility rose his great sense of reality, his love of truth; and to the persistent lures of dream and inertia he opposed a constant activity of mind and variety of interest. The matter with much of our disillusion is that its content is as poor as that of illusion itself. Illusion must be confronted with realities solid enough to stand against it; and excellent material for their construction lies all about us in the world as we find it.

Yet illusion, after all, is a vapor,our swords cut without dividing it. The realities that move against spirit should be those of spirit itself; 'for it alone is high fantastical.' When we look at the great facts of life we find illusion to be one of them. It envelops our birth, ‘a sleep and a forgetting'; it holds the curtain ready to drop on our exit; it dangles the ball of happiness before us day by day. It is Maia and Ceres, sower and scatterer of the harvest; We must approach illusion reverently; we must abstain from creating it, lest we come to be ruled by the creature of our making, and from renouncing it too proudly, for it is sure to turn up again, like the imp in the household goods of the family who had moved to get rid of it.

Nul, s'il n'est cortois et sages,

Ne puet riens d'amour aprendre. -CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES.

I

THE lady's life and even her character are always sensibly modified by the house she lives in, and the house represents the social or economic requirements of the man of her class. The man shapes the house, and the house shapes the lady. The Roman villa, ample, luxurious, and open, built to house a complicated social life, began to disappear in Europe together with the par Romana, and the restriction of space set in that necessarily accompanies fortification.

In forming a picture of the mediæval castle, we must banish the vision of the coquettish château of the Renaissance, the fortified manor like Azay-le-Rideau, and the fortified palace like Chambord. Many a good knight in the twelfth century housed his family, his servants, and his men-at-arms, under the single roof of his donjon. All castles agreed in certain features. They were surrounded by a strong wall, punctuated by towers and by a great gate flanked with towers, and equipped with drawbridge and portcullis. The gate gave access to the lower court. The inner court was in its turn inclosed by a fortified wall; in the inner court stood the heart of the castle, the donjon; and within the donjon dwelt the lady.

Windows and doors were eschewed in castle architecture. The ground floor of the donjon had no opening of

any kind, the entrance being invariably on the first floor, and reached by a gently inclined bridge, which was removed or destroyed in case of siege. The whole of the first floor was occupied by a single room, the famous 'hall' of ballad and history. This room was round, square, or polygonal, according to the shape of the tower. It was lighted grudgingly by a narrow window here and there, set at the end of a sort of tunnel bored through a wall eight or ten feet thick, and it was warmed by open fires of logs. In the English manor there prevailed until the sixteenth and even the seventeenth century the Homeric custom of the central hearth without a chimney. The smoke made its more or less leisurely way out of a hole in the roof directly over the hearth. But in France the Roman chimney, never altogether abandoned, was in common use from the eleventh century onward, and developed early its characteristic conical hood.

The hall was often paved with tiles of white stone incrusted with black mastic, and on this flooring were spread thick rugs. If the company sat freely on the floor, it was not because there were no chairs, though they were not as numerous as in the Homeric house. But a row of coffers often stood against the walls, and sometimes also there were massive forms with backs, divided like choir-stalls, and sometimes there were lighter benches, easily moved about. Kings and great lords had faldstools, but it was not every simple castellan who owned one. The asperities

of all these somewhat unconciliating seats were tempered by rugs and cushions, but a study of them explains why the persons of the romances so frequently sat upon the bed. In the first place, the bed of the lord and the lady stood as often as not in the hall, opposite the fireplace. It was large and monumental; the frame was gilded, carved, inlaid with ivory. Cords stretched on the frame held a featherbed which was covered with sheets of linen or silk. During the day the bed was shrouded with a rich spread of fur or silk or cloth of gold. It was surrounded by curtains which made it a room within a room. Herrad shows us Solomon sleeping in all the glory of the twelfth century, with a night-light, and as easy a posture as can be assumed by a sleeper who wears a crown.

With all its splendor, the presence of the bed in the hall is symbolic of the change wrought in manners by lack of space. Privacy was gone. The lord and the lady slept in the hall. On the floor above lay their children and their guests, often enough in but two rooms, the women in one, and the men in the other. At the head of each bed was a bar on which the occupant hung his clothes. In the morning he could reach them from where he lay and dress himself behind his curtains before getting out of bed. Outside his curtains was the public. It is often lamented by critics of medieval morals that young men had apparently free access to the bedrooms of young women, and that they so often sat down to talk upon a lit paré. It must be remembered in this connection that the mediæval bedroom offered hardly more privacy than the American sleeping-car.

If the lady's house, in order to keep her safe, was obliged to contract the space at her disposal, she found expansion and light and air in the garden. Without the wall, at the foot of the

castle hall, approached often by a postern of its own, lay her open-air drawing-room. The garden of the Middle Age was strictly architectural. Its symmetrical plan, with orderly subdivisions, the presence of seats of stone or turf, sculptured fountains and plants in tubs, gave it the air of a house without a roof. It was planted with regard to the bird's-eye view from above, and as seen from the castle, must have looked like a carpet or a tiled pavement. The labyrinth and other familiar motives of floor-decoration are found in garden plans. An important feature is always the fountain. Even in Paradise, as figured in Jean de Berri's Book of Hours, a beautiful Gothic fountain refreshed our first parents. Trees were clipped to shape, artificial mounds were raised, stiff hedges divided one room, so to speak, from another. In this charming setting many and many a scene of the romances is enacted. The frowning donjon by itself would leave the feudal lady only half explained; it is in the garden that we must look for the expansion of some of her most characteristic traits.

The lady's own outward appearance is almost as well known to us as that of her house and garden. It is not necessary to believe that she was as uniformly blond as the romances assert; they prove only that the favorite type was gray-eyed, fair-haired, whiteskinned, with rosy cheeks and scarlet lips.

Whatever her complexion, the lady's costume consisted of three main items. Next her body she wore a chemise of fine linen, 'white as a meadow-flower.' This garment had sleeves and covered the wearer from chin to foot. Sometimes the collar and cuffs were embroidered with gold and were allowed to show. Over the chemise she put on the pelisson, a garment made of fur but covered within with linen and without

able in winter, indoors as well as out; but in summer it would be excessive, and there is reason to believe that the fur substrate was then withdrawn, leaving the border as before. Over the pelisson the lady wore the famous bliaut, the dress of half the saints in Christendom as we see them in sculpture or in stained glass. The bliaut was sometimes straight and simple, giving the wearer the same apparent diameter at shoulder, waist, and knee. Sometimes it was confined by a broad cuirass that outlined the breast and hips.

For material the lady might choose among a variety of woolen stuffs or among silks of great beauty, ranging in weight from samite to crêpe de Chine. In purple and scarlet, green and blue, the lady dressed, with often a thread of gold interwoven, and with fringes and braids of gold in plenty. The climax of her costume was the girdle, fastened loosely about the waist and falling to the bottom of the bliaut. Gold and jewels often went to make it; their brilliancy accented the lines of the lady's body, and called attention to every movement as she walked. Her hair was woven, with ribbons, into two long braids, which she pulled forward and allowed to hang in front. Out of doors she wore a mantle which might open either in front or at the side, and was capable of highly effective draping. It could be arranged to show as much or as little as the wearer desired of the costume beneath. Both sexes covered the head out of doors with the chaperon, a sort of peaked hood with a cape. And both sexes wore pointed heelless shoes of stuff or leather, often elaborately ornamented.

Such in appearance were the castle and the lady. Doubtless it would be absurd to represent the social status of the lady as the direct outcome of the architecture of her home, since both

of the life of the man of her class and time. But it is certain that the castle was the primary condition of that life, and that where its interests clashed with those of the lady, hers had to give way. In her everyday life she perhaps gained as much from its limitations as she lost. Though the lady had no privacy, she suffered no isolation. Her place was in the hall, and in the hall the life of the house was transacted. Whatever interested her husband was discussed in her presence. The life of her time was an open book before her; she was free to form her opinion of men and things, and to make her personality count for what it was worth.

But the really sinister effect of the castle and its lands upon the lady was one that resulted from their meaning, rather than from their physical characteristics. They were held by the knight from his overlord on condition of the payment of rental in the form of military service. Every acre of ground was valued in terms of fighting men, and only the knight in person could be sure of rallying the quota and producing them when required. If the knight died, in harness or in his bed, and left a widow with young children or a daughter as his sole heir, there was a good chance that the rent would not be paid. The overlord had the right to see that a fief should not be without a master; in other words, to marry as soon as might be the widow or the daughter of the deceased to some stout knight who was willing to take the woman for the sake of the fief. 'One of these days,' says the king in Charroi de Nîmes to a baron who is threatening him, 'one of these days one of my peers will die; I will give you his fief and his wife if you will take her.' In fact, it could be said of the lady as truly as of the serf that she 'went with the land.' She knew this full well herself.

Hardy younger sons might win castle and lands by recommending themselves through feats of arms to fathers of daughters. Thus the aged Aimeri, in the Enfans Aimeri, wished to provide for his sons by marriage. To Garin he said, 'Go to Bavaria and bid the Duke Naimes to give you his daughter, with the city of Anseiine, its harbors and shores. It is true this land is at the moment in the hands of the Saracens, but you have only to take it from them.' Garin makes his way to Bavaria and explains his idea to the duke. 'You are of high race,' answers the duke, ‘and I will give you my daughter of the fair face.' He called for her forthwith. 'Belle,' said he, 'I have given you a husband.' 'Blessed be God,' said the damsel.

In one aspect or another the identification of the fief and the lady provides the motive of a hundred chansons. It is the basis of her social importance, superseding the production of legitimate offspring which was the basis of her social importance in Greece and, theoretically at any rate, in Rome. It is far from paradoxical to say that as a sort of indemnification for the iron hand laid upon her destiny by the system of land-tenure in the Middle Age, the lady achieved a new measure of personal liberty. She might within reason philander where she would, provided she married where she was bid.

The lady's education was probably, on the academic side at least, considerably better than her husband's. Very likely she could more often read and write than he. But, as in Homeric days, the want of reading was supplied for man and woman alike by the accomplishments of the rhapsode, who is now called a jongleur.

Not only in literary taste, but in practical matters, the daughter of the castle would receive much the same education as Helen of Troy. She would

be a famous spinster and needlewoman, able to make a shirt or an altar-cloth. She would sit by the hour among her damsels in hall or in garden, developing stitch by stitch that incredible faculty of patience which alone has enabled the lady of all times to live with health, and without too much analysis, her life of constant suspension on the acts of another. All household work was familiar to her. Life was full of emergencies, and she was ready for them. Often she was a skillful leech, unafraid of blood, trained to succor the men on whose lives her life depended. The tradition of the 'wise woman' still hung about her, and she had secret recipes for medicines that could cure almost any ill. In religion she learned the Pater Noster, the Ave, and the Credo. She could read her book of hours and follow the Mass.

It is necessary for our purpose to try to form a notion what occupation the lady found for the greater number of the days, hours, and instants of her life. The romantic vision, that sees her dividing her time between awarding the prize at the tourney and presiding at the Court of Love, may be abandoned at once. In its place there rises almost inevitably a picture somewhat nearer the truth, but drawn also from the romances and founded on the conditions of life at the courts of kings and great lords. It is the métier of the romance to deal with action, and from it we receive inevitably the impression of a stirring, animated life. In so far as the house of the great lord is concerned, this impression may be measurably true, though even there we must remember that winter came round at suitable intervals. But in the castle of the simple knight, life, as far as we are able to reconstitute it, must have passed with a monotony before which the modern mind quails. When Gautier, an enthusiast for the Middle Age,