Excerpt from Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama The general practice of assigning some precise period when youths should be admitted into the society of the manhood of their tribe, and considered as entitled to use the privileges of that more mature class is common to many primitive nations. The custom, also, of marking the transition from the one state to the other, by some peculiar for mality and personal ceremonial, seems so very natural, that it is quite unnecessary to multiply instances, or crowd our pages with the bar barous names of the nations by whom it has been adapted. In the general and abstract definition of Chivalry, whether as comprising a body of men whose military service was on horseback, and who were invested with peculiar honours and privileges, or with reference to the mode and period in which these distinctions and privileges were con ferred, there is nothing either original or exclusively proper to our Gothic ancestors. It was in the singular tenets of Chivalry, - in the exalted, enthusiastic, and almost sanctimonious, ideas connected with its duties, - in the singular balance which its institutions offered against the evils of the rude ages in which it arose, that we are to seek those peculiarities which render it so worthy of our attention. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.