Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/223

 won, when the royal tower of his father was in jeopardy or in hostile hands, then the heart of Rufus never waxed weak in counsel, his arm never faltered in the fight.

But one form of words which I have just used opens to us one special side of the character of the Red King which is apt to be overlooked. I have spoken of the point of honour. I am not sure that, in the generation before Rufus, those words could have applied in all their fulness either to Harold of England or to William of Normandy, either to Gyrth of East-Anglia or to Roger of Beaumont. But to no man that ever lived was the whole train of thoughts and feelings suggested by those words more abidingly present than they were to the Red King. It might be going too far to say that William Rufus was the first gentleman, as his claim to that title might be disputed by his forefather Duke Richard the Good. But he was certainly the first man in any very prominent place by whom the whole set of words, thoughts, and feelings, which belong to the titles of knight and gentleman were habitually and ostentatiously thrust forward.

We have now in short reached the days of chivalry, the days of that spirit on which two of the masters of history have spoken in words so strong that I should hardly venture to follow them. Of that spirit, the spirit which, instead of striving to obey the whole law of right, picks out a few of its precepts to be observed under certain circumstances and towards certain classes of people, William the Red was one of the foremost models. The knight, like the monk, arbitrarily picks out certain virtues, to be observed in such an exclusive and one-sided way as almost to turn them into vices.