PERHAPS no boy will deny that to find the world still reading a book which was written five hundred years ago is a very wonderful business. For the world grows, -faster than a boy; and when you remember how it is only about ten years since you were reading Jack the Giant-killer, and how you are infinitely beyond all that now, -you know, -you readily see that it must be a very manful man indeed who can make a book so strong and so all-time like as to go on giving delight through the ages, spite of prodigious revolutions in customs, in governments, and in ideas.Now, Froissart sets the boy's mind upon manhood and the man's mind upon boyhood. In reading him the young soul sifts out for itself the splendor, the hardihood, the daring, the valor, the generosity, the boundless conflict and unhindered action, which make up the boy's early ideal of the man; while a more mature reader goes at once to his simplicity, his gayety, his passion for deeds of arms, his freedom from consciousness and from all internal debate-in short, his boyishness. Thus Froissart helps youth forward and age backward.With this enchanting quality, by which he not only defies, but even reverses, the passage of time, our fine Sir John has always had and will long have readers, both old and young; and if it were not for some peculiarities of his manner, growing mainly out of the habits of his time, there would be no need of any special edition of him for boys. But the latter sort find many halting-places and many skipping-places in him, by reason of his long dialogues, his tranquil way of telling all the particulars, and his gay habit of often relating events in chapter fifty which happened before those in chapter forty. The first two of these faults were virtues in Froissart's day, when the longer a story the better it helped to pass the time between battles; and the last one probably arose from the manner in which he collected many of his facts, -which was as follows.You must know that in the year 1357 this lively young Hainaulter, being at that time but about twenty years old, was asked by the Count Robert de Namur to write a history of the wars of those times. The idea tickled his fancy, and he went straightway to work.If any of you should set about writing a history, you would most likely go up into the library, take down a great many books, pamphlets, and manuscripts, and pore and peer and scribble, until after a while when your back was aching and your eyes burning you would look at your watch and say, "Bless me! it's two o'clock in the morning," and so to bed; and such would be your day's work until the history was finished. But not so with our young Froissart. Instead of painfully burrowing among dusty books, he saddled his horse, strapped on his portmanteau behind, and cantered off along the road through the bright French air, with his faithful greyhound following.[1] Presently he was pretty sure to overtake or be overtaken by some knight or esquire: whereupon Froissart would salute him, politely inquire his name, and ply him with artful questions as to the battles he had fought, the lords he had served, the negotiations he had conducted or assisted in, the events he had witnessed or heard of; and thus the two would converse by the way, the horses meantime embracing the opportunity to slacken pace, and the greyhound taking his chance to nose about here and there on each side the road. When the inn or friendly castle would be reached where lodgment was to be had in the evening, Froissart would jot down notes of all that he had learned from fellow-travellers during the day. Sometimes such a journey would terminate in a long visit at the castle of a great man, -as when he went to see the Count of Foix, referred to in the Third Book of these Chronicles; and then in the long evenings he would learn, either from the actors themselves or from knights or attendants about their persons, the deeds and events with which they had been connected.