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I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty; but from the best of motives; and therefore shall make her no apology for it when she returns back: 'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself, of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition and knowledge which a book of this cast, if read over as it should be, would infallibly impart with them The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the younger affirm, 'That he never read a book so bad, but he drew some profit from it. The stories of Greece and Rome, run over without this turn and application, do less service, I affirm it, than the history of Parismus and Parismenus, or of the Seven Champions of England, read with it.
We are not the champions of the slave or the hired servant, the factory girl or the housemaid, the seamstress or the washerwoman. We are not the advocates merely of labor against capital, of the employers as opposed to the employed. Ours is the cause of all classes and vocations, and our success is the triumph of all.
The witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason.
Wherefore the memory of those fathers should be immortal, who delighted only in the treasures of wisdom, who most laboriously provided shining lamps against future darkness, and against hunger of hearing the Word of God, most carefully prepared, not bread baked in the ashes, nor of barley, nor musty, but unleavened loaves made of the finest wheat of divine wisdom, with which hungry souls might be joyfully fed These men were the stoutest champions of the Christian army, who defended our weakness by their most valiant arms; they were in their time the most cunning takers of foxes, who have left us their nets, that we might catch the young foxes, who cease not to devour the growing vines.
"Who has not?" returned the countess; "every heart that could be interested by heroic virtue has heard and well remembers its glorious struggles against the calamities of your country. Whilst the newspapers of the day informed us of these things, they noticed amongst the first of her champions the Palatine of Masovia, Kosciusko, and the young Sobieski.
Buckle in England have been the foremost champions, would bear the same relation to political events as Optics and Astronomy do to the phenomena of light and of the solar and sidereal systems. It would deal less with the conjectural and probable than with the predicable and positive.
The theories of its intellectual champions were as diverse as the motives which spurred on their followers to the attack on the outworn abuses of the age. Discontent and faith were the ultimate motive powers of the Revolution. Faith prepared the Revolution and discontent accomplished it.
In discussion of the misdoings at Homestead and Coeur d' Alene it is amusing to observe all the champions of law and order gravely prating of "principles" and declaring with all the solemnity of owls that these sacred things have been violated. On that ground they have the argument all their own way.
He had the courage in the fifteenth century at Florence to proclaim that the philosophers were in hell, and that an old woman knew more of saving faith than Plato. Savonarola and Lorenzo were opposed as champions of two hostile principles alike emergent from the very life of the Renaissance: paganism reborn in the one, the spirit of the gospel in the other.
These men he took to serve with him, and, after overcoming Aquitania, soon went to Britain, where he overthrew the King of the Humbrians, and enrolled the smartest of the warriors he had conquered, the chief of whom was esteemed to be Orm, surnamed the Briton. The fame of these deeds brought champions from divers parts of the world, whom he formed into a band of mercenaries.
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