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The Poem of Coeur-de-Lion has been already mentioned, and the wider form and aim it had got since he first took it in hand. It was above a year before the date of these tragedies and changes, that he had sent me a Canto, or couple of Cantos, of Coeur-de-Lion; loyally again demanding my opinion, harsh as it had often been on that side.
"Your father," said the king, "has approved his fidelity to me, by the loss of his lands, which the newness of my return, and many public cares, have not yet given me time to restore: but this justice shall be done to him, and to thee also, Robin, if thou wilt leave thy forest-life and resume thy earldom, and be a peer of Coeur-de-Lion: for braver heart and juster hand I never yet found."
On the 11th, the 12th, and the 13th December we were continually marching, always going in the direction of the guns. We went from Ecoman to Moree, to Saint Hilaire-la-Gravelle, and thence to the Chateau de Rougemont near Freteval, a spot famous as the scene of a victory gained by our Richard Coeur-de-Lion over Philip Augustus.
Some of the leaders wearied with inaction had pushed on to Normandy where four great fortresses greatest of all the immense and mysterious stronghold on the high cliffs of the Seine, that imposing Chateau Gaillard which Richard Coeur-de-lion had built, the ruins of which, white and mystic, still dominate, like some Titanic ghost, above the course of the river had yielded to them.
"To my mind there can be no doubt," Rashevitch went on, growing more and more enthusiastic, "that if a Richard Coeur-de-Lion, or Frederick Barbarossa, for instance, is brave and noble those qualities will pass by heredity to his son, together with the convolutions and bumps of the brain, and if that courage and nobility of soul are preserved in the son by means of education and exercise, and if he marries a princess who is also noble and brave, those qualities will be transmitted to his grandson, and so on, until they become a generic characteristic and pass organically into the flesh and blood.
Throw the rate to the moat! cut down! spare not! No quarter! remember Je su! I'm shot!" On a silken pallet lying, under hangings stiff with gold, Now is Coeur-de-Lion sighing, weakly sighing, he the bold! For with riches, power, and glory now forever he must part. They have told him he is dying.
I thought I should be obliged to go to Odessa, a city which had become prosperous under the enlightened administration of the Duke of Richelieu, and from thence I might have gone to Constantinople and into Greece; I consoled myself for this long voyage by the idea of a poem on Richard Coeur-de-Lion, which I have the intention of writing, if life and health are spared me.
The historian says: "It was the enthusiasm of honour, the enthusiasm of adventure and the enthusiasm of faith. Daulac was the Coeur-de-Lion among the forests and savages of the New World." The names and occupations of the young men may still be read in the parish registers, the faded writing illumined by the sanctity of martyrdom.
Yet, if it be the legitimate end of military science to accomplish its largest purposes at the least expense of human suffering; if it be progress in civilisation to acquire by scientific combination what might be otherwise attempted, and perhaps vainly attempted, by infinite carnage, then is the professor with his diagrams, standing unmoved amid danger, a more truly heroic image than Coeur-de-Lion with his battle-axe or Alva with his truncheon.
"I will go," he said, "but to save the Saracens, not to slay them." He was not going out to fight, yet he had in his heart a plan that needed him to be braver and more full of resource than any warrior in the armies of the Crusades. He was as much a Lion-hearted hero as Richard Coeur-de-Lion himself, and was far wiser and indeed more powerful.
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