importance to what he calls "the feudal family."
"The feudal family … lived separated from the rest of the population, shut up in the castle. The colonists and serfs made no part of it; the origin of the members of this society was different, the inequality of their situation immense. Five or six individuals in a situation at once superior to and estranged from the rest of the society, that was the feudal family. It was, of course, invested with a peculiar character. It was narrow, concentrated, and constantly called upon to defend itself against, to distrust, and, at least, to isolate itself from, even its retainers. The interior life, domestic manners, were sure to become predominant in such a system. … Domestic life necessarily, therefore, acquired great sway. Proofs of this abound. Was it not within the bosom of the feudal family that the importance of women developed itself?"[1]
Chivalry was in its origin as much aristocratic as religious; the poetry of sex began within the narrow confines of a small hereditary class, and from thence exerted its humanising influence over wider and always widening circles of social life. Precisely in the same way did the political liberties of the modern world develop. First the reign of privilege
- ↑ See "History of Civilisation," vol. i. p. 71.
