Gilbert had been brought up.

For Gilbert was the type of noble youth in the days when the light of
chivalry had dawned upon an age of violence, but was not yet fully
risen. God, honour, woman--these made up the simple trinity of a
knight's belief and reverence, from the moment when the Church began to
make an order of fighting men, with ceremonies and obligations of their
own, thereby forever binding together the great conceptions of true
Christianity and true nobility.

In the absence of anything like real learning among the laymen of those
days, education in its simplest and most original sense played a very
large part in life, and Gilbert had acquired that sort of culture in
its highest and best form. The object of mere instruction is to impart
learning for some distinct purpose, but most chiefly, perhaps, in order
that it may be a means of earning a livelihood. The object of education
is to make men, to produce the character of the man of honour, to give
men the inward grace of the gentleman, which cannot manifest itself
outwardly save in good manners, modesty of bearing, and fearlessness;
and such things in earlier days were profoundly associated in the minds
of men with the inward principles and the outward rites of
Christianity. It was the perfect simplicity, and in a measure the ample
harmony, of beliefs, principles, and rules of action that made life
possible at all at a time when the modern art of government was in its
earliest infancy, when the idea of a constitution had been lost in the
chaos of the dark ages, and when the direction of kingdoms,
principalities, and societies was a purely personal matter, wholly
dependent upon individual talent or caprice, virtue or vice, charity or
greed. Without some such foundation in the character of the times,
society, the world, and the Church must have fallen a prey to the