people who, as people normally do, accepted their times and made the best
of them, since the most estimable needs conform a little to the custom of
his day, whether it be Caractacus painting himself sky-blue or Galileo on
his knees at Santa Maria. And accordingly, many of my comedians will lie
when it seems advisable, and will not haggle over a misdemeanor when there
is anything to be gained by it; at times their virtues will get them
what they want, and at times their vices, and at other times they will
be neither punished nor rewarded; in fine, Madam, they will be just human
beings stumbling through illogical lives with precisely that lack of
common-sense which so pre-eminently distinguishes all our neighbors from
ourselves.

For the life that moved in old Manuel of Poictesme finds hereinafter in his
descendants, in these later Allonbys and Bulmers and Heleighs and Floyers,
a new _milieu_ to conform and curb that life in externes rather than in
essentials. What this life made of chivalrous conditions has elsewhere
been recorded: with its renewal in gallant circumstances, the stage is
differently furnished and lighted, the costumes are dissimilar; but the
comedy, I think, works toward the same _denouement_, and certainly the
protagonist remains unchanged. My protagonist is still the life of Manuel,
as this life was perpetuated in his descendants; and my endeavor is (still)
to show you what this life made (and omitted to make) of its tenancy of
earth. 'Tis a drama enactable in any setting.

Yet the comedy of gallantry has its conventions. There must be quite
invaluable papers to be stolen and juggled with; an involuntary
marriage either threatened or consummated; elopements, highwaymen, and
despatch-boxes; and a continual indulgence in soliloquy and eavesdropping.
Everybody must pretend to be somebody else, and young girls, in particular,
must go disguised as boys, amid much cut-and-thrust work, both ferric and