Volume 28, Number 18 · November 19, 1981
Idylls for Idlers
By Robert Bernard Martin
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
by Mark Girouard
Yale University Press, 312 pp., $35.00
Even Thomas Carlyle could find little good to say about the aristocracy in the 1830s. 'What do the idle rich do?' he asked, and gave a blunt answer to his own question: 'Shoot partridges.' He still thought there was a faint chivalric whiff of 'heroic Daring' in their heraldry and banners, but he could no longer find anything of 'intrinsic, necessary divineness' in a class that had become a spent and empty symbol, a form without the spiritual and military leadership that had once animated it.
Review, 2347 words
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