His "hair-breadth 'scapes" under these frequent exigencies, were, no doubt, among the most interesting adventures of his life, furnishing rare material, could they be procured, for the poet and romancer.

Unhappily, while the chronicles show the frequent emergency which attended his painful condition, they furnish nothing more.

We are without details.

The melancholy baldness and coldness with which they narrate events upon which one would like to linger is absolutely humbling to the imagination; which, kindled by the simple historical outline, looks in vain for the satisfaction of those doubts and inquiries, those hopes and fears, which the provoking narrative inspires only to defraud.

How would some old inquisitive Froissart have dragged by frequent inquiry from contemporaneous lips, the particular fact, the whole adventure, step by step, item by item,--the close pursuit, the narrow escape,--and all the long train of little, but efficient circumstances, by which the story would have been made unique, with all its rich and numerous details! These, the reader must supply from his own resources of imagination.