[Burlesques by William Makepeace Thackeray]@TWC D-Link book
Burlesques

CHAPTER VI
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And it is a fact that the Princess Rosalia Seraphina of Pumpernickel, the most lovely woman of her time, became so frantically attached to him, that she followed him on a campaign, and was discovered with his baggage disguised as a horse-boy.

But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy.

The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so terrible and admirable, that I promise you the youthful libertines did not sneer THEN; and the most reckless of them often turned pale when they couched their lances to follow Ivanhoe.

Holy Waltheof! it was an awful sight to see him with his pale calm face, his shield upon his breast, his heavy lance before him, charging a squadron of heathen Bohemians, or a regiment of Cossacks! Wherever he saw the enemy, Ivanhoe assaulted him: and when people remonstrated with him, and said if he attacked such and such a post, breach, castle, or army, he would be slain, "And suppose I be ?" he answered, giving them to understand that he would as lief the Battle of Life were over altogether.
While he was thus making war against the Northern infidels news was carried all over Christendom of a catastrophe which had befallen the good cause in the South of Europe, where the Spanish Christians had met with such a defeat and massacre at the hands of the Moors as had never been known in the proudest day of Saladin.
Thursday, the 9th of Shaban, in the 605th year of the Hejira, is known all over the West as the amun-al-ark, the year of the battle of Alarcos, gained over the Christians by the Moslems of Andaluz, on which fatal day Christendom suffered a defeat so signal, that it was feared the Spanish peninsula would be entirely wrested away from the dominion of the Cross.

On that day the Franks lost 150,000 men and 30,000 prisoners.
A man-slave sold among the unbelievers for a dirhem; a donkey for the same; a sword, half a dirhem; a horse, five dirhems.


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