The sermon, by means of which Henry Warden
purposed to restore concord and good order to the Castle of Avenel,
bore for text the well-known words, "_He who striketh with the sword
shall perish by the sword,_" and was a singular mixture of good
sense and powerful oratory with pedantry and bad taste. He enlarged a
good deal on the word striketh, which he assured his hearers
comprehended blows given with the point as well as with the edge, and
more generally, shooting with hand-gun, cross-bow, or long-bow,
thrusting with a lance, or doing any thing whatever by which death
might be occasioned to the adversary. In the same manner, he proved
satisfactorily, that the word sword comprehended all descriptions,
whether backsword or basket-hilt, cut-and-thrust or rapier, falchion,
or scimitar. "But if," he continued, with still greater animation,
"the text includeth in its anathema those who strike with any of those
weapons which man hath devised for the exercise of his open hostility,
still more doth it comprehend such as from their form and size are
devised rather for the gratification of privy malice by treachery,
than for the destruction of an enemy prepared and standing upon his
defence. Such," he proceeded, looking sternly at the place where the
page was seated on a cushion at the feet of his mistress, and wearing
in his crimson belt a gay dagger with a gilded hilt,--"such, more
especially, I hold to be those implements of death, which, in our
modern and fantastic times, are worn not only by thieves and
cut-throats, to whom they most properly belong, but even by those who
attend upon women, and wait in the chambers of honourable ladies.
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