Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Bulfinch

Bulfinch pulls off a sly bit of Victorian scene-setting by making chivalry literally about horsepower. The line looks like an etymology note you’d skim past, but its real intent is deflationary: it yanks “chivalry” down from the pedestal of timeless virtue and pins it to a concrete social technology - the mounted warrior class. If the root is cheval, then the romance of knightly honor is inseparable from who could afford a horse, who was trained to fight from it, and who got to be celebrated for it.

The subtext is class, and Bulfinch knows his audience. Writing in the 19th century, when medievalism was being repackaged as moral décor - knights as icons of manners, gallantry, and clean heroism - he quietly reminds readers that the code wasn’t born in a vacuum of ideals. It emerged from a specific military economy: cavalry dominance, feudal obligations, aristocratic privilege. Chivalry isn’t just “be nice”; it’s a brand built around an elite’s toolkit.

That’s why the sentence works. It uses the cool authority of language history to puncture sentimentality without sounding polemical. Bulfinch, best known for popularizing myth, often mediates between enchantment and explanation. Here, he keeps the enchantment at arm’s length: admire the legend if you want, but don’t mistake it for innocence. The horse is the receipt.