pouch she galloped on a palfrey, carrying a bird on her fist, or a cane in her hand. What can be more ridiculous,' says Petrarch, in a letter addressed to the pope, in 1366, 'than to see men girthed round the body. Below, long peaked shoes; above, caps laden with feathers; hair tressed, moving this way and that, behind them, like the tail of an animal, and turned up on the forehead with ivory-headed pins!" " Vol. I. pp. 26, 27.

We must hurry through these enticing topics, upon which, too, the viscount delights to dwell, or we shall never arrive at English literature. "Repasts" and "Manners" will detain ust but an instant; though it is well in these, so called, ages of luxury and refinement, to see to what extremes matters were pushed by our ancestors :

Among the nobles, dinner was announced by the sound of the horn: this was called in France corner l'eau, because the company washed their hands before they sat down to table. The usual dinner hour was nine in the morning, and that for supper five in the evening. They sat on banks or benches, sometimes high, at others low, and the table was raised or lowered in proportion. From the bank or bench is derived the word banquet. There were tables of gold and silver chased: the wooden tables were covered with double cloths, called doubliers; they were laid to resemble the surface of a river which a breeze has ruffled into little waves. Napkins are of more modern date. Forks, with which the Romans were unacquainted, were also unknown to the French till the end of the fourteenth century: we meet with them for the first time under Charles V."

"Beer, cider, and wine of all sorts, were consumed in abundance. Mention is made of cider under the second race of kings. Clairet was clarified wine, to which spices were added; hypocras, wine sweetened with honey. In 1310, an English abbot entertained six thousand guests, before whom were set three thousand dishes. At the wedding feast of the Earl of Cornwall, in 1243, thirty thousand dishes were served up; and, in 1251, sixty fat oxen were furnished by the Archbishop of York alone, for the marriage of Margaret of England with Alexander III., King of Scotland. The royal repasts were enlivened by intermezzi: all sorts of music were performed; the clerks sang songs, roundelays, and virelays. When the king (Henry II. of England) goes abroad in the morning,' says Pierre of Blois, 'you see a multitude of people, running hither and thither, as if they had lost their wits; horses dash one against the other; carriages upset carriages; players, public women, gamesters, cooks, confectioners, singers, barbers, dancers, boon companions, parasites, make a horrible noise: in short, the confusion of foot and horse is so hideous that you would imagine the abyss had opened and hell vomited forth all its devils.'

When Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, traveled, he had two hundred horsemen in his train, consisting of knights, esquires, pages, clergymen, and officers of his household. This cavalcade was followed by eight carriages, each drawn by five strong horses: two of these carriages contained beer, one conveyed the furniture of his chapel, another that of his chamber, and another that of his kitchen; the last three were filled with provisions, apparel, and various other articles. He had, besides, twelve horses laden with coffers, containing his money, gold plate, books, clothes, and the ornaments for the altar. Each carriage was guarded by a very large bull-dog, having a monkey on his back. (Salisb.)

"It was found necessary to enact sumptuary laws for the table.

These laws allowed the rich only two courses and two sorts of meat, with the exception of prelates and barons, who were at liberty to eat what they pleased. They limited traders and artisans to the use of meat at one meal only; for all the other meals they were obliged to content themselves with milk, butter, and vegetables. Vol. I. pp. 31-34.

The hurly-burly into which society was thrown, the discordance of its materials, the ingredients and seeds of revolutions, and excesses of every kind, are well depicted in the following passage towards the close of the viscount's view of the middle

ages:

"On the one hand chivalry, on the other the insurrection of the rustic population, all sorts of licentiousness in the clergy, together with all the ardour of religion. Itinerant monks, traveling on foot or riding on sorry mules, preached against all these scandals, and were burned alive for their pains by the priests, whom they reproached for their dissolute lives, and drowned by the princes whose tyranny they attacked. Gentlemen, lying in wait near the high roads, robbed travellers, whilst other gentlemen became in Spain, in Greece, in Dalmatia, lords of renowned cities, to whose history they were utter strangers. There were courts of love, in which arguments were held agreeably to all the rules of Scottism, and of which the canons were members; troubadours and minstrels, roving from castle to castle, lashing the men in satires, praising the ladies in ballads; citizens divided into guilds, holding festivals in honour of their patrons, in which the saints of Paradise were mingled with the deities of fable; dramatic representations, miracles and mysteries in churches; feasts of fools; sacrilegious masses; gravy soups eaten upon the altar; the Ite missa est responded to by the three brayings of an ass; barons and knights engaging at these mysterious repasts to make war upon nations, vowing upon a peacock or a heron to fight to the death for their ladye-loves; Jews slaughtered and slaughtering one another, conspiring with lepers to poison the wells and springs; tribunals of all sorts, sentencing, by virtue of all kinds of laws, to all sorts of punishments, accused persons of all classes, from the heretic, flayed and burned alive, to adulterers bound together naked and led in public through the crowd: the complaisant judge, substituting an innocent prisoner, instead of the wealthy murderer, condemned to die; to crown the confusion, to complete the contrast, the old society civilized after the manner of the ancients perpetuating itself in the abbeys; the students at the universities reviving the philosophic disputes of Greece; the tumult of the schools of Athens and Alexandria mingling with the din of tournaments, feasts, and tiltings. Lastly, place, above and out of this so agitated society, another principle of action, a tomb, the object of all affections, of all regrets, of all hopes, which was incessantly drawing beyond sea sovereigns and subjects, the valiant and the guilty, the former to seek enemies, kingdoms, adventures, the latter to fulfil vows, to atone for crimes, to appease remorse-and you have a picture of the middle ages." Vol. I. pp. 39-41.

After this lengthened introduction, the first and second epochs of English literature, viz., at the time of the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes, and during the middle ages, are despatched in the space of fifteen pages, which consist, for the most part, of extracts from the "Erse Poems." There is really nothing which justifies a very long notice of the literature of that era, though one

might very naturally have assumed a different opinion from the sketch of the middle ages which precedes it, and the other philosophical reflections with which it is introduced. But is there any thing that is worthy of a more elaborate dissertation in the third and fourth epochs, from William the Conqueror to Henry the Eighth? Not much; but one, or, at the most, two names illumine this long night of literature; we refer to Gower and Chaucer; and he must be a rash man who would now undertake the reading of either of them. The only fact of importance during this extended space of time, which has regard to our present subject, and upon which Chateaubriand slightly touches, is the struggle for mastery between the two languages, the French and English, in the latter kingdom; we say the two languages, in reference to spoken language and the literature of the people, but the three, when regard is had to literary composition, because the Latin laboured long to maintain its supremacy, and was not vanquished for many years after this period. It is this circumstance which makes the name of Chaucer grateful to English ears. He fought manfully for his native tongue against foreign idioms, and may be considered as the very first who did it good service. But it was only in the use of the language that Chaucer asserted and preserved his nationality; he did not ascend to Saxon sources for his themes, but borrowed from Petrarch and Boccacio the character and spirit of his songs and tales. The contest between the tongues, though probably familiar to most of our readers, will, from the interest of the subject, bear a word or two in addition.

It is known that the extremest abhorrence for the English language was felt by the Conqueror. By his command, the laws and judicial acts were written in French, and children were directed to be taught the rudiments of literature in the same tongue. The rival languages were the rival standards of the two parties-and we know the deadly hate felt for each other by the Saxon and Norman races. The latter was in the seat of power, and used the means which fortune had placed in its hands, nearly to the utter extinction of the English tongue, as well as people. Our author says on this point:

"Edward I. paid the most respectful attention to the reading of a Latin bull of Boniface VIII., and ordered it to be translated into French, because he had not understood its meaning.

"Peter de Blois informs us that, in the beginning of the twelfth century, Gillibert was ignorant of English; being well versed, however, in Latin and French, he preached to the people on Sundays and holidays. Wadington, a poet and historian of the thirteenth century, intimates that he writes his works in French, and not in English, in order that he may be the better understood by high and low, a proof that the foreign idiom was on the point of stifling the ancient idiom of the land." Vol. I. pp. 89, 90.

A strong foothold was first obtained by the French idiom at the conquest, though it had been previously used in England, and was more firmly planted and enlarged by the very conquests of Edward III. and his heroic son over their rivals. But those victories, while they excited the national pride, finally prepared the way for the supremacy of the native tongue; a supremacy it not long thereafter secured, when it was rendered more copious and beautiful by the intermixture of other idioms.

The first step towards this far more important victory was made in the grant, by this very monarch, of the use of the insular idiom in civil pleadings, though the judgments of the courts thereon were still rendered in French. It is a curious fact, that the very act of parliament of 1362, which directed this innovation, was itself drawn up in the foreign tongue. Our author says, "that it required the scourges of Heaven to combine with the laws in extinguishing the language of the conquerors"-for it was only after the great plague of 1349 that the French tongue began to be disused generally. The acts of parliament continued till a much later period to be drawn up in French-the first English act of the house of commons being in the year 1425; and it was not until 1483, under Richard III., that parliament engrossed and promulgated the bills in English-an example which has not since been departed from.

The Reformation, most fortunately, affords the noble author another grand incident in his sketch of the progress of English literature, and he makes the most of it. Its important influence upon the cause of letters in England he does not very clearly make out; but it gives him what he wanted--a glorious occasion for an episode. The important questions he propounds are-How was it brought about?--what were its consequences to the human mind, to literature, to arts, to governments? These grave questions are skimmed over in a lively, playful manner, and the subject affords room for much pleasant anecdote, and the display, on the part of the author, of his attachment to the Roman catholic faith. He takes occasion, too, to discuss Luther's character and views: his account of them containing some truth mixed up, of course, with much error. His chief aim in discussing Luther's doctrines appears to be (and it is rather an extraordinary design for a peer of France) to show that the protestant religion was intended only for princes and gentlemen, and altogether unsuited to the common people. With them he seeks to render it unpopular; and, as respects the former, he tries to make them ashamed of their faith, because its originator-or, we should say, reformer—was the son of a peasant.

been altered and adapted to the stage. "Why not act," says he, "the plays of their deity in a perfect form?" Conceding the truth of the assertion, an inference does not follow derogatory to the genius of Shakspeare, or affecting in the least his popularity as a dramatic author. Some of his confessedly most beautiful plays are rarely if ever acted. Of those which are, there is enough for the immortality of a dozen men. That his merits were for a season unperceived and unappreciated, argues only the stupidity of the age. The same temporary neglect happened to Milton: but when once the glories of these luminaries arose to the vision of an admiring country, their splendour was duly acknowledged, and they have been worshipped unceasingly since.

The universality of Shakspeare's talent, our author thinks, has tended to corrupt dramatic literature, and founded the erroneous notion on which the new school, as he is pleased to term it, is established. He thinks that it is deemed by that school the perfection of the tragic art to "jumble together a succession of incongruous and disconnected scenes-to place the burlesque and the pathetic side by side-to bring the beggar in contact with the king." If it be so, Shakspeare is not to blame for it, but his ignorant imitators. The fact, however, is not so. The school which Shakspeare founded, and himself carried to perfection, is the school of nature in contradistinction to that of studied, formal art-action limited within divisions of time unsuited, according to all the regular course of nature, for the happening of the supposed events, and passion and feeling doled out and checked by rigid weight and measure. When Chateaubriand pronounces Racine more natural than Shakspeare, (whom, by the by, too, he seems disposed to place below Corneille, Molière, and even Voltaire,) we confess we consider him above or below argument, and would therefore leave him undisturbed in the possession of his opinion. "Racine, in all the refinement of his art, is more natural than Shakspeare-just as the Apollo, in all his divinity, is more human in his form than an Egyptian Colossus."

But we eschewed controversy, so let us turn to an agreeable extract. We have here a good picture of the theatre in Shakspeare's time.

"In the dramatic performances of Shakspeare's time, the female characters were represented by young men; and the actors were not distinguished from the spectators except by the plumes of feathers which adorned their hats, and the bows of ribbon which they wore in their shoes. There was no music between the acts. The place of performance was frequently the court-yard of an inn, and the windows which looked into this court-yard served for the boxes. On the representation of a tragedy in London, the place in which it was performed was hung with black, like the nave of a church at a funeral.