the copes, the cowls, the crosiers, the mitres, whose forms are met with in the Gothic, preserved the symbols of the worship at the same time that they produced unexpected effects of art. The gutters and spouts were very often carved into the faces of hideous demons or vomiting mouths. This architecture of the middle ages exhibited a medley of the tragic and the grotesque, of the gigantic and the graceful, like the poems and romances of the same period.

"The plants of our soil, the trees of our woods, the trefoil and the oak, also decorated our churches, in like manner as the acanthus and the palm had embellished the temples of the country and the age of Pericles. Within a cathedral was a forest, a labyrinth, whose thousands of arches, at every motion of the spectator, crossed each other, separated, and entwined again. This forest was lighted by circular windows of painted glass, which resembled suns shining with a thousand colours beneath the foliage; externally the same cathedral looked, with its flying buttresses and its pinnacles, like an edifice from which the scaffolding had not been removed." Vol. I. pp. 18—22.

Of the correctness of these observations we are persuaded. Modern Europe (and our own country may be included in the remark) has no national architecture. There is no modern style of building recognised in her code. Antiquity had her orders. Greece and Egypt reared their temples in forms and proportions as different as the genius of the two countries. The dark ages produced their magnificent piles, the impress of the mind of the era. Eastern barbarians, as we call them, can point to domes which raise their lofty heads in fantastic, it may be, but still national shapes; but modern Europe has been content, either with a servile imitation of one model, or what is infinitely worse, an unsightly and unseemly mixture of all. But let us hasten with our author to other subjects of observation-the dress, entertainments, and repasts of those days.

Nothing could be more picturesque than the variety of costume in the middle ages. Not only the different classes of society, but the inhabitants of different provinces and towns were clothed in garments varying in fashion and splendour. Modern habits have invested nearly every body in a uniform dress; but in those times it marked the wearer's station and profession. The great number of religious fraternities must have increased very much this diversity of wardrobe, and thrown a still more variegated hue over the surface of society. Chateaubriand remarks upon the immense advantages this circumstance gave to the painter in the use of his pencil, and asks, "what can the painter now make of our tight garments, our round or cocked hats?" Little, indeed, to gratify the imagination or the taste. Hence the resort to antique or fancy dresses in individual portraits-and hence, also, the plainness, approaching to the ludicrous, in the few historical paintings we have. Every one must have smiled at the parade of straight coats in Trumbull's picture of the Declaration of Independence, VOL. XXI.--NO. 41.

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to say nothing of the number of shin pieces which it exhibits -and every one, too, must have been sensible of the great relief afforded by the introduction into these large pictures, where the subject admitted it, of a military coat, cap, and feathers, but, above all, of a fine looking horse.

The dress varied from time to time. Sometimes a furred pelisse and a long oriental robe enwrapped the figure; again, a close dress prevailed, and that, in its turn, was followed by loose garments. The pelicon, the origin of the surplice, was common to all orders. The breeches, in one age, came but half way down to the knee, and were worn very tight; this, when it was the fashion to tuck up the robe about the waist, must have gratified the taste of such personages as the famous Dutches of Gordon.1 But the shoes were the most remarkable. Our author says:

"The pointed and stuffed shoes called pouleyns, or poulains, were long in fashion. The maker cut out the upper leather like the windows of a church. They were two feet long for the noble, decorated at the extremity with horns, claws, or grotesque figures. They were of such length that it was impossible to walk in them without fastening the points, which crooked upwards, to the knees with chains of gold or silver. The bishops excommunicated the poulains, and treated them as a sin against nature. They were declared to be 'contrary to good morals, and invented in derision of the Creator.' In England, an act of parliament forbade the making of any shoes or buskins with poleyns exceeding the length of two inches.' The pointed shoes were succeeded by wide square-toed slippers. The fashions of that time varied as much as those of our days. The knight or the lady who invented a new fashion became a celebrated person. The inventor of poleyns was the English knight Robert le Cornu." Vol. I. pp. 25, 26.

A word about the ladies:

"The gentlewomen wore very fine linen next to the skin. They were dressed in high tunics covering the bosom, embroidered on the right breast with the arms of their husbands, on the left with those of their family. Sometimes they wore their hair combed down smooth upon the forehead, and covered with a small cap interlaced with ribands; at others they allowed the hair to float loosely over their shoulders; at others again they built it up into a pyramid three feet high, suspending to it either wimples, or long veils, or stripes of silk, descending to the ground and fluttering in the wind. At the time of Queen Isabeau, it was found necessary to enlarge the door ways, both in height and breadth, in order to afford a passage for the ladies' head-dresses. These headdresses were supported by two curved horns, the frame-work of this structure. From the top of the horn on the right side hung a piece of light stuff, which the wearer suffered to float, or which she drew over her bosom like a wimple, by twisting it round the left arm. A lady in full dress displayed collars, bracelets, and rings. To her girdle, enriched with gold, pearls, and precious stones, was fastened an embroidered

Her grace is known to have preferred the rear view of a Highland regiment grounding their arms, to any other sight in nature.

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 us 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.