drink blubber, but also eat fat, and even soap and the wick of lamps with the greatest greediness.

In Europe, the Russians are, as far as I know, or at least have remarked, the only people that drink melted butter, like brandy, to the most immoderate degree, in what they call the butter week. Yet I have no manner of doubt, that the rest of the Sclavonian nations are like the Russians in this particular. Among the nations of Celtic extraction, though the common people prefer bacon, lard, and greasy soups, yet I do not know that even the rudest clown, in the countries that are not Sclavonian, eats pure fat without bread, or drinks melted butter or other grease. The Icelanders and the inhabitants of the Orcades form the only exception here. For amongst the former the taste for fat things is so great, that many of the common people eat tallow, or drink the melted fat of oxen and sheep; and others drink the fat of wild geese, however rancid it may be. And from this circumstance I conclude, either that the Icelanders and the inhabitants of the Orcades are not of pure Norman or Celtic origin, but are partly descended from the Finnish savages, who in ancient times were much more widely spread than at present over the regions of the North; or even I suppose that the extraordinary cold of their climate begets in them their taste for fat meats, and renders them absolutely necessary to their well-being. For experience teaches us, that animal oil is so much the wholesomer, and spirituous or inflammatory liquors are so much the more dangerous, the nearer the pole, or the colder the region.

CHARACTER OF CHAUCER. BY GODWIN.

The life of Chaucer, by Godwin, which has been lately imported from Europe, contains a great variety of curious and instructive views of the state of Eng

land at the period of the poet's existence. The following extract is a sort of recapitulation of the work, and will serve as an excellent specimen of this performance.

HAVING accompanied Chaucer through his public and poetical life, as far as our documents will enable us, from the cradle to the tomb, it may be gratifying to take one connected and concluding view of his manners and habits, to survey the features of his mind, and the principal traits of his character.

We know little of his early youth, except that he was born and brought up in the city of London; and we seem to have sufficient indications that he was not exposed to the inconveniences of a narrow fortune, and that he received all the intellectual discipline and instruction which the metropolis of England could then afford. If he discovered in his boyish years any of those original powers which have recommended him to our present attention, if his progress in learning was rapid, or if any interesting anecdotes of enterprize, good-nature, or fortitude were repeated of him by his contemporaries, these circumstances, as might be expected, are lost to us for ever, through the obscurity of the long interval of time which has succeeded.

At college, during the period of his studies at Cambridge, at Oxford, and perhaps at Paris, he was indefatigable in his exertions to attain a knowledge of what man and mind had been in the ages that were elapsed. It perhaps never happened that a man was so devoted to books as Chaucer represents himself to have been at successive periods of his life, without feeling a very early vocation to the pursuit of letAncient history was at this time an unsubstantial and fleeting shade. The writings of the Greeks were inaccessible to Chaucer. But he studied Latin, French, and Italian. Virgil was particularly his favourite. The adventures of romance, and the songs of the mins

ters.

trels, were listened to by him with avidity. Tales of chivalry, of generous enterprize, and heroic adventure, had a double interest with him, because he knew that, when he went forth into the world, the men of whom he read, a race that is now extinct, would be the objects of his daily observation and intercourse. The whole world was then romantic, scenic, and sublime. The castle of the ancient baron, the magnificence of ecclesiastical edifices, the splendour of the tournament, the solemnity of religious worship, yet unstripped of any of its decorations, the troops of monks and friars devoted to the things of an invisible world, these were the objects which met the eye on every side. The mind of man was not yet broken down into a dull uniformity. This was the age of reformers and of robbers. Pilgrimages and crusades invited the consent of the pious. Chaucer too had a particular turn for subjects of humour. And those adventures, which have since received their last touches from the hands of Boccaccio, Ariosto, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, were not feebly shadowed forth in the tales of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

It was at college that Chaucer contracted a friendship with Gower and Strode, two young Oxonians of great learning and talents; a friendship which probably lasted for the greater part of their lives.

Chaucer was both a lawyer and a soldier; but he quitted each of these professions after a very short trial, and having collected from the experiment a more exact knowledge of human nature, as it is modified by them, than he could have gained merely as a spectator.

Chaucer was a courtier; but he was a courtier in the best sense of the word, not bowing at levees, not depending upon the smiles and promises of ministers, but associating with their masters, and being the confident of the loves of the generous, and at least as yet uncorrupted, because as yet youthful, offspring of those masters. He probably had a

large share in forming the mind of the patron of Wicliffe; the saviour of the bishop of Limoges, of Hereford, and of Swinderby; the generous, gallant, manly, and frank John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. He was the earnest vindicator of his calumniated reputation. He is said to have been employed by Blanche, the heiress of Lancaster, and youthful consort of John of Gaunt, to write the godly verses which she chanted as she dropped her beads.

Chaucer received in early life the gift of a house almost contiguous to the royal palace at Woodstock. This gift could have no other meaning than that his sovereigns were desirous frequently to enjoy his society, and be exhilerated with the sallies of his conversation. He observed intimately the heroic Philippa; the venerable mother of the Black Prince, of Lionel of Antwerp, and of John of Gaunt; the protectress of the distressed, and the patroness of Froissart. Edward III and his eldest son, the victors of Cressy and Poitiers, whose glorious forms often pass in review before our entranced imaginations, were the similar friends of Chaucer, and were equally known to him in their proudest stretch of thought, and in their plainest and most undisguised moments.

Chaucer was an ambassador. He is affirmed by Froissart to have been a principal in the unsuccessful attempt to negotiate a marriage for Richard prince of Wales with a daughter of France. This situation must have afforded him an ample opportunity of observing the temper of courts, the tricks of ministers, and the prejudices and prepossessions of kings.

Chaucer was a minister. His place was that of comptroller of the customs. His office was probably by the water side, amidst all the bustle and confusion of trade. Trade was, in a considerable degree, the passion of his age, for at this time Venice, Genoa, and London were powerful cities, made so by the operation of commerce. The comp troller of the customs was enjoined

to keep the accounts of his employment with his own hand. Chaucer was seldom absent from the duties of his place, for we find a leave of absence to him for a month formally recorded upon the patent rolls, and only one such leave of absence has yet been observed. He tells us himself that he had no opportunity for the pleasures of study, till he had made an end of all his reckonings," and the business of the day was concluded. This lasted twelve years.

Chaucer was a patriot. He never, even in thought, departed from his allegiance to the grandson of his first benefactors. But he bitterly deplored the evil habits that prince had contracted, and the pernicious counsellors into whose hands he had fallen. He saw them plotting at once the destruction of the man in the world to whom he was himself bound by the most complicated ties, and and the ruin of the liberties of the metropolis of which he was a native, and which was dependent for all its distinctions upon the permanence of those liberties. He embarked his all in resistance to their machinations.

Chaucer was an exile and a prisoner. He was fated to experience the vicissitudes of human life. He paid, in this instance, the debt for which we are all of us in some manner called upon, to the condition of our terrestrial existence; and he gained that knowledge, and those wholesome impressions, which are seldom gained but through the operation of adversity. In his exile he was nearly destitute of all the comforts and conveniences of life; and in his imprisonment he witnessed the savage triumph of the unrelenting Thomas of Woodstock, and perhaps saw from his window the victims whom that usurper was daily dragging to execution.

The terms upon which he was liberated from his confinement after five years of oppression and difficulty, are such as no admirer of Chaucer will with pleasure contemplate.

Upon his restoration to liberty Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works, an office on many accounts

more agreeable to him than his for mer place of comptroller of the customs. He occupied this situation, however, only for a short time.

Being now more than sixty years of age, he retired to his favourite residence of Woodstock. He was tired of business and of courts, and wished to enjoy the pleasures of privacy and nature. He did not, however, retire to a life of indolence. As he had begun his literary career early, so he finished it late. In a green and vigorous old age he planned and undertook the Canterbury Tales. One of the most extraordi nary specimens of active genius and various talent which England has produced, thus appears to have been the fruit of a period of life, when common men think themselves ex cused from further exertion.

Chaucer was probably satisfied with his modest roof at Woodstock. The Canterbury Tales may be seen to have been the production of a se rene, a cheerful, and contented mind, buffeted by the world, but not broken, and carrying off from all its defeatures and misadventures whatever is most valuable in man. Yet he was not so contented with Wood, stock, as to be incapable of being tempted to leave it. John of Gaunt at this time married Chaucer's kinswoman; and he told the poet that now, being nearly allied to royalty, he must change the style in which he had hitherto lived. Chaucer consented. An ancient castle opened its ample gates, and spread out its spacious apartments, to receive him as its inhabitant. Chaucer brought hither the same gay and well-tempered mind which had accompanied him through life: he sat under his own oaks, and in a truly social spirit named them after his benefactors and patrons.

One event only was reserved for the concluding scene of the life of Chaucer. His sovereign was deposed, and the son of John of Gaunt usurped the throne. Chaucer's conduct on this occasion is highly worthy of our praise. He did not oppose the usurper; he did not wish të

The sweetness of Chaucer's character may also be inferred from his long friendship with Gower, and from the circumstance of his drawing up toward the close of his life a treatise of astronomy for a boy of ten years. But a circumstance still more singular and worthy of recollection, when we are summing up his character, is that of his being eight years suitor to a lady, probably the same whom he afterward married. A number of traits of disposition may be deduced from this anecdote. It could never have belonged to a person of a fiery and hot-brained temperament; it could never have belonged to a man dissipated, fickle, and inconstant. Such things have been related of persons of feeble understanding and emasculate character. But, in a man of Chaucer's force, it marks only persistive choice, a pursuit, not easily repressed, yet not breaking out into extravagancies, a character undebauched and sincere, and a love deeply grounded in the most perma nent qualities of the mind.

Chaucer was a man of a frank and easy temper, undeformed by haughtiness and reserve, and readily entering easily into a certain degree of social intercourse upon trivial occasions. This particular is strongly confirmed to us by the curious record of his testimony in the cause of arms between Scrope and Grosvenor. He describes himself as walking in Friday-street, in the city of London, and observing there the arms which he had always seen borne by the family of Scrope, hung out as a sign. This inconsiderable circumstance immediately excites an interest in the patriarch of the English language and of English poetry. The Scropes were his friends. He accosts a stranger, whom he perceives accidentally standing by, and asks, What inn is that, which I observe has hung out the arms of Scrope for its sign?.... Nay, replied the other, it is no inn, nor are those the arms of Scrope; they are the shield of a Cheshire family of the name of Grosvenor. In Chaucer, the thus addressing himself to a per

son unknown, is no evidence of a vulgar, indelicate, and undiscriminating mind. It shows that he was a character, not fastidious enough to refuse to interest itself in trifles, and frank, even, and affable in his intercourse with mankind.

Chaucer was a man of convivial dispositions. This has reasonably been concluded from the grant he received of a pitcher, or what we should now call four bottles of wine daily from the royal cellar. It may fairly be inferred that this wine was designed for the poet's daily consumption.

Chaucer was a man of expensive habits, and of no very rigid pecuniary economy and foresight. This may be concluded from his frequent embarassments. Immediately after the loss of his place of comptroller of the customs, which he had held for twelve years, and in which he had "richesse suffisauntly to weive nede, and in delicious houres was wont to enjoy blisful stoundes," he found himself in great poverty. "His worldly godes were fulliche dispente." On his restoration to favour, he obtained the perhaps equally lucrative place of clerk of the works. He resigned this office, and retired to Woodstock; yet no sooner was he settled there, and engaged in writing his Canterbury Tales, than it became necessary that he should solicit another pension. When any of his patrons, John of Gaunt, Anne of Bohemia, or Henry IV, are desirous of demonstrating their kindness to him, the first thing thought of is a further pecuniary provision.

But Chaucer was not less fond of study than of convivial intercourse. There is scarcely one of his longer poems in which this feature of his character is not incidentally mentioned. He reads in bed. In the Parliament of Birds, he had been reading all day long, and it is only when the light fails him that he falls asleep, and has the dream which he proceeds to relate. And in the House of Fame, the eagle tells him,

* Boke of the Duchesse, ver. 47.