Of the "Introduction of Knowledge," Dibdin says, "it is the most curious and generally interesting volume ever put forth from the press of the Coplands."

Of course he begins with the Englishman, who is in the rude woodcut represented naked, holding a huge pair of shears, and having over his right arm a piece of cloth. This is a hit at the national love of new fashions:

I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
Musyng in mynde what rayment I shall were;
For now I wyll were thys, and now I wyll were
that,

A now I wyll were I cannot tel what.
English freedom is insisted on:

No man shall let me, but I wyl have my mynde. And English swearing impressed Boorde as something sui generis; he often remarks on it: "In all the worlde ther is no regyon nor countree that doth vse more swearynge than is used in England, for a chylde that scarse can speake, a boy, a gyrle, a wenche, now a dayes wyl swere as great othes as an olde knave and an olde drabbe." Which shows that we do owe something to the Puritans; for our "girls and wenches," at any rate, have given up the custom, and contrast strikingly in their careful shunning of strong expressions with the German lasses, for instance, whose "Ach du lieber Gott!" drawn out so sweetly from a rosebud mouth, is much more startling than the “Mon Dieu!" of a Frenchwoman. The Italian verdict on England, Boorde tells us, was “bona terra, mala gente." This he combats: the English are as good as any people; "yea, much more better in many thynges, specially in maners and manhod." The superior fertility of Eng

of a Traveller) struck the Doctor; he also thinks London the finest city in the world, "wherein is suche a brydge of pulchritudnes that in all the worlde there is none lyke." Stonehenge he notices; and Bath, where "in wynter the poore people doth go into the water to kepe themself warme, and to get them a heate." England too has "more nobiler portes and hauens than any other regyon." But the strangest thing is that he puts Cornwall by itself in an "appendex," in order to give samples of that old Cornish which Mr. Max Müller has found more than a match for him in the third volume of his Chips, and also to declaim against the bad cooking which is said to be still a fault of the Cornish folks. "Cornish cream" the Doctor evidently never tasted, though its well-known "Phoenician origin" precludes the idea of its having been since invented; however, clotted cream he mentions several times in his "Dietary," but he must have eaten a Cornish pasty (such as they give you-generally cold into the bargain-at that worst of all refreshment rooms at the Plymouth station);

for he says, "there meate and theyr

breade is marde and spylt for lacke of good ordring and dressynge." But his chief complaint is that nothing fit to drink can be got in the county: "there ale is starke nought, lokinge whyte and thycke, as pygges had wrasteled in it." Of men who drink stuff like that we do not wonder to hear that

For wagginge of a straw,

They wyl go to law-

a characteristic of their descendants, un

less report maligns them. Nor do the Welshmen proper fare better at our author's hands.

I am a Welshman, and do dwel in Wales, I haue loued to serche boudgets and looke in males;

I loue not to labour nor to delue nor to dyg, My fyngers be lymed lyke a lyme twig ; sounds very like an expression of "Taffy was a thief." Welsh singing and harping both seemed to the Doctor

Much lyke the hussyng of a homble be; while the Welsh love of "cawse boby" (toasted cheese) is of course noted. Our author was writing some score of years after the hundred merry tales" were printed, in one of which St. Peter, ordered

to clear heaven of the ruck of Welsh saints, goes outside and shouts "cawse boby," and when their Welsh holinesses have all rushed out to get some, slips in and locks the door upon them. Wales is, he says, like Castile or Biscay in the poverty of living and lodging; yet the people are "hardy, stronge, and goodly. . . . and many of them be louynge and kynd hearted, faythful and vertuous." Their wakes, after the Irish fashion, amused him; and their cry, "O swetynge, why dost thou dye? thou shalt not goe from us; we wyl die with the; venit! (benedictus)" reminded him again of Castile.

Of Irish characteristics the Doctor hits off not a few. Under a cut representing a girl "hunting over" the hair of a rough fellow whose head is in her lap, we read

sore;

I cannot leaue It, it creaseth more and more. Frieze, hobby-hawks (such as Strafford in later days sent over to his friends), “aquavite," dice, are Irish exports. There are no magpies (now they are almost as plentiful as in France) nor snakes, etc.; and English merchants carry away Irish earth "to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll venimous wormes." The Irish are slothful, not caring for riches but for meat and drink; "flesh sufficient they haue, but little bread or wine, and none ale." It is "their melancholy complexion" (Mr. Disraeli says it is the nearness of the melancholy sea) which causes them to be testy without a cause. Nevertheless Boorde adds: "I did neuer find more amyte and loue than I haue found of Iryshe men the whyche was borne within the English pale; yea, even among the wylde Irishe there be vertuous creatures whom grace worketh aboue nature." So Stanihurst (1577): "These Irishe beyng vertuously bred up or reformed are such myrors of holynes and austeritie, that other nations retaine but a shadow of deuotion in comparison of them."

young Britons; but as soon as our factories out there began to be worth going to, "the Scotch party" grew, and grew till men from this side of the border were almost looked on as interlopers. And not in India, but (much to their credit) in almost every part of the known world, Scotch merchants and Scotch in every capacity have gone ahead, just as Boorde describes them doing in his time, as James's English courtiers and subjects cried out against them for doing some seventy years later. Is this "pushing" a proof of their being pure-blood Teutons? It certainly is not Celtic: the French have it not, nor the Welsh and Irish; but the Prussians, so their London and Liverpool fellow-clerks say, possess it in a most unpleasant degree. This would settle the question about Lowlanders; but how is it that the Highlanders have, on the whole, done as well-in some walks of life better -than their Lowland rivals? Anyhow, though the Scots are in this as Boorde found them, let us rejoice that no longer are his next verses true in any sense : I am a Scotyshe man, and haue dissembled moche And in my promise I haue not kept touche. An Englyshe man I cannot naturally loue. wretchedness of the Borderland; he reBoorde notices the great poverty and and of their skill in music, and doubts not marks on the good cookery of the Scotch, that the Northern Scotch are of the same race with the Irish.

land together, except that both, he says, Why he treats of Shetland and Friesabound in fish, I cannot tell. The Frisians he praises as being good, simple folk. men, who certainly were for centuries About Iceland he is sadly at fault: the above the European average in intelligence,he stigmatizes as "beastly creatures, vnmanered and vntaughte, lyuing in caues altogether, like swyne. they will wyll eate candells ends and olde grece. gyue away ther children.

They

I am a Scotyshe man, and trew I am to France;
In euery countrey myself I do advance ;

I wyll boost myselfe, I will crake and face,
I loue to be exalted here and in euery place.

India was not yet a field for enterprising

Boorde's conscientiousness comes out in his declining to give any samples of Icelandic; for, says he, "I can not speke it, but here and there a worde or two." Poor old man! he could fairly assert:

After my conscyence I do wryte truly.

But I am as I am, but not as I was.

And where as my metre is ryme dogrell,

The effect of the whyche no wyse man wyll defell.

"Drunk as a rat" is the proverb of the "buttermouth Flemings;" but the Dutch are worse, drinking till it runs out of them. Brabant is rich and pleasant, and "Handwarp" has a curious spire and a "Bourse" for the merchants. Cleves and Gueldres are poor, because so fond of war. In Juliers the geese are plucked naked every year. So much for the "base Doche men. In "hyghe Doch lond" we are astonished to find the "Junker" already known by name, wearing a feather in his

cap:

Be it of goose or capon, it is right good gere. One High Dutch custom which disgusted Boorde has made its way over here, possibly along with the Georges "they will eate magotts as fast as we wyll eat comfits. They haue a way to brede them in chese." The snowy Alps impressed our author much: "a man may see them fyftene myle of, at a cyte called Ulmes."

Denmark, next on the Doctor's list, is a very poor country, so poor that Boorde marvels "how they dyd ones gette Englande." So again he marvels how a little country like Saxony could have conquered England; "for I think if al the world were set against England it might neuer be conquerid, they beying treue within themselfe." Next Boorde speaks of those other heretics the Bohemians, whose spokesman says:

For the Pope's curse I do lytle care. Ever sens Wyclif dyd dwel wyth me I dyd never set by the Pope's auctorite. Bohemia is the land of wonderful beasts -"bughs and bovies," much like those which Cæsar describes as inhabiting the great Hyrcanian forest. What Boorde says of them may be all true; but he is certainly wrong when he says of the Bohemians, "their speche is Doch." Not even the Thirty Years' War and the Germanizing of their nobles ever for a moment drove the Czech speech from its position as the language of the country. And now when the German traveller crosses the old frontier, he feels much as an Englishman

Mr. Freeman is quite right; we are Teutons; the "at home like feeling which most of us have all the way from the Rhine to the Oder proves it to my mind. Even if we don't understand the speech, we feel as if we ought to. Nay, far west of the Rhine, about Ostend, where the Fleming asserts himself so stoutly against his "Welsh" neighbors, how homelike is the look of the people, and how you "stand corrected" if at some little inn you have asked for "viande" and the hostess with a grave shake of the head drawls out "Nit fleisch." You never feel at home in Bohemia; the lodging is still as "indifferent" as it was in Boorde's day; but it is something about the people which shows they are not of us.

In Poland our author was chiefly struck with its poverty; he makes here too a mistake about language-"theyr_speche is corrupt Doche." Boorde would have had an effort made to drive the Turks out of Hungary. His Hungarian says:

If we of other nacions might haue any helpe,
We wold make them to fle like a dog or a whelpe.

He grows quite poetical about the "regall flod of Danuby ;" but he does not appear to have passed beyond it; for about Constantinople he romances, talking of Saint Sophia as not a mosque, but the "fairist cathedral churche in the worlde...they say that there is a thowsande prestes that doth belong to the church: before the funt is a pycture of copper and gylt of Iustinian, that sytteth upon a horse of coper." All which smacks rather of Mandeville than of personal observation. The kindliness of the man comes out in his way of noticing the Great Schism: "The Greciens do erre in many articles concerning our fayth, the whyche I do thinke better to obmyt, and to leue vnwryten than to wryte it." Bravo, Boorde! How well you contrast with some of our moderns. I took up A Vacation Tour in Brittany not long ago, and was vexed to find all that was new in it made up of tirades against "Popish darkness and superstition."

We are wrong. Boorde must have been in Greece, for he gives an unusually long Greek and English dialogue, ending with the pious Cherete apapantes with which the modern host dismisses his guests.

Harking back from Greece towards Calais, Boorde takes Southern Europe, beginning with Sicily and Italy; the thing which chiefly struck him in every part of which was the prevalence of old fashions in dress and behavior:

Al new fashyons to England I do bequeat, says the Neapolitan;

says

In my apparel I am not mutable, the Roman, and so on. Boorde's righteous soul was vexed, like other righteous souls, at the state of Rome; "I dyd se lytle vertue there, and much abhominable vyces." He is also worried by their way of reckoning time, "for they do recken vnto xxiii a cloke, and than it is mydnyght."

What he says of Venice reads like Childe Harold's lines put into old prose: "Whosoeuer that hath not seene the noble citie of Venis, he hath not sene the bewtye and ryches of thys worlde." The Doge may not leave the city so long as he doth live; there is not a poor person to be seen in Venice; the Venyscions hath great

prouision of warre, for they haue euer in a

redynes tymber to make a hondred gates or more,' They are not superstitious: "When they do heare masse they doth clap theyr hand on theyr mouth, and do not knock themself on the brest." In

fact the Venetians were a satisfactory people. The laxness which Byron found among them, and which made their city in his eyes an Italian Seville, belonged in Boorde's day to Genoa. Thomas, in his History of Italy (1561), says: "One thing I am sure of, that if Ouide were now aliue, there be in Genoa that could teache him a dousen poinctes de arte amandi."

Boorde as a doctor of course noticed Genoa treacle, enpraxiv, whose virtues are witnessed to in Chaucer's line:

Christ that of alle mischef is triakel.

Of it he says: "Whan they do make theyr tracle, a man wyll take and eate poysen, and than he wyl swel redy to brost and to dye, and as sone as he hath takyn trakle he is hole agene."

After the old-custom-loving Italians it is a change to come into France, where they "wyll euery daye haue a new fashion." France suits our author's love of good cheer, and though he has a special word for "good Aquitany," as he affectionately calls it, he is able to say of the whole

that "Fraunce is a noble countre, and plentiful of wyne, bread, corne, fysh, flesh and whyld foule. there a man shal be honestly orderyd for his mony, and shal haue good chere and good lodging." Very different this from Aragon, where nothing is to be had but measly bacon and sardines -so bad that, when Englishmen have been there,

Thither neuer after they wyll come agene.

The rest of Spain is as bad, except by the sea-side, where, like Portugal, it is enriched by trade. Elsewhere "the countrey is baryn of wine and corne, and skarse of vitels; a man shal not get mete

....

in many places for no mony; other whyle you shal get kyd, and mesell bakyn, and salt sardyns, which is a lytle fysh as byg as a pylcherd, and they be rosty. al your wyne shal be kepte and caryed in gote skyns. whan you go to dyner and to supper you must fetch your bread in one place, and your wyne in a nother place, and your meate in a nother place; and hogges in many places shal be vnder yovr feete at the table, and lice in your houses, for they do kepe typlinge houses." bed.... the best fare is in prestes

his

way

At which Com

When he comes to Navarre Boorde tells at full length the story of the white cock and hen which were kept at St. Domingo in memory of the sad fate of the Joseph-like young pilgrim who was on to Compostella. postella, by the way, an old blear-eyed doctor of divinity tells Boorde that "our clergy doth illude, mocke and skorne the people to do Idolatry, making ygnorant people to worship the thynge that is not here;" all the bones, etc., of St. Janies and others having been placed by Carolus Magnus in St. Severin's in Toulouse. I am sorry to say that Brittany — " litle Britten"-has not a good character in Boorde:

Of al nacions I hate free Englyshe men,

is what the Breton says; but then, as Boorde's Breton speaks French, let us hope he is misrepresented as regards his dislikes as well as his language.

So having got back to Calais again, Boorde goes on to treat of Moors, and of Turks, whose "Macomyt, a false felow," deceived the people by teaching tricks to his dove and his camel; much as many Irish believe Henry VIII. taught a donkey