of so important a circumstance from the modes and constitution of ancient life must have influenced the cotemporary poetry.

All or most of these circumstances contributed to give a descriptive, a picturesque, and a figurative cast to the poetical language. This effect appears even in the prose compositions of the reign of Elizabeth. In the subsequent age prose became the language of poetry.

In the mean time general knowledge was increasing with a wide diffusion and a hasty rapidity. Books began to be multiplied, and a variety of the most useful and rational topics had been discussed in our own language. But science had not made too great advances. On the whole we were now arrived at that period, propitious to the operations of original and true poetry, when the coyness of fancy was not always proof against the approaches of reason; when genius was rather directed than governed by judgment; and when taste and learning had so far only disciplined imagination, as to suffer its excesses to pass without censure or control for the sake of the beauties to which they were allied.

227.-SHIPWRECK OF THE MEDUSE FRENCH FRIGATE.

(From the Quarterly Review.)

THE French possessions on the west coast of Africa having been restored at the general peace, an expedition, consisting of a frigate and three other vessels, was sent in the month of June, 1816, to take possession of them.

Owing to a very relaxed state of discipline, and an ignorance of the common principles of navigation which would have disgraced a private merchant ship, this frigate, the Méduse, was suffered to run aground on the bank of Arguin. It was soon discovered that all hopes of getting her off must be abandoned, and that nothing remained but to concert measures for the escape of the passengers and crew. Some biscuit, wine, and fresh water, were accordingly got up and prepared for putting into the boats and upon a raft which had been hastily constructed; but, in the tumult of abandoning the wreck, it happened that the raft which was destined to carry the greatest number of people, had the least share of the provisions of wine, indeed, it had more than enough, but not a single barrel of biscuit.

There were five boats. The military had, in the first instance, been placed upon the raft. The number embarked on this fatal machine was not less than one hundred and fifty, making, with those in the boats, a total of three hundred and ninety-seven.

The boats pushed off in a line, towing the raft, and assuring the people on board that they would conduct them safely to land. They had not proceeded, however, above two leagues from the wreck, when they, one by one, cast off the tow-lines. It was afterwards pretended that they broke. Had this even been true, the boats might at any time have rejoined the raft, instead of which they all abandoned it to its fate, every one striving to make off with all possible speed.

At this time the raft had sunk below the surface to the depth of three feet and a half, and the people were so squeezed one against another that it was found impossible to move; fore and aft they were up to the middle in water. In such a deplorable situation, it was with difficulty they could persuade themselves that they had been abandoned; nor would they believe it until the whole of the boats had disappeared from their sight. They now began to consider themselves as deliberately sacrificed, and swore to be revenged of their unfeeling companions if ever they gained the shore. The consternation soon became extreme. Every thing that was horrible took possession of their imaginations; all perceived their destruction to be at hand, and announced by their wailings the dismal thoughts by which they

were distracted. The officers, with great difficulty, and by putting on a show of confidence, succeeded at length in restoring them to a certain degree of tranquillity, but were themselves overcome with alarm on finding that there was neither chart, nor compass, nor anchor, on the raft. One of the men belonging to M. Corréard, geographical engineer, had fortunately preserved a small pocket compass; and this little instrument inspired them with so much confidence that they conceived their safety to depend on it. But this treasure, above all price, was speedily snatched from them for ever; it fell from the man's hand, and disappeared between the openings of the raft.

None of the party had taken any food before they left the ship; and hunger beginning to oppress them, they mixed the biscuit, of which they had about five and twenty pounds on board, with wine, and distributed it in small portions to each man. They succeeded in erecting a kind of mast, and hoisting one of the royals that had belonged to the frigate.

Night at length came on, the wind freshened, and the sea began to swell. The only consolation now was the belief that they should discover the boats the following morning. About midnight the weather became very stormy, and the waves broke over them in every direction. In the morning the wind abated, and the sea subsided a little; but a dreadful spectacle presented itself. Ten or twelve of the unhappy men, having their lower extremities jammed between the spars of the raft, unable to extricate themselves, had perished in that situation; several others had been swept off by the violence of the waves. In calling over the list, it was found that twenty had disappeared.

All this, however, was nothing to the dreadful scene which took place the following night. The day had been beautiful, and no one seemed to doubt that the boats would appear in the course of it to relieve them from their perilous state; but the evening approached, and none were seen. From that moment a spirit of sedition spread from man to man, and manifested itself by the most furious shouts. Night came on; the heavens were obscured with thick clouds; the wind rose, and with it the sea; the waves broke over them every moment; numbers were swept away, particularly near the extremities of the raft; and the crowding towards the centre of it was so great that several poor wretches were smothered by the pressure of their comrades, who were unable to keep on their legs.

Firmly persuaded that they were on the point of being swallowed up, both soldiers and sailors resolved to soothe their last moments by drinking till they lost their reason! They bored a hole in the head of a large cask, from which they continued to swill till the salt water, mixing with the wine, rendered it no longer potable. Excited by the fumes, acting on empty stomachs and heads already disordered by danger, they now became deaf to the voice of reason, boldly declared their intention to murder their officers, and then cut the ropes which bound the raft together. One of them, seizing an axe, actually began the dreadful work. This was the signal for revolt. The officers rushed forward to quell the tumult, and the man with the hatchet was the first that fell; the stroke of a sabre terminated his existence.

The passengers joined the officers, but the mutineers were still the greater number. Luckily they were but badly armed, or the few bayonets and sabres of the opposite party could not have kept them at bay. One fellow was detected secretly cutting the ropes, and immediately flung overboard; others destroyed the shrouds and halyards; and the mast, deprived of support, fell on a captain of infantry and broke his thigh. He was instantly seized by the soldiers and thrown into the sea, but was saved by the opposite party. A furious charge was now made upon the mutineers, many of whom were cut down. At length this fit of despera

The

tion subsided inte egregious cowardice; they cried out for mercy, and asked forgiveness on their knees. It was now midnight, and order appeared to be restored; but after an hour of deceitful tranquillity, the insurrection burst forth anew. mutineers ran upon the officers like desperate men, each having a knife or a sabre in his hand; and such was the fury of the assailants that they tore their flesh, and even their clothes, with their teeth. There was no time for hesitation; a general slaughter took place, and the raft was strewed with dead bodies.

On the return of day it was found that, in the course of the preceding night of horror, sixty-five of the mutineers had perished, and two of the small party attached to the officers. One cask of wine only remained. Before the allowance was served out, they contrived to get up their mast afresh; but having no compass, and not knowing how to direct their course, they let the raft drive before the wind, apparently indifferent whither they went. Enfeebled with hunger, they now tried to catch fish, but could not succeed, and abandoned the attempt. At length, what is horrible to relate, the unhappy men, whom death had spared in the course of the night, fell upon the carcases of the dead and began to devour them. Some tried to eat their sword belts and cartridge boxes: others devoured their linen, and others the leather of their hats; but all these expedients, and others of a still more loathsome nature, were of no avail.

A third night of horror now approached; but it proved to be a night of tranquillity, disturbed only by the piercing cries of those whom hunger and thirst devoured. In the morning a shoal of flying fish, in passing the raft, left nearly three hundred entangled between the spars. By means of a little gunpowder and linen, and by erecting an empty cask, they contrived to make a fire; and mixing with the fish the flesh of a deceased comrade, they all partook of a meal, which, by this means, was rendered less revolting.

The fourth night was marked by another massacre. Their numbers were at length reduced to twenty-eight, fifteen of whom only appeared to be able to exist for a few days; the other thirteen were so reduced that they had nearly lost all sense of existence. As their case was hopeless, and as, while they lived, they would consume a part of the little that was left, a council was held, and, after a deliberation at which the most horrible despair is said to have presided, it was decided to throw them overboard. "Three sailors and a soldier undertook the execution of this cruel sentence. We turned away our eyes, and shed tears of blood on the fate of these unfortunate men; but this painful sacrifice saved the fifteen who remained, and who, after this dreadful catastrophe, had six days of suffering to undergo before they were relieved from their dismal situation." At the end of this period a small vessel was descried at a distance; she proved to be the Argus brig, which had been despatched from Senegal to look out for them. All hearts on board were melted with pity at their deplorable condition. "Let any one," say our unfortunate narrators, "figure to himself fifteen unhappy creatures almost naked, their bodies shrivelled by the rays of the sun, ten of them scarcely able to move; our limbs stripped of the skin; a total change in all our features; our eyes hollow, and almost savage; our long beards, which gave us an air almost hideous; we were in fact but the shadows of ourselves."

Such is the history of these unfortunate men! Of the hundred and fifty embarked on the raft, fifteen only were received on board the brig; and of these six died shortly after their arrival at St. Louis, and the remaining nine, covered with cicatrices, and exhausted by the suffering to which they were so long exposed, are stated to have been entirely altered in appearance and constitution. We are shocked to add, such were the neglect and indifference of their shipmates, who had arrived there in safety, that had it not been for the humane attention of Major Peddy and

Captain Campbell, they would, in all probability, have experienced the fate of their unfortunate companions.

Of the boats, two only (those in which the governor and the captain of the frigate had embarked) arrived at Senegal; the other four made the shore in different places, and landed their people. They suffered extremely from hunger and thirst, and the effects of a burning sun reflected from a surface of naked sand. With the exception, however, of two or three, they all reached Senegal.

The preceding narrative is perfectly well authenticated, being compiled from an account written by two of the unhappy survivors.

228.-LONDON IN THE TIME OF CHAUCER.

GODWIN.

[WILLIAM GODWIN, whose political writings are forgotten, but whose novel of Caleb Williams' will endure with our language, was born in 1756, and died in 1836. During this long life he was principally engaged in literary pursuits. He married in 1797, the celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft, who died the same year, leaving him one daughter, the present Mrs. Shelley. The following extract is from his 'Life of Geoffrey Chaucer.']

The seat of Chaucer's nativity was the city of London. This is completely ascertained by his own words in the Testament of Love, book i., section 5. “Also the citye of London, that is to me so dere and swete, in which I was forth growen; and more kindely love have I to that place than to any other in yerth, as every kindely creture hath full appetite to that place of his kindely engendrure, and to wilne reste and pece in that stede to abide."

This passage contains nearly all the information we possess relative to the commencement of our poet's life. But it is fraught with various inferences. It is peremptory as to the place of his birth, or, as he calls it, of his "kindely engendrure" (that is, his geniture according to kind, or the course of nature). It renders it extremely probable that London was the abode of his tender years, and the scene of his first education; so much is not unlikely to be implied in his giving it the appellation of the place in which he was "forth growen." Lastly, as he is in this passage assigning a reason why many years after (in the fifty-sixth year of his age) he interested himself in the welfare, and took a part in the dissensions, of the metropolis, it may with some plausibility be inferred that his father was a merchant, and that he was himself by the circumstances of his birth entitled to the privileges of a citizen.

He who loves to follow the poet through the various scenes from which his mind receives its first impressions, will be eager in this place to recollect what sort of a city London was in the beginning of the fourteenth century; how far it resembled, and in what respects it differed from, the present metropolis of England.

I am afraid little doubt can be entertained that, if we were to judge of it from the first impression it was likely to make upon a stranger, it would not have been found much more advantageous than that of Paris at the same era, which Petrarca describes (A. D. 1333) as "the most dirty and ill-smelling town he had ever visited ; Avignon only excepted."

Of this, however, we may be sure, that the impression which London produced on the mind of Chaucer, was very different from that of Paris on the mind of Petrarca. Petrarca viewed the cities of France with the prepossessions of an Italian, and the haughtiness of a pedant, proud that he owed his birth to the country of Cicero and Virgil, of Brutus and Cato, and looking on the rest of the world as a people of barbarians. Chaucer had none of these prejudices: he felt the great dictates of nature, and cherished them with the fondness of attachment. London, with its narrow lanes, and its dirty ways, its streets encumbered with commerce,

and its people vexed with the cares of gain, was in his eyes beautiful, lovely, and engaging. “More kindely love and fuller appetite" had he "to that place than to any other in yerth.”

But, though London had at this time very little to boast on the score of its general architecture, it was already the scene of considerable population and wealth. The topographer who would attain to an exact idea of any of our principal towns at a remote period of their history, must go back in the first place to the consideration of what they were in the time of the Roman empire. For near four centuries, from the year of Christ 50, to the year 450, Britain was a flourishing and powerful colony to the great mistress of the world. The Romans, in proportion as they subdued her barbarous inhabitants, founded cities, erected theatres, established universities, constructed highways, and adorned the island with magnificent works of art, as well as planted within its circuit the seeds of discipline, science, and literature. England was then a civilised and a magnificent scene, and would have presented as many objects worthy of the curiosity of a traveller of taste, as at any period of its subsequent history. London was founded by the Romans, and inclosed with a wall, nearly equal in extent to the present boundaries of the city of London strictly so called. Its limits were from about the foot of Blackfriars Bridge, west, to the Tower Stairs, east on the north it extended to the street now denominated London Wall, and on the south it had another wall which skirted the whole length of the city along the shores of the river.

In that melancholy period when the Roman empire in the west became universally a prey to the hordes of ferocious barbarians, England fell to the lot of certain piratical tribes from the north of Germany, since known by the general denomination of Anglo-Saxons. These invaders were successful in exterminating from among us all vestiges of literature and Roman civilisation. The Christian religion itself sunk under their hostility. The institutions of the ancient Germans and the mythology of Woden became universal. At the time when the monk, St. Augustine, arrived in this country for the pious purpose of converting its usurpers, A.D. 596, it has been supposed that there was not a book to be found through the whole extent of the island. From this time, however, there was a period of comparative illumination. The Saxons had poetry, and the missionaries from Rome brought with them such literature as Europe then had to boast. We had our Bede, cur Alcuin, and our Alfred. This infancy of improvement was nearly crushed by the Danes; the inveterate foes of monasteries and learning, who were in the tenth century what the Saxons had already been in the sixth. England presents little to soothe the eye of the lover of civilisation, from the retreat of the Romans to the epoch of the Norman Conquest, when a race of warriors educated in a happier scene, and a succession of kings nearly all of distinguished ability, brought back to us the abode of the Muses and the arts of cultivated life.

During this interval, London, the heart of England, had experienced a common fate with the rest of its members. The walls, indeed, in considerable part remained, but the houses tumbled into ruin, and the tall grass waved in the streets: not that it was ever wholly unpeopled, but that it was an inconsiderable place, in comparison of the dimensions which the Romans had marked out for it. A short time, however, previously to the Conquest, it had a bridge of wood erected over the Thames : a work which would scarcely have been constructed in those rude times, if it had not even then been a flourishing city.

The Tower of London was constructed for the purpose of subjugation by William the Conqueror. William Rufus, who had a strong passion for magnificence, enlarged this edifice, rebuilt London Bridge on a more commodious plan, and laid the foundation of Westminster Hall. London Bridge was first built of stone under Henry