supper-table, where there were these tasty omelettes: moile, made of
marrow and grated bread, and haggis, which is supposed to be identical
with the Scottish dish so called. Lydgate, who belonged to the
monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, doubtless set on the table at
Canterbury some of the dainties with which he was familiar at home;
and this practice, which runs through all romantic and imaginative
literature, constitutes, in our appreciation, its principal worth.
We love and cherish it for its very sins against chronological and
topographical fitness--its contempt of all unities. Men transferred
local circumstances and a local colouring to their pictures of distant
countries and manners. They argued the unknown from what they saw
under their own eyes. They portrayed to us what, so far as the scenes
and characters of their story went, was undeceivingly false, but what
on the contrary, had it not been so, would never have been unveiled
respecting themselves and their time.

The expenditure on festive occasions seems, from some of the entries
in the "Northumberland Household Book," to present a strong contrast
to the ordinary dietary allowed to the members of a noble and wealthy
household, especially on fish days, in the earlier Tudor era (1512).
The noontide breakfast provided for the Percy establishment was of a
very modest character: my lord and my lady had, for example, a loaf of
bread, two manchets (loaves of finer bread), a quart of beer and one
of wine, two pieces of salt fish, and six baked herrings or a dish
of sprats. My lord Percy and Master Thomas Percy had half a loaf of
household bread, a manchet, a pottle of beer, a dish of butter, a
piece of salt fish, and a dish of sprats or three white herrings; and
the nursery breakfast for my lady Margaret and Master Ingram Percy was
much the same. But on flesh days my lord and lady fared better, for
they had a loaf of bread, two manchets, a quart of beer and the same