The English nobility and gentry, according to the king’s example, were excited to keep a proportionable hospitality in their several country mansions, the husbandmen encouraged to breed cattle, all tradesmen to a cheerful industry; and there was then a free circulation of money throughout the whole body of the kingdom. There was spent yearly in the king’s house of gross meat fifteen hundred oxen, seven thousand sheep, twelve hundred veals, three hundred porkers, four hundred storks or young beefs, six thousand eight hundred lambs, three hundred flitches of bacon, and twenty-six hams; also one hundred and forty dozen of geese, two hundred and fifty dozen of capons, four hundred and seventy dozen of hens, seven hundred and fifty dozen of pullets, one thousand four hundred and seventy dozen of chickens; for bread three thousand six hundred bushels of wheat: and for drink six hundred tuns of wine, and one thousand seven hundred tuns of beer; moreover of butter forty six thousand six hundred and forty pounds, together with fish and fowl, venison, fruit and spice proportionably. THE FAIR GERALDINE AND THE EARL OF SURREY. The “Fair Geraldine” the general object of Lord Surrey’s empassioned sonnets, is commonly said to have lived at Florence, and to have been of the family of the _Geraldi_, of that city. This is however, a misapprehension of an expression in one of our poet’s Odes, and of a passage in Drayton’s Heroic Epistles. This lady was Elizabeth, third daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare. She appears to have received her education at Hunsdon House, with the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth. It was here she was first seen by the Earl of Surrey, and she immediately became the object of his fervent but fruitless devotion. She was married first to Sir Anthony Browne, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and secondly to Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, surviving by many years her noble and unfortunate admirer. There is a Portrait of the “Fair Geraldine” in the Woburn collection. It is not precisely known at what period the Earl of Surrey began his travels. They have the air of a romance. He made the tour of Europe in the true spirit of chivalry, and with the ideas of an Amadis; he proclaimed the unparalleled charms of his Mistress, and prepared to defend the cause of her beauty with the weapons of Knight-errantry; nor was this adventurous journey performed without the intervention of an enchanter. The first city in Italy which he proposed to visit was Florence, the capital of Tuscany, and the original seat of the ancestors of his Geraldine.