CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FINE ARTS LIBRARY Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924015436086 THE WORKS OF DONALD G. MITCHELL WET DAYS AT EDGENA/OOD WITH OLD FARMERS, OLD GARDENERS, AND OLD PASTORALS CHARLES SCRIBNEfl'S SONS NEW YORK » >« i» « 1907 .i£_ Copyright. 1864, 1883, 1892, by DONALD G. MITCHELL Copyrisht, 1907, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ORIGINAL DEDICATION TO CHARLES SCRIBNEPx IN TOKEN OF MY RESPECT FOR HIS LITERARY JUDGMENT, MY GRATITUDE FOR HIS UNIFORM COURTESY. AND MY CONFIDENCE IN HIS FRIENDSHIP 1864 Copyright. 1864, 1883, 1892. by DONALD G. MITCHELL Copyright, 1907, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS ORIGINAL DEDICATION TO CHARLES SCRIBNER IN TOKEN OF MY RESPECT FOR HIS LITERARY JUDGMENT. MY GRATITUDE FOR HIS UNIFORM COURTESY. AND MY CONFIDENCE IN HIS FRIENDSHIP 1864 PREFATORY NOTE A CONSIDERABLE portioii of this book was pub- lished more than a score of years ago in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. The articles thus contributed — under the name of Wet- Weather-Work — were afterward revised, large additions made to them, and published at the instance of my friend, the late Mr. Charles Scribner — to whom I dedicated the volume, under its present title. That dedication I repeat upon this edition of twenty years later — that it may stand there so long as this book is issued, in token of my high regard for his memory, and of my warm recol- lections of his kindly nature, and of his many and unabating offices of friendship. Donald G. Mitchell. Edgewood, 1883. CONTENTS FIRST DAY PAGE Without and Within 3 Hesiod and Homer 13 Xenophon 19 Theocritus and Lesser Poets .... 26 Cato 33 Varro 37 Columella 41 A Roman Dream 48 SECOND DAY Virgil 55 An Episode 65 tlbullus and horace 70 PLINY'S COUNTRY-PLACES 73 Palladius . 79 Professor Daubeny . . ... 82 ix CONTENTS PAGE The Dark Age . .... 83 Geoponica Geoponicorum 86 Crescenzi , . 93 A Florentine Farm 97 THIRD DAY A Picture of Rain 103 Southern France AND Troubadours . . . 106 Among the Italians 110 Conrad Heresbach 121 LA Maison Rustique 132 French Ruralisms 138 A Minnesinger 148 FOURTH DAY Piers Plowman 153 The Farmer of Chaucer's Time . . . .157 Sir Anthony Fitz-Herbert 1 63 Thomas TussER 167 Sir Hugh Platt 172 Gervase Markham 176 FIFTH DAY English Weather 189 Time of James the First 194 X CONTENTS PAGE Samuel Hartlib 200 Period of the Commonwealth and Restoration 205 Old English Homes 214 A Brace of Pastorals 219 SIXTH DAY A British Tavern 225 Early English Gardeners 230 Jethro Tull 236 Hanbury and Lancelot Brown . . . .244 William Shenstone 248 SEVENTH DAY John Abercrombie 259 A Philosopher and Two Poets .... 264 Lord Kames 269 Claridge, Mills, and Miller 276 Thomas Whately 279 Horace Walpole 285 Edmund Burke 289 goldsmith 293 EIGHTH DAY Arthur Young 303 Ellis AND Bakewell . . . . . .310 xi CONTENTS PAGE William Cowper 315 Gilbert White 319 Trusler AND Farm-Profits 321 Sinclair and Others 323 Old Age of Farmers 329 Burns and Bloomfield 335 Country Story-Tellers 339 NINTH DAY British Progress in Agriculture ... 345 Opening of the Century 350 Sir Humphry Davy 353 BiRKBECK, BEATSON, AND FiNLAYSON . . . .358 William Cobbett 360 Grahame and Crabbe 369 Charles Lamb .... . . 371 The Ettrick shepherd 374 Loudon 376 A Bevy OF Poets 380 L'ENVOI 389 xu FIRST DAY FIRST DAY WITHOUT AND WITHIN IT is raining; and being in-doors, T look out from my library-window, across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the middle of it. A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of Osage-orange ; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields, checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald- green of carrots. There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of new- springing rye ; gray stubble ; the ragged brown of discolored, frostbitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the river- basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, cupolas, ambitious lookouts of surburban WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD houses, spires, belfries, turrets: all these com- mingling in a long line of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and so blend with the northern sky. Is the picture clear ? A road ; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers ; a near wood, that con- ceals the sunken meadow of a river ; a farther wood, that skirts a town, — that seems to over- grow the town, so that only a confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood; and these tallest spires and turrets ly- ing in relief against a purple hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and north- ward, as I said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to blue, and then to haze. Thus much is seen, when I look directly eastward ; but by an oblique glance southward (always from my library- window) the check- ered farm-land is repeated in long perspective : here and there is a farmhouse with its clus- tered out-building; here and there a blotch of WITHOUT AND WITHIN wood, or of orcharding; here and there a bright sheen of winter-grain; and the level ends only where a slight fringe of tree-tops, and the iron cordon of a railway that leaps over a marshy creek upon trestle-work, sepa- rate it from Long Island Sound. To the north, under such oblique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands in smaller en- closures stretch half a mile to the skirts of a quiet village. A few tall chimneys smoke there lazily, and below them you see as many quick and repeated puffs of white steam. Two white spires and a tower are in bold relief against the precipitous basaltic cliff, at whose foot the village seems to nestle. Yet the mountain is not wholly precipitous; for the columnar masses have been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping debris be- low, and leaving above the iron-yellow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens. Nor is the summit bald, but tufted with dwarf cedars and oaks, which, as they file away on either flank, mingle with a heavier growth of hickories and chestnuts. A few stunted kalmias and hem- lock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, li- WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD chens, and weather-stains of the cliff ; all which show under a sunset light richly and change- fully as the breast of a dove. But just now there is no glow of sunset; raining still. Indeed, I do not know why I should have described at such length a mere landscape, (than which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my wet farm-days, I should present to them at once my oldest acquaintance, — the view from my library-window. But as yet it is only coarsely outlined; I warn the reader that I may return to the out- side picture over and over again; I weary no more of it than I weary of the reading of a fair poem; no written rhythm can be more be- guiling than the interchange of colors — wood and grain and river — all touched and toned by the wind, as a pleasant voice intones the shad- ows and the lights of a printed Idyl. And if, as to-day, the cloud-bank comes down so as to hide from time to time the remoter objects, it is but a csesural pause, and anon the curtain lifts — the woods, the spires, the hills flow in, and the poem is complete. In that corner of my library which im- 6 WITHOUT AND WITHIN mediately flanks the east window is bestowed a motley array of farm-books : there are fat ones in yellow vellum; there are ponderous folios with stately dedications to some great man we never heard of ; there are thin tractates in ambitious type, which promised, fifty years and more ago, to overset all the established methods of farming; there is Jethro Tull, in his irate way thrashing all down his columns the efifete Virgilian husbandry; there is the sententious talk of Cato, the latinity of Colu- mella, and some little musty duodecimo, hunted down upon the quays of Paris, with such title as "Comes Rusticus" ; there is the first thin quarto of Judge Buel's "Cultivator" — since expanded into the well-ordered stateliness of the "Country Gentleman" ; there are black-let- ter volumes of Barnaby Googe, and books com- piled by the distinguished "Captaine Garvase Markhame" ; and there is a Xenophon flanked by a Hesiod, and the heavy Greek squadron of the "Geoponics." I delight immensely in taking an occasional wet-day talk with these old worthies. They were none of them chemists. I doubt if one of them could have made soil analyses which would have been worth any more, practically, than those of many of our agricultural profes- WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD sors. Such powers of investigation as they had, they were not in the habit of wasting, and the results of their investigation were for the most part compactly managed. They put to- gether their several budgets of common-sense notions about the practical art of husbandry, with good old-fashioned sturdiness and point- edness. And, after all — theorize as we will and dream as we will about new systems and scientific aids — there lies a mass of sagacious observation in the pages of the old teachers which can never be outlived, and which will contribute nearly as much to practical success in farming as the nice appliances of modern collegiate agriculture. Fortunately, however, it is not necessary to go to the pages of old books for the traces and aims of that sagacity which has always underlaid the best practice. Its precepts have become traditional. And yet I delight in finding black-letter evidence of the age of the traditions and of the purity with which they have been kept. An important member of the County Society pays me a morning visit, and in the course of a field-stroll lays down authoritatively the opin- ion that "there 's no kind o' use in ploughing for turnips in the spring, unless you keep the weeds down all through the season." I yield implicit and modest assent; and on my next 8 WITHOUT AND WITHIN wet day find Ischomachus remarking to So- crates,^— "This also, I think, it must be easy for you to understand, that, if ground is to he fallow to good purpose, it ought to be free from weeds, and warmed as much as possible by the sun." And yet my distinguished friend of the County Society is not a student of Xeno- phon. If I read out of the big book the same observation to my foreman (who is more pi- quant than garrulous), he says, — "Xenophon, eh! well, well — there 's sense in it." Again, the distinguished county member on some Sunday, between services, puts his finger in my button-hole, as we loiter under the lee side of the porch, and says, — "I tell you. Squire, there a'n't no sort o' use in flinging about your hay, as most folks does. If it 's first year after seedin', and there 's a good deal o' clover in it, I lay it up in little cocks as soon as it 's wilted; next morning I make 'em bigger, and after it 's sweat a day or so, I open it to dry off the steam a bit, and get it into the mow;" — all which is most excellent advice, and worthy of a newspaper. But, on my next rainy day, I take up Heresbach,^ and find ^CEconomicus; Chap. XVI. § 13. ^ "The whole Arte of Husbandry, first written by Conrade Heresbach, and translated by Barnaby Googe, Esquire;" Book I. WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD Cono laying down the law for Rigo in this wise : — "The grasse being cut, you are to consider of what nature the grasse is, whether very coarse and full of strong weedes, thicke leaves and great store of peony-grasse, or else ex- ceeding fine and voyd of anything which ask- eth much withering; If it be of the first kind, then after the mowing you shall first ted it, then raise it into little grasse Cockes as bigge as small molehills, after turne them, and make them up again, then spread them; and after full drying put them into wind rowes, so into greater Cockes, then break those open, and after they have received the strength of the Sunne, then put three or four Cockes into one, and lastly leade'them into the Barns." If I read this to my foreman, he says, "There 's sense in that." And when I render to him out of the epi- grammatic talk of Cato, the maxim that "a man should farm no more land than he can farm well," and that other, "that a farmer should be a seller rather than a buyer," Mr. McManus (the foreman) brings his brown fist down with an authoritative rap upon the table that lies between us, and says,— "That 's sense!" In short, the shrewd sagacity, the keen lO WITHOUT AND WITHIN worldly prudence, which I observe to lie at the root of all the farming thrift around me, I detect in a hundred bristling paragraphs of the Latin masters whose pages are before me. "Sell your old cattle and your good-for- nothing sheep,"^ says Cato; and, true to the preachment, some thrifty man of an adjoin- ing town tries to pass upon me a toothless cow or a spavined horse. "Establish your farm near to market, or adjoining good roads,"^ says the Roman, and thereupon the New-Eng- lander pounces down in his two-story white house upon the very edge of the highway. And not alone in these lesser matters, but in all that relates to husbandry, I take a curious interest in following up the traces of cousin- ship between the old and the new votaries of the craft; and believing that I may find for a few wet days of talk, a little parish of country livers who have a kindred interest, I propose in this book to review the suggestions and drift of the various agricultural writers, be- ginning with the Greeks, and coming down to a period within the memory of those who are '"Vendat boves vetulos .... oves rejiculas [and the old heathen scoundrel continues] servum senem, servum morbosum." ' "Oppidum validum prope siet .... aut via bona." II WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD living. I shall also take the liberty of reliev- ing the talk with mention of those pastoral writers who have thrown some light upon the rural life of their days, or who by a truthful- ness and simplicity of touch have made their volumes welcome ones upon the shelves of every country library. The books practical and poetical which re- late to flower and field, stand wedded on my shelves and wedded in my thought. In the text of Xenophon I see the ridges piling along the Elian fields, and in the music of Theocritus I hear a lark that hangs hovering over the straight-laid furrows. An elegy of TibuUus peoples with lovers a farmstead that Colu- mella describes. The sparrows of Guarini twit- ter up and down along the steps of Crescenzi's terraced gardens. Hugh Piatt dibbles a wheat-lot, and Spenser spangles it with dew. Tull drives his horse-hoe a-field where Thom- son wakes a chorus of voices, and flings the dappling shadows of clouds. Why divorce these twin-workers toward the profits and the entertainment of a rural life? Nature has solemnized the marriage of the beautiful with the practical by touching some day, sooner or later, every lifting harvest with a bridal sheen of blossoms; no clover-crop is 12 HESIOD AND HOMER perfect without its bloom, and no pasture hill- side altogether what Providence intended it should be until the May sun has come and stamped it over with its fiery brand of dande- lions. HESIOD AND HOMER Hesiod is currently reckoned one of the oldest farm- writers ; but there is not enough in his homely poem ("Works and Days") out of which to conjure a farm-system. He gives good advice, indeed, about the weather, about ploughing when the ground is not too wet, about the proper timber to put to a plough- beam, about building a house, and taking a bride. He also commends the felling of wood in autumn, — a suggestion in which most lum- bermen will concur with him, although it is questionable if sounder timber is not secured by cutting before the falling of the leaves. "When the tall forest sheds her foliage round. And with autumnal verdure strews the ground, The bole is incorrupt, the timber good, — Then whet the sounding ax to fell the wood." ^ ' Cooke's Hesiod; Book II. 13 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD The old Greek expresses a little doubt of young folk. "Let a good ploughman yeared to forty, drive : And see the careful husbandman be fed With plenteous morsels, and of wholesome bread : The slave who numbers fewer days, you '11 find Careless of work and of a rambling mind." He is not true to modern notions of the creature comforts in advising (Book II. line 244) that the oxen be stinted of their fodder in winter, and still less in his suggestion (line 285 ) that three parts of water should be added to the Biblian wine. Mr. Gladstone notes the fact that Homer talks only in a grandiose way of rural life and employments, as if there were no small land- holders in his day; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, with his modest homeliness, does not confirm this view. He tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cautious how he lends either of them. His household stipulations, too, are most mod- erate, whether on the score of the bride, the maid, or the "forty-year-old" ploughman; and for guardianship of the premises the proprie- 14 HESIOD AND HOMER tor is recommended to keep "a sharp-toothed cur." This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated round his good bailiff Eumseus four savage watch-dogs, who straightway (and here Homer must have nodded) attack their old master, and are driven off only by a good pelting of stones. This Eumasus may be regarded as the Hom- eric representative farmer, as well as bailiff and swineherd, — the great original of Gurth, who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as Eumseus extempor- ized one upon his Greek farm for Ulysses. Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhyme that has a ring of the Rappahannock: — "His vest succinct then girding round his waist, Forth rushed the swain with hospitable haste. Straight to the lodgments of his herd he run, Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun ; Of two his cutlass launched the spouting blood ; These quartered, singed, and fixed on forks of wood. All hasty on the hissing coals he threw ; And, smoking, back the tasteful viands drew, Broachers, and all." This is roast pig: nothing more elegant or 15 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumseus had nothing better to offer his landlord,— the most abominable dish, Charles Lamb and his pleasant fable to the contrary notwithstanding, that was ever set before a Christian. But there is pleasanter and more odorous scent of the Homeric country in the poet's flowing description of the garden of Alcinous and thither, on this wet day, I conduct my reader, under leave of the King of the Phsea- cians : — "Four acres was the allotted space of ground, Fenced with a green enclosure all around. Tall thriving trees confirmed the fruitful mould ; The reddening apple ripens here to gold. Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows. With deeper red the full pomegranate glows ; The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear. And verdant olives flourish round the year. The balmy spirit of the western gale Eternal breathes on fruits untaught to fail : Each dropping pear a following pear supplies; On apples apples, figs on figs arise : The same mild season gives the blooms to blow, The buds to harden and the fruits to grow. i6 HESIOD AND HOMER "Here ordered vines in equal ranks appear, With all th' united labors of the year ; Some to unload the fertile branches run, Some dry the blackening clusters in the sun; Others to tread the liquid harvest join. The groaning presses foam with floods of wine. Here are the vines in early flowers descried. Here grapes discolored on the sunny side, And there in autumn's richest purple dyed." Is this not a pretty garden-scene for a blind poet to lay down? Horace Walpole, indeed, in an ill-natured way, tells us,^ that, "divested of harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry," it was but a small orchard and vineyard, with some beds of herbs and two fountains that watered them, enclosed by a thick-set hedge. I do not thank him for the observation ; I pre- fer to regard the four acres of Alcinous with all the Homeric bigness and glow upon them. And under the same old Greek haze I see the majestic Ulysses, in his tattered clothes fling- ing back the taunts of the trifling Eurymachus, and in the spirit of a yeoman who knew how to handle a plough as well as a spear, boasting after this style : — ' Lord Orford's Works, 1793 ; Vol. II. p. S20. 17 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD "Should we, O Prince, engage In rival tasks beneath the burning rage Of summer suns ; were both constrained to wield, Foodless, the scythe along the burdened field ; Or should we labor, while the ploughshare wounds. With steers of equal strength, the allotted grounds ; Beneath my labors, how thy wondering eyes Might see the sable field at once arise !" To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a small farmer — if he had ever farmed at all — in the foggy latitude of Boeotia, and knew nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely estates as Eum- seus managed in the Ionian Seas. Flaxman has certainly not given him the look of a large proprietor in his outlines : his toilet is severely scant, and the old gentleman appears to have lost two of his fingers in a chaff-cutter. As for Perses, who is represented as listening to the sage,^ his dress is in the extreme of classic scantiness, — being, in fact, a mere night-shirt, and a tight fit at that. But we dismiss Hesiod, the first of the hea- then farm-writers, with a loving thought of * Flaxroan's Illustrations of Works and Days; Plate I. i8 XENOPHON his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so be- decked, whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and whose attributes the poet has compacted into one res- onant line, daintily rendered by Cooke, — "Thus the sex began A lovely mischief to the soul of man." XENOPHON I NEXT beg to pull from his place upon the shelf, and to present to the reader. General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may believe Laertius, "handsome beyond expression." It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one man at any time, and doubly refreshing to find them in a person so far removed from the charities of to-day that the malcontents cannot pull his character in pieces. To be sure, he was guilty of a few acts of pillage in the course of his Persian campaign, but he tells the story of it in his "Anabasis" with a brave front; his purse was low, and needed replen- WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD ishment ; there is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers. The farming reputation of the general rests upon his "(Economics" and his horse-treatise ('IirirtK^). Economy has cgme to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it were only — sav- ing. Its true gist is better expressed by the word management; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xenophon's book: management of the household, manage- ment of flocks, of servants, of land, and of property in general. At the very outset we find this bit of practi- cal wisdom, which is put into the mouth of Socrates, who is replying to Critobulus:— "Those things should be called goods that are beneficial to the master. Neither can those lands be called goods which by a man's un- skilful management put him to more expense than he receives profit by them ; nor may those lands be called goods which do not bring a good farmer such a profit as may give him a good living." Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischomachus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon domes- 20 XENOPHON tic management. The apartments, the expo- sure, the cleanHness, the order, are all con- sidered in such an admirably practical, com- mon-sense way as would make the old Greek a good lecturer to the sewing-circles of our time. And when the wife of the wise Ischo- machus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on rouge and cosmetics, the grave husband meets her with this complimentary rebuke: — "Can there be anything in Nature more complete than yourself?" "The science of husbandry," he says, and it might be said of the science in most times, "is extremely profitable to those who under- stand it; but it brings the greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who undertake it without knowledge." (Sec. xv.) Where Xenophon comes to speak of the de- tails of farm-labor, of ploughings and fallow- ings, there is all that precision and particular- ity of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the columns of the "Country Gentleman." He even describes how a field should be thrown into narrow lands, in order to promote a more effectual surface-drainage. In the midst of it, however, we come upon a stercorary maxim, which is, to say the least, of doubtful worth:— "Nor is 21 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD there any sort of earth which will not make very rich manure, by being laid a due time in standing water, till it is fully impregnated with the virtue of the water." One of his British translators. Professor Bradley, does, indeed, give a little note of corroborative tes- timony. But I would not advise any active farmer, on the authority either of General Xenophon or of Professor Bradley, to trans- port his surface-soil very largely to the near- est frog-pond, in the hope of finding it trans- muted into manure. The absorptive and re- tentive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just now of very particular contention; but whatever that capacity may be, it certainly needs something more palpable than the virtue of standing water for its profitable development. Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much simple good sense has to do with hus- bandry : Socrates, who is supposed to have no particular knowledge of the craft, says to his interlocutor,— "You have satisfied me that I am not ignorant in husbandry ; and yet I never had any master to instruct me in it." "It is not," says Xenophon, "difiference in knowledge or opportunities of knowledge that makes some farmers rich and others poor; but that which makes some poor and some rich is 22 XENOPHON that the former are negligent and lazy, the latter industrious and thrifty." Next, we have this masculine ergo: — "Therefore we may know that those who will not learn such sciences as they might get their living by, or do not fall into husbandry, are either downright fools, or eke propose to get their living by robbery or by begging." (Sec. XX.) This is a good clean cut at politicians, office- holders, and other such beggar-craft, through more than a score of centuries, — clean as clas- sicism can make it: the Attic euphony in it, and all the aroma of age. Once more, and it is the last of the "CEcon- omicus," we give this charming bit of New- Englandism : — "I remember my father had an excellent rule," {Ischoniachiis loquitur,) "which he advised me to follow : that, if ever I bought any land, I should by no means pur- chase that which had been already well-im- proved, but should choose such as had never been tilled, either through neglect of the owner, or for want of capacity to do it; for he observed, that, if I were to purchase improved grounds, I must pay a high price for them, and then I could not propose to advance their value, and must also lose the pleasure of im- 23 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD proving them myself, or of seeing them thrive better by my endeavors."^ When Xenophon wrote his rural treatises, (including the Kui/ijytTtKos, ) he was living in that delightful region of country which lies westward of the mountains of Arcadia, looking toward the Ionian Sea. Here, too, he wrote the story of his retreat, and his wanderings among the mountains of Armenia; here he talked with his friends, and made other such symposia as he has given us a taste of at the house of Callias the Athenian; here he ranged over the whole country-side with his horses and dogs : a stalwart and lithe old gentleman, without a doubt; able to mount a horse or to manage one, with the supplest of the grooms; and with a keen eye, as his book shows, for the good points in horse-flesh. A man might make a worse mistake than to buy a horse after Xenophon's instructions, to-day. A spa- vin or a wind-gall did not escape the old gen- tleman's eye, and he never bought a nag with- out proving his wind, and handling him well ' It is worthy of note that Cato advises a contrary practice, and urges that purchase of land be made of a good farmer. "Caveto ne alienam disciplinam temere contemnas. De domino bono colono, bonoque aedifica- tore melius emetur." — De Re Rustica, I. 24 XENOPHON about the mouth and ears. His grooms were taught their duties with nice specialty: the mane and tail to be thoroughly washed; the food and bed to be properly and regularly pre- pared; and treatment to be always gentle and kind. Exception may perhaps be taken to his doc- trine in regard to stall-floors. Moist ones, he says, injure the hoof: "Better to have stones inserted in the ground close to one another, equal in size to their hoofs ; for such stalls con- solidate the hoofs of those standing on them, beside strengthening the hollow of the foot." After certain directions for rough riding and leaping, he advises hunting through thick- ets, if wild animals are to be found. Other- wise, the following pleasant diversion is named, which I beg to suggest to sub-lieuten- ants in training -for dragoon-service: — "It is a useful exercise for two horsemen to agree between themselves, that one shall retire through all sorts of rough places, and as he flees, is to turn about from time to time and present his spear; and the other shall pursue, having javelins blunted with balls, and a spear of the same description, and whenever he comes within javelin-throw, he is to hurl the blunted weapon at the party retreating, and 25 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD whenever he comes within spear-reach, he is to strike him with it." Putting aside his horsemanship, in which he must have been nearly perfect, there was very much that was grand about the old Greek, — very much that makes us strangely love the man, who, when his soldiers lay be- numbed under the snows on the heights of Armenia, threw off his general's coat, or blanket, or what not, and set himself resolutely to wood-chopping and to cheering them. The farmer knew how. Such men win battles. He has his joke, too, with Cheirisophus, the Lace- daemonian, about the thieving propensity of his townspeople, and invites him, in virtue of it, to steal a difficult march upon the enemy. And Cheirisophus grimly retorts upon Xeno- phon, that Athenians are said to be great ex- perts in stealing the public money, especially the high officers. This sounds home-like! When I come upon such things,— by Jupiter! — I forget the parasangs and the Taochians and the dead Cyrus, and seem to be reading out of American newspapers. THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS It is quite out of the question to claim Theo- 26 THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS critus as a farm-writer ; and yet in all old liter- ature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wanton kids, and "butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who milk the cows "upon the sly," as in the "Idyls" of the musical Sicilian. There is no doubt but Theocritus knew the country to a charm : he knew all its rough- nesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds ; he knew the lank heifers, that fed, "like grasshoppers," only on dew; he knew what clatter the brooks made, tumbling headlong adown the rocks ;^ he knew, more- over, all the charms and coyness of the coun- try-nymphs, giving even a rural twist to his praises of the courtly Helen: — "In shape, in height, in stately presence fair. Straight as a furrow gliding from the share." ^ A man must have had an eye for good ploughing and a lithe figure, as well as a keen scent for the odor of fresh-turned earth, to make such a comparison as that ! 'The resounding clatter of his falling water is too beautiful to be omitted:— — atrb Ta.'S virpwi KaToXtifitTai i>j/60af vSiop- ' Elton's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctness. 27 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD Again, he gives us an Idyl of the Reapers. Milo and Battus are afield together. The last lags at his work, and Milo twits him with his laziness; whereupon Battus retorts, — "Milo, thou moiling drudge, as hard as stone, An absent mistress did'st thou ne'er bemoan ?" And Milo,— "Not I, — I never learnt fair maids to woo; Pray, what with love have reaping men to do?" Yet he listens to the plaint of his brother- reaper, and draws him out in praise of his mistress — "charming Bombyce," — upon which love-lorn strain Milo breaks in, rough and homely and breezy: — "My Battus, witless with a beard so long, Attend to tuneful Lytierses' song. O fruitful Ceres, bless with com the field ; May the full ears a plenteous harvest yield ! Bind, reapers, bind your sheaves, lest strangers say. Ah, lazy drones, their hire is thrown away!' To the fresh north wind or the zephyrs rear Your shocks of corn ; those breezes fill the ear. Ye threshers, never sleep at noon of day. For then the light chaff quickly blows away. 28 THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS Reapers should rise with larks to earn their hire, Rest in the heat, and with the larks retire. How happy is the fortune of a frog : He wants no moisture in his watery bog. Steward, boil all the pease : such pinching 's mean, You '11 cut your hand by splitting of a bean." Theocritus was no French sentimentalist; he would have protested against the tame elegancies of the Roman Bucolics; and the sospiri ardenti and miserelli amanti of Guarini would have driven him mad. He is as brisk as the wind upon a breezy down. His cow- tenders are swart and barelegged, and love with a vengeance. It is no Boucher we have here, nor Watteau : cosmetics and rosettes are far away; tunics are short, and cheeks are nut- brown. It is Teniers rather: — boors, indeed; but they are live boors, and not manikin shep- herds. There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an uproarious song that shakes the woods ; and if it comes to a matter of kissing, there are no "reluctant lips," but a smack that makes the vales resound. I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Moschus, were it only for his picture of a fine, 29 WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD sturdy bullock: it occurs in his "Rape of Europa" :— "With yellow hue his sleekened body beams ; His forehead with a snowy circle gleams ; Horns, equal-bending, from his brow emerge, And to a moonlight crescent orbing verge." Nothing can be finer than the way in which this "milky steer," with Europa on his back, goes sailing over the brine, his "feet all oars." Meantime, she, the pretty truant, "Grasps with one hand his curved projecting horn, And with the other closely drawn compressed The fluttering foldings of her purple vest. Whene'er its fringed hem was dashed with dew Of the salt sea- foam that in circles flew : Wide o'er Europa's shoulders to the gale The ruffled robe heaved swelling, like a sail." Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Ven- ice; and his picture is truer to the premium standard. The painting shows a pampered animal, with over-red blotches on his white hide, and is by half too fat to breast such "salt sea-foam" as flashes on the Idyl of Moschus. 30 THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name has a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather ( Atoo-ij/iela) which is quite as good to mark down a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Professor Espy or Judge But- ler. Besides which, our friend Aratus holds the abiding honor of having been quoted by St. Paul, in his speech to the Athenians on Mars Hill:- "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said : 'For we are also His offspring.' " And Aratus, (after Elton,) — "On thee our being hangs ; in thee we move ; All are thy offspring, and the seed of Jove." Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charm- ing bits of rurality, redolent of the fields and of field-life, with which it would be easy to fill up the measure of this rainy day, and beat off the Grecian couplets to the tinkle of the eave-drops. Up and down, the cicada chirps ; the locust, "encourager of sleep," sings his drowsy song; boozy Anacreon flings grapes; the purple violets and the daffodils crown the WET DAYS AT EDGEWOOD perfumed head of Heliodora; and the rever- ent Simonides Hkens our hfe to the grass. Nor will I part company with these, or close up the Greek ranks of farmers, (in which I must not forget the great schoolmaster, Theo- phrastus,) until I cull a sample of the An- thology, and plant it for a guidon at the head of the column,— a little bannerol of music, touching upon our topic, as daintily as the bees touch the flowering tips of the wild thyme. It is by Zonas the Sardian : — At 8' ayeri ^ovdal tri/t^SXjytSes aKpa fi.4\tcr