THE JOHN • CRAIG LIBRARY COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE Cornell university Library c 521.M663 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/cu31 924001 01 2875 Wet Days at Edgewood By don? G. MITCHELL ^ET DAYS AT EDGE WOOD Old Farmers, Old Gardeners, and Old Pastorals BT THE AITTHOB OF "MY FARM OF ED6EW00D." Nsw York CHARLES SCmBlTERS SOWS 1899 COPTBIQBT, faei^ f889, f899 Bt Donald G. Hitchbli. TROW OIRIOTORr f RINTlNa AKD lOOKBIItDINa OOMMUT new YORK (Drlginttl Hebication TO CHARLES 8CRIBNER, IN TOKEN OP MY RESPECT FOB HIS ZITEBABV JVDOXBNT, MY GBATITVDE FOB SIS UNIFOBJt COUBTESY, AND MY CONFIDENCE IN Bia FBIENDSmP. 1861 PREFATORY NOTE. A CONSIDERABLE portion of this book was pub- lished more than a score of years ago in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. The articles thus con- tributed — 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 recollections of his kindly nature, and of his many and unabating ofSces of friendship. Donald G. Mitchell. EDGE WOOD, 1883. CONTENTS. FIRST DAY. PAGE Without and Within, i Hesiod and Homer, lo Xenofhon, • ^S Theocritus and Lesser Poets, .... 21 Cato, 26 Varro, . 30 Columella, 33 A Roman Dream, 39 SECOND DAY. Virgil, 44 An Episode, 54 tibullus and horace, 58 Pliny's Country-Places, 60 Palladius, 67 Professor Daubeny, 68 The Dark Age, 69 X CONTENTS. PAGB Geoponica Geoponicorum, 71 Crescenzi, 77 A Florentine Farm, 81 THIRD DAY. A Picture of Rain, 85 Southern France and Troubabours, ... 87 Among the Italians, 91 Conrad Heresbach, loi La Maison Rustique no French Ruralisms 115 A Minnesinger, 124 FOURTH DAY. Piers Plowman, 126 The Farmer of Chaucer's Time, .... 130 Sir Anthony Fitz-Herbert, ..... 134 Thomas Tusser, 138 SIR Hugh Platt, 142 Gervase Markham, 146 FIFTH DAY. English Weather 155 Time of James the First 160 Samuel Hartlib, 165 Period of the Commonwealth and Restoration, . r6g Old English Homes, ...... 1^7 A Brace of Pastorals, rSi CONTENTS. SIXTH DAY: PAGB A British Tavern, ....... tSs; Early English Gardeners 189 Jethro Tull, t, . ^ ..... . 195 Hanbury and Lancelot Brown, .... 202 William Shenstone, ...... 205 SEVENTH DAY. John Abercrombie, 212 A Philosopher and Two Poets, .... 216 Lord Kames 221 Claridge, Mills, and Miller, .... 227 Thomas Wkately, 230 Horace Walpole, 235 Edmund Burke, 239 Goldsmith, 242 EIGHTH DAY. Arthur Young, 248 Ellis and Bakewell, 254 William Cowper, 259 Gilbert White, 262 Trusler and Farm-Profits, 264 Sinclair and Others 266 Old Age of Farmers, 271 Burns and Bloomfield 276 Country Story-Tellers, 280 xii CONTENTS. NINTH DAY. PAGE British Progress in Agriculture, . . . 284 Opening of the Century, 289 Sir Humphry Davy, 291 BiRKBECK, BeATSON, AND FiNLAYSON, . . . 296 William Cobbett 297 GRAHAME AND CRABBE, 3O5 Charles Lamb, 307 The Ettrick Shepherd, 310 Loudon 311 A Bevy of Poets, 313 L'entoi, 333 FIRST DAT. Withovi and Within. T'T is raimng ; and being in-doors, I look out from my -■- library-window, across a quiet coimtry-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 pm^le of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots. There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned fur- rows ; 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 suburban houses, spires. 2 WET DAYS. belfries, turrets: all these comminglmg in along Una 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 conceals the sunk- en meadow of a liver; a farther wood, that skirts a town, — that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a confused line of roo&, belfries, spires, towers, rise above tiie wood; and these tallest spires and turrets lying 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 ^eam of water, where a light-house sMnes npon a point ; and norl3iward, 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 checkered farm-land is repeated in long perspective : here and there is a farmhouse with its clustered out-buildings ; here and there a blotch of 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 rsulway WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 3 that leaps over a marshy sreek upon trestle-vorl^ separate it &om Long Island Sound. To the north, under such ohlique glance as can be caught, the farm-lands m smaller enclosures 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 pufis 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 whoUy precipitous ; for the columnar masses have been fretted away by a thousand frosts, making a sloping debris below, and leaving above the iron-yeUow scars of fresh cleavage, the older blotches of gray, and the still older stain of lichens. Nor is the sununit 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 hemlock-spruces have found foothold in the clefts upon the face of the rock, showing a tawny green, that blends prettily with the scars, lichens, and weather-stains of the cliff; all which show under a sunset light richly and changefully 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 de- scribed at such length a mere landscape, (than which I know few fairer,) unless because of a rainy day it is 4 WET DAYS. always in my eye, and that now, having invited a few outsiders to such entertainment as may belong to my wet fenn-days, I should present to them at once my oldest acquaintance, — the view from my library-win- dow. But as yet it is only coarsely outlined ; I warn the reader that I may return to the outside 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 beguiling than the interchange of colors — wood and grain and river — all touched and toned by the wind, as a pleasant voice intones the shadows and the lights of a printed Idyl. And i^ 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 comer of my library which immediately 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, fifly 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 efiete Ylrgilian husbandry ; there is the sententious talk of Cato, the latinity of Columella, and WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 5 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 " Culh vator " — since expanded into the well-ordered state* liness of the " Country Gentleman " ; there are black- letter volumes of Bamaby Googe, and books compiled 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 agricultu- ral professors. 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 together their several budgets of common-sense notions about the practical art of husbandry, with good old-fashioned sturdiness and pointedness. 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 modem collegiate^ agriculture. Fortunately, however, it is not necessary 6 WET DAYS. to go to the pages of old books for the traces and sdma 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 opinion 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 wet day find Ischomachus re- marking to Socrates,* — " This also, I think, it must be easy for you to understand, that, if ground is to lie fal- low 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 Xenophon. If I read out of the big book the same observation to my foreman (who is more piquant 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 Bays, — "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 • (Eamomicut ; Chap. XVI. { 13 WITBOOT ANV WTTHIN. 7 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 oflF 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 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 exceeding fine and voyd of anj'thing which asketh 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 Bams." If I read this to my foreman, he says, " There 's sense in that" And when I render to him out of the epigram- matic talk of Cato, the maxim that " a man should farm • " The whole Arte of Buibandry, first written by Conrade Hem- batch, and translated by Bamaby Googe, Esquire ; " Book I. g WET DAYS. 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 Sst down with an authoritative rap upon the table that ies between us, and says, — '' That 's sense ! " In short, the shrewd sagacity, the keen worldly pru- dence, 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 yom- old cattle and your good-for-nothing sheep," * says Cato ; and, true to the preachment, some thrifty man of an adjoining town tries to pass upon me a toothless cow or a spavined horse. " Establish your farm near to market, or adjoining good roads," t says the Bo- man, and thereupon the !New-£nglander 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 cm-ious interest in following up the traces of cousinship 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 die • " Vendat boves vetnlos .... oves rejiculas [and the o'.d heathaa •coundrel continues] servum Henem, servnm morbosum.'* t " Oppidum validum propft sict .... aut via bona." WITHOUT AND WITHIN. 9 various agricultural writers, beginning with the Greeks, and coming down to a period within the memory of those who are living. I shall also take the liberty of relieving the talk with mention of those pastoral writers who have thrown some light upon tlie rural life of their days, or who by a truthfulness and sim- pUcity of touch have made their volumes welcome ones upon the shelves of every country library. The books practical and poetical which relate 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 hover- ing over the straight-laid furrows. An elegy of Tibul- lus peoples with lovers a farmstead that Columella de- scribes. The sparrows of Guarini twitter 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 Thomson wakes a chorus of voices, and flings the dap- pling shadows of clouds. Why divorce these twin-workers towards the profits and the entertainment of a rural life ? Nature has sol- emnized 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 petfect without its bloom, and no pasture hill- 10 WET DAYS. side altogether what Providence intended it should be, until the May £un has come and stamped it over with its fieiy brand of dandelions. JBimod and Homer. TTESIOD is currently reckoned one of the oldest -'— '- ferm - 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 liunbermen 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 shedB her foliage Toand, And with autumnal verdure strews the ground, The bole is incorrupt, the timber good, — Then whet the sounding ax to fell the wood." * The old Greek expresses a little doubt of young folk " Let a good ploughman ytared to forty, drive i And see the carefiil husbandman be fed With plenteous morsels, and of wholesome braadi • Cooke's Beiiod; Book 11. HESIOD AND HOMER. U The slave who numbeis 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 (Boole II. !ine 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 landholders in his.day ; but Hesiod, who must have lived within a century of Homer, vrith his modest homeliness, does not confirm tliis view. He tells us a farmer should keep two ploughs, and be cau- tious how he lends either of them. His household stip- ulations, too, are most moderate, whether on tlie score of the bride, the maid, or the " forty-year-old " plough- man ; and for guardianship of the premises the pro- prietor is recommended to keep " a sharp-toothed cur." This reminds us how Ulysses, on his return from voyaging, found seated round his good baUifi* Eunijeus 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 Homeric representative farmer, as well as bailiff and swine- herd, — the great original of Gurth, who might have prepared a supper for Cedric the Saxon very much as 12 WET DAYS. Euiuaius extemporized oue upon his Greek fann for Ulysses. Pope shall tell of this bit of cookery in rhymo 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 liis herd he run, Where the fat porkers slept beneath the sun; Of two his cutlass latinched 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, Broacheis, and all." This is roast pig : nothing more elegant or digestible. For the credit of Greek farmers, I am sorry that Eumaeus 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 poef s flowing description of the garden of Alcinous ; and thither, on this wet day, I conduct my reader, under leave of the King iif the Phaeacians : — " Four acres was the allotted space of ground, Fenced with a green enclosure all around, Tall thriving trees confined the fruitful mould; The reddening apple ripens here to gold- Here the blue fig with luscious juice overflows. With deeper red the full pomegranate glows; HESIOD AND HOMER. 13 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, flgs on figs arise : The same mild season gives the blooms to blow, The buds to harden and the fruits to grow. '* 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 vine- yard, 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 prefer to regard the four acres of Alcinous with aU the Homeric bigness and glow upon them. And under the same old Greek haze I see the majestic Ulysses, in his tattered clothes flinging back the taunts of the trifling Eurymachus, • Lord Orford's Works, 1793; Vol. H. p. 520. 14 WET DAYS. and in the spirit of a yeoman who knew how to handle a plough as well as a spear, boasting after this style : — " Shoald we, O Prince, engage In rival tasks beneath the burning rage Of sammer surjs; were both constrained to wield, Foodlcss, the scythe along the burdened field j 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 I" To return to Hesiod, we suspect that he was only a Email farmer — if he had ever farmed at all — in the foggy latitude of Bceotia, and knew nothing of the sunny wealth in the south of the peninsula, or of such princely estates as Eumaeus managed in the Ionian Seas. Flax- man 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 Ferses, who is rep- resented 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 heathen farm- writers, with a loving thought of his pretty Pandora, whom the goddesses so bedecked, whom Jove looks on (in Flaxman's picture) with such sharp approval, and • Flaxman's niustratlona of Workt and Days ; Plate I. XEi\OPHON. IJ irhose a'.lnbutes the poet has compacted into one rea< onant line, daintilv rendered by Cooke, — " Thus the sex began A lovely mischief to the soul of man." Xenophm. 1" NEXT beg to pull from his place upcin the shel^ -*- and to present to the reader, General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced fanner, and, if we may be- lieve Laertius, "handsome beyond expression." It is refreshing to find such qualities united in one wan 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 replenishment ; there is no cover put up, of disorderly sutlers or camp-followers. The farming reputation of the general rests upon his " CEconomics " and his horse-treatise Clira-i/oj). Economy has come to have a contorted meaning in our day, as if it were only — saving. Its true gist is better expressed by the word management ; and in that old-fashioned sense it forms a significant title for Xen< 16 WBT DAYS. ophon's book : management of the household, manage- irent of flocks, of servants, of land, and of property in g 2ncral. At the very outset we find this bit of practical wisr dom, 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 famjer such a profit as may give him a good living." Thereafter (sec. vii.) he introduces the good Ischom- achus, who, it appears, has a thrifty wife at home, and from that source flow in a great many capital hints upon domestic management The apa.-tments, the exposure, the cleanliness, the order, are all considered in such an admirably practical, common-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 Ischomachus, in an unfortunate moment, puts on rmige 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 proip. itable to those who understand it; but it brings th« XENOPBON. 17 greatest trouble and misery upon those farmers who undertake it without knowledge." (sec. xv.) Where Xonophon comes to speak of the details of farm-labor, of ploughings and fallowings, there is all that precision and particularity of mention, added to a shrewd sagacity, which one might look for in the col- lunns 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 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 Brad- ley, does, indeed, give a little note of corroborative testimony. But I would not advise any active fanner, on the authority either of General Xenophon or of Professor Bradley, to transport his surface-soil very largely to the nearest frog-pond, in the hope of finding it transmuted into manure. The absorptive and reten- tive capacity of soils is, to be sure, the bone just now of very particular contention ; but whatever that ca- pacity may be, it certainly needs something more pal- pable than the virtue of standing water for its profita- ble development Here, again, is very neat evidence of how much a 18 WET DAYS. simple good sense has to do with husbandry : 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, " difference in knowledge or opportunities of knowledge that makes some farmers rich and others poor ; but that which makes some poor and some ric'i is 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 else 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 classicism can make it : the Attic euphony in it, and all- the aroma of age. Once more, and it is the last of the " CEconomicus," we give this charming bit of New-Englandism : — "I remember my father had an excellent rule," {Ischomo' ehus 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-improved, but should choose such as bad never been tilled, either through neglect of the jwner, or for want of capacity XENOPHON. 19 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 improving them myself, or of seeing them thrive better by my en- deavors." * When Xenophon wrote his ruidl treatises, (including the Kui/ijyeTiKos,) 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 spavin or a wind-gall did not escape the old gentleman's eye, and he never bought a nag without proving his wind, and handling him well about the mouth and ears. • It is worthy of note that Cato advises a contrary pra.-1ic6, and nrges that purchase of land be made of a good farmer. " Gaveto li« ftUenam disciplinam temere conremnas. De domino bono colonf*, bono- qne xdiljcatore melius emetur." — De. Re Rusticdf I. 20 WET DAYS. His grooms were taught their duties with nice special- ity : the mane and tail to be thorouglily washed ; the food and bed to be properly and regularly prepared ; and treatment to be always gentle and kind. Exception may perhaps be taken to his doctrine 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 scalls consolidate 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 thickets, if wild animals are to be found. Otherwise, the following pleasant diver- sion is named, which I beg to suggest to sub-lieutenants in training for dragoon-service: — "It is a useful ex- ercise 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 tune 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 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, — \ ery much that niakes ui THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 21 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 Cheinsophus, the Lacedaemonian, 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 Xenophon, that Athenians are said to be great experts in stealing the public money, espe- cially 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. TT is quite out of the question to claim Theocritus as -*- a farm-writer ; and yet in all old literature there is not to be found such a lively bevy of heifers, and wan- ton kids, and " butting rams," and stalwart herdsmen, who mUk 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 roughnesses, and the thorns that scratched the bare legs of the goatherds; ha Sa WET DAYS. 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 country- 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." t 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 ! Again, he gives us an Idyl of the Keapers. Milo and Battus are afield together. The last lags at his work, and Milo twits him with Ills 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 • The resounding clatter of his falling watei is too beautiftil to b« smitted: — t Eltnn's translation, I think. I do not vouch for its correctDKiiii THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 23 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. fruitful Ceres, bless with com the field ; May the full ears a plenteous harvest yield ! Bind, reapers, bind your sheaves, lest strangers ttj, ' Ah, lazy drones, their hire is thrown away 1 ' To the fresh north wind or the zephyrs rear Your shocks of com ; those breezes fill the ear. Ye threshers, never sleep at noon of day, For then the light chaff quickly blows away. 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 Eo- man Bucolics ; and the sospiri ardenti and misereUi 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 shepherds There is no miserable tooting upon flutes, but an up 24 WET DAYS. roarious song that shakes the woods ; and if it comes to a matter of kissing, there are no " relactant lips," but a smack that makes the vales resound. I shall call out another Sicilian here, named Mos- chus, were it only for his picture of a fine, sturdy bul- lock : it occurs in his " Rape of Europa " : — " With vellow hue his eleekened body beams ; His forehead with a snowy circle gleams ; Horns, equal-bending, &om 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 rufiied robe heaved swelling, like a sail." Moschus is as rich as the Veronese at Venice ; 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. THEOCRITUS AND LESSER POETS. 28 Another poet, Aratus of Cilicia, whose very name Las a smack of tillage, has left us a book about the weather (Atoo-T;/x€ta) which is quite as good to mark doirn a hay-day by as the later meteorologies of Pro- fessoi Espj or Judge Butler. 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 more; All are thy ofEspring, and the seed of Jove." Scattered through the lesser Greek poets, and up and down the Anthology, are charming 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 perfumed head of Heliodora; and the reverent Simonides likens our life 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, Theophrastus,) until I cull a 26 WET DAYS. sample of the Anthology, 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 : — A.' ff iyere iav&at ai/i^hitSei wcpa fteXuiaai, K. T. X., — imd the rendering by Mr. Hay : — " Ye nimble honey-making bees, the flowers are in their prime ; Come now and taste the little buds of sweetly breathing thyme, Of tender poppies all so fair, or bits of raisin sweet. Or down that decks the apple tribe, or fragrant violet; Come, nibble on, — your vessels store with honey while yon can, In order that the hive-protecting, bee-preserving Pan Hay have a tastmg for himself, and that the hand so rude. That cuts away the comb, may leave yourselves some little food." Cato. LEAVING now this murmur of the bees upon the banks of the Pactolus, we will slip over-seas to Tusculum, where Cato was bom, who was the oldest of the Roman writers upon agriculture ; and thence into the Sabine territory, where, upon an estate of his father's, in the midst of the beautiful country lying northward of the Monte Gennaro, (the Lucretilis of Horace,) he learned the art of good farming. In what this art consisted in his day, he tells us in short, cracklinc speech : — "Primum, bene arare ••■ CATO. 27 eandum, arare ; tertium, stercorare." Foi the rest, ha says, choose good seed, sow thickly, and pull all tlia weeds. Nothing more would be needed to grow as good a crop upon the checkered plateau under my win dow as ever fattened among the Sabine Hills. Has the art come to a stand-still, then ; and shall wa take to reading Cato on fair days, as well as rainy ? f/" There has been advance, without doubt ; but all the advance in the world would not take away the edge from truths, stated as Cato knew how to state them. There is very much of what is called Agricultural Science, nowadays, which is — rubbish. Science is sound, and agriculture always an honest art; but the mixture, not uncommonly, is bad, — no feir marriage, but a monstrous concubinage, with a monstrous progeny of muddy treatises and disquisitions which confuse more than they instruct. In contrast with these, it is no won- der that the observations of such a man as Cato, whose ener^es had been kept alive by service in the field, and whose tongue had been educated in the Roman Senate, should carry weight with them. The grand truths on which successful agriculture rests, and which dimple experience long ago demonstrated, cannot ba kept out of view, nor can they be dwarfed by any im> position of learning. Science may explain them, or illustrate or extend; but it cannot shake their pre- ponderating influence vpon the crop of the year. Aa 28 WET DA YS. respects many other arts, the inititil ti-uths may be loa sight of. and orerlaid by the mass of succeeding devel opments, — not falsified, but so belittled as practically to be counted for nothing. In this respect, agriculture is exceptional. The old story is always the safe story j'ou must plough and plough again ; and manure ; and sow good seed, and enough ; and pull the weeds ; and as siu'e as the rain falls, the crop will come. Many nice additions to this method of treatment, which my fine-farming friends will suggest, are antici- pated by the old Roman, if we look far enough into his book. Thus, he knew the uses of a harrow ; he knew the wisdom of ploughing in a green crop ; he had steeps for his seed ; he knew how to drain ofiF the surface-water, — nay, there is very much in his account of the proper preparation of ground for olive-trees, or vine-setting, which looks like a mastery of the princi- ples that govern the modem system of drainage.* Of what particular service recent investigations in science have been to the practical farmer, and what positive and available aid, beyond what could be de- rived from a careful study of the Eoman masters, they put into the hands of an intelligent worker, who is tilfc ing ground simply for pecuniary advantage, I shall hops to inquire and discourse upon some other day : when that day comes, we will fling out the banner of ih« * XLin. " Sulcos, si locus aquosus erit, alveatoa esse oportet," ^^ CATO 2* mneteeuth century, and ^ve a girn to Liebig, and John son, and the rest. Meantime, as a farmer who endeavors to keep posted in all the devices for pushing lands which have an awk- ward habit of yielding poor crops into the better habit of yielding large ones, I will not attempt to conceal the chagrin with which I find this curmudgeon of a Eoman Senator, living two centuries before Christ, and north- ward of Monte Gennaro, who never heard of " Hovey's Eoot-Cutter," or of the law of primaries, laying down rules * of culture so clear, so apt, so full, that I, who have the advantages of two thousand years, find nothing in them to laugh at, unless it be a few oblations to the gods ; t and this, considering that I am just now burning a little incense (Havana) to the nymph Volutia, is uncalled for. \ And if Senator Cato were to wake up to-morrow, in \ the white house that stares through the rain yonder, \ and were to open his little musty vellum of slipshod ? maxims, and, in faith of it, start a rival farm in the ;' bean-line, or in vine-growing, — keeping clear of the ; newspapers, — I make no doubt but he would prove as thrifty a neighbor as my good friend the Deacon. ,. "We nineteenth-century men, at work among out cabbages, clipping o£F the purslane and the twitch-grass, • This mention, of course, excludes the Senator s formula trt ui^ gnente, aperients, cattle-nostrums, and pickled pork, t CXXXIV. ZaU>, Dt Rt Ruslicd. 50 WET DAYS. arc disposed to assmne a very complacent attitude, u we lean upon our hoe-handles, — as if we were doing tall things in the way of illustrating physiology and the coguate sciences. But the truth is, old Laertes, near three thousand years ago, in his slouch cap and greasy beard, was hoeing up in the same way his purslane and twitch-grass, in his bean-patch on the hills of Ithaca. The difference between us, so far as the crop and the tools go, is, after all, ignominiously small. Be dreaded the weevil in his beans, and we the club-foot in our cab- bages ; toe have the " Herald," and he had none ; we have " Plantation-Bitters," and he had his jug of the Biblian wine. Vdrro. 11 yr VARKO, another Boman farmer, lies between the -"-*-• same covers "De Re Bustica" with Cato, and seems to have had more literary tact, though less of blunt sagacity. Yet he challenges at once our confi- dence by telling us so frankly the occasion of his writ- icg upon such a subject. Life, he says, is a bubble, — and the life of an old man a bubble about to break. He IS eighty, and must pack his luggage to go out of this world. {"Annus octogesimus admonet me, ut sarcinat eoUigam anteqtiam prqficiscar e vita.") Therefore he writes down for his wife, Fundania, the rules by whicb she may manage the farm. fARRO n And a vei^ respectably old lady she must have leen, to deal with the vtllici and the coloni, if her age bore suitable relation to that of her husband. The lipe maturity of many of the rural writers I have introduced cannot fail to arrest attention. Thus, Xenophon gained a strength in his Elian fields that carried him into the nineties ; Cato lived to be over eighty ; and now we have Varro, writing his book out by Tusculiun at the same age, and surviving to counsel with Fundania ten years more. Pliny, too, (the elder,) who, if not a farmer, had his country-seats, and left very much to establish our acquaintance with the Eoman rural life, was a hale, much-enduring man, of such soldierly habits and large abstemiousness as to warrant a good fourscore, — if he had not fallen under that murderous cloud of ashes from Mount Vesuvius, in the year 79. The poets, doubtless, burnt out earlier, as they usually do. Virgil, whom I shall come to speak of presently, certainly did: he died at fifty-one. Tibullus, whose opening Idyl is as pretty a bit of gasconade about living in a cottage in the country, upon love and a few vege- tables, as a maiden could wish for, did not reach the fifties ; and Martial, whose " Faustine Villa," if noth- ing else, entitles him to rural oblation, fell short of the sixties. Varro himself alludes with pride to the greater longevity of those who live in the country, and alleges ■s a reason, "yworf Dimna natura dedit agros, art 82 WET DAYS. humana tedificavit urbes." Is not this the possible original of Cowper's " God made the country, and man made the town "? The old man is very fiill in his rules for Fundania, not only as regards general management, but in respect to the choice of land, the determination of its quali- ties, the building of the country-houses, the arrange- ment of the offices, the regimen of the servants, and the treatment of the various manures and crops. He clearly urges rotation, has faith in a very large in- fluence of the moon, counts the droppings of pigeons the best of all manures, and ^ves the sea-birds very little credit for their contributions to the same office.* I even find this octogenarian waxing jocose at times. On a certain occasion he says, (it is mentioned in his book of poultry and birds,t) " I paid a visit with a friend to Appius Claudius, the Augur, and found him seated, with Cornelius Merula [blackbird] and Fircel- lius Pavo [peacock] on his left, while Minutius Pica [magpie] and Petronius Passer [sparrow] were on his right ; whereupon my friend says, ' My good sir, you receive us in your aviary, seated among yoiu- birds.'" Ihe jokelet is not indeed over-racy, but it has a quaint twang, coriiing as it does in musty type over so man^ centuries, from the pen of an old man of eighty, who • Lib. X cap. xxx\-iii. " Stercus optimum scribit Cosains ease vobt snua, praeter paJustrium, ac nantlum.'* t Lib. IIL cap. ii. He Re liuiiicd. COLUMELLA. Sa discussed guinea-fowl and geese, and who made mim- ing calls at the house of Judge Appius Claudius. Varro indulges in some sharp sneers at those wha had written on the same subject before him. This was natural enough in a man of his pursuits : he had writ • ten four hundred books. Oolumella. /■ \F Columella we know scarcely more than that ha ^-^ lived somewhere about the time of Tiberius, that he was a man of wealth, that he travelled extensively through Gaul, Italy, and Greece, observing intelligently different methods of culture, and that he has given the fullest existing compend of ancient agriculture. In his chapter upon Gardening he warms into hexameters; but the rest is stately and euphonious prose. In his opening chapter, he does not forego such praises of the farmer's life as sound like a lawyer's address before a county - society on a fair -day. Cincinnatus and his plough come in for it ; and Fabricius and Curius Den- tatus ; with which names, luckily, our orators cannot whet their periods, since Columella's mention of them is about all we know of their farming. He falls into the way, moreover, of lamenting, as people obstinately continue to do, the " good old times," when men were better than " now," and when the rea- Bonable delights of the garden and the fields engrossed 54 WET DAYS. them to the neglect of the circus and the theatres But when he opens upon his subject proper, it is in grandiose Spanish style, (he was a native of Cadiz,) with a maxim broad enough to cover all possible condi- tions: — "Whoever would devote himself to the pursuit of agriculture should understand that he must summon to his aid — prudence in business, a faculty of spend- ing, and a determination to work."* Oi, as Tremellius says, — " That man ■ will master the craft, who knows how to cultivate, et poterit, et volet." This is comprehensive, if not encouraging. It would be hard to say, indeed, in what particular this summa- tion of Columella would not apply to the pursuit of almost any man. That " faculty of spending " is a tre- mendous bolster to a great many other things as well as fanning. Neither parsons nor politicians can ignore it wholly. It is only another shape of the poterit, and the poterit only a scholarly rendering of pounds and pence. As if Tremellius had said, — That man will make his way at farming who understands the business, who has the money to apply to it, and who is willing to bleed freely. There are a great many people who have said the same thing since. "With a kindred sagacity this shrewd Roman advisef R man to slip upon his farm often, in order that his stew * ' Qui studiiun agricolatioai dederit, sciat hsec sibi alrocanda pinaentiam rei, facultatem impendendi, voluntatem agendi." COLUMELLA. M *rd may keep sharply at his work ; he even sugjjests that the landlord make a feint of c( ming, when he has no intention thereto, that he may gain a day's alertness from the bailiff. The book is of course a measure of the advances made in farming during the two hundred years elapsed since Cato's time ; but those advances were not great There was advance in power to sy* tematize facts, advance in literary aptitude, but no verj noticeable gain in methods of culture. Columella gives the results of wider observation, and of more persistent study ; but, for aught I can see, a man could get a crop of lentils as well with Cato as with Columella ; a man would house his flocks and servants as well out of the one as the other ; in short, a man would grow into the " faculty of spending " as swiftly under the teachings of the Senator as of the later writer of the reign of Tiberius. It is to be observed, however, that, so far as one can judge from the work of Columella, farming was now conducted upon a grander scale. The days when Cin- cinnatus dug among his own cabbages, and Curius Dentatus bent his own back to the sarculum, were long gone by, and were looked back upon, I dare say, by the first readers of the elegant Columella, as we look back to the days of Captain Smith, Pocahontas, and corn-cakes baked in the ashes. The details of a Soman farmery which are entered upon by this author are of an extent and of a nicety which would compare with an "East' 36 WET DAYS. Hothian steading. He divides the entire establishmenl into three distinct parts : the villa urbana, the villa rut' tica, and the fructuaria ; or, as we might say, the man- sion-house, the laborers' cottages, and the out-buildinga I give a reduced drawing of such a design from (lastell's " Villas of the Ancients." * A huge kitchen, it * The following letters and numbers indicate the several parts: — A. The Villa Urbana. a. Inner court. h. Servants' hall. b. Summer dining-room. •'. Dressing-room of hatha, e. Winter dining-room. le. Bathing-room. d. Withdrawing-rooms. t. Warm cell. «. Winter apartments. m. Sweating-room, y. Summer apartments. ». Furnace. g. Library. u. Porters' lodges. B. Villa Eustica and Fkuctuaria. 1. Inner farm-yard. a. Pond. 3. Outer yard, 4. Kitchen. 5. New wine. 6. Old wine. 7. Housekeeper. 8. Spinning-room. 9. To sick-room. 10. Lodges. 11. Stairs to bailiff's room. 12. Keeper of stoves. 13. Stairs to work-house. 14. Wine-press. 15. Oil-press. 16. Granaries. 17. Fruit-room. 18. Master of cattle. 19. Ox-statis. SO. Herdsmen. 21. Stables. 22. Grooms 23. Sheepfold. 24. Shepherds. 25. Goat-pens. 26. Goatherds. 27. Dog-kennels. 28. Cart-bouses. 29. Hog-sties. 30. Hog-keepers. 31. Bakehouse. 32. Mill. 33. Outer pond. 34. Dunghills. 35. Wood and fodder. 36. Hen-yard. 37. 38. Dove-houses 39. Thrushes. 40. Poultry. 41. Poulterers. 42. Porter. 43. Dog-kennels 44. Orchard. 45. Kitchen-gaidoi COLUMELLA. 37 9 B ^'-Bi t' 'siUD B HO 3? I M5 ■liuTrninnninnr AP try upon Horace ; where I had the pleasure of drink- ing goats' milk — " dulci digne mero " — in the spring of 1846. There can be no doubt but Virgil had been an atten- tive reader of Xenophon, of Hesiod, of Cato, and of Varro ; otherwise he certainly would have been unwor- thy of the task he had undertaken, — that of laying down the rules of good husbandry in a way that should insure the reading of tliem, and kindle a love for the pursuit I suspect that Virgil was not only a reader of all that had been written on the subject, but that he was also an insistant questioner of every sagacious landholder and every sturdy farmer that he fell in with, whether on the Campanian hills or at the house of Maecenas. How else does a man accomplish himself for a didactic work relating to matters of fact? I suspect, moreover, that VirgU, during those half dozen years in which he was engaged upon this task, lost no opportunity of in- specting every beehive that fell in his way, of measur- ing the points and graces of every pretty heifer he saw in the fields, and of noting with the eye of an artist the color of every furrow that glided from the plough. It is inconceivable that a man of his intellectual address should have given so much of literary toil to a work that was not in every essential fiilly up to the best VIRGIL. 49 practice of the day. Five years, it is. said, were given to the accomplishment of this short poem. What say our poetasters to this ? Fifteen hundred days, we will suppose, to less than twice as many lines ; blocking out four or five for his morning's task, and all the evening — for he was a late worker — licking them into shape, as a bear licks her cubs. But what good is in it all ? Simply as a work of art, it will be cherished through all time, — an earlier Titian, whose color can never fade. It was, besides, a most beguiling peace-note, following upon the rude blasts of war. It gave a new charm to forsaken homesteads. Under the Virgilian leadership, Monte Gennaro and the heights of Tusculimi beckon the Romans to the fields ; the meadows by reedy Thrasymene are made golden with doubled crops. The Tarentine sheep multiply around Benacus, and crop close those dark bits of herbage which have been fed by the blood of Roman citizens. Thus much for the magic of the verse ; but there is also sound farm-talk in Virgil. I am aware that Seneca, living a few years after him, invidiously objects that he was more careful of his language than of his doc- trine, and that Columella quotes him charily, — that the collector of the " Geoponics " ignores him, and that Tull gives hmi clumsy raillery ; but I have yet to see in what respect his system falls short of Columella, or how i 5C WET DAYS. it differs materially, except in fulness, from the teachings of Crescenzi, who wrote a thousand years and more later. There is little in the poem, save its superstitions, from which a modern farmer can dissent* We are hardly launched upon the first Georgic before we find a pretty suggestion of the theory of rotation, — " Sic quoque mutatis requiescunt foetibus -.rva." EoUing and irrigation both glide into the verse a few lines later. He insists upon the choice of the best seed, advises to keep the drains clear, even upon holy- days, (268,) and urges, in common with a great many shrewd New-England farmers, to cut light meadows while tlie dew is on, (288-9,) even though it involve night-work. Some, too, he says, whittle their torches by fire-light, of a winter's night ; and the good Trife, meantime, lifting a song of cheer, plies the shuttle merrily. In the opening of the second book, Virgil insists, very wisely, upon proper adaptation of plantations of fruit-trees to different localities and exposures, — a mat ter which is far too little considered by farmers of our day. His views in regard to propagation, whether by cuttings, layers, or seed, are in agreement with those • Of course, I reckon the " Ezceptantque leTes aurai) ; et BSB(e sine ulUs," eta., (Ub m. 374,) as among the superstitions. VIRGIL. Ol of the best Scotch nurserymen ; and in the matter of grafting or inoculation, he errs (?) only in declaring certain results possible, which eve a modem gardening has not accomplished. Dryden shall help us to the pretty falsehood : — " The thin-leaved arbute hazel-giafts receives, And planes huge apples bear, that bore but leaves. Thus mastful beech the bristly chestnut bears, And the wild ash is white with blooming pears, And greedy swine from grafted elms are fed With falling acorns, that on oaks are bred." It is curious how generally this belief in something like promiscuous grafting was entertained by the old writers. Palladius repeats it with great unction in his poem " De Insilaone," two or three centuries later ; * and in the tenth book of the " Geoponics," a certain Damogerontis (whoever he may have been) says, (cap. Ixv.,) "Some rustic writers allege that nut-trees and resinous trees (to. priTlvt]v t^ovra) cannot be success- fully grafted ; but," he continues, " this is a mistake ; I have myself grafted the pistache-nut into the terebin- thine." Is it remotely possible that these old gentlemen un- derstood the physiology of plants better than we ? As T return to Virgil, and slip along the dulcet lines, • The same writer, under Februarius, Ti« XVII., gives a very en- lions method sf grafting the willow, so that it may bear peaches. 5S WET DAYS. I come upon this cracking laconistn, in which is com- pacted as much wholesome advice as a loose farm-write» would spread over a page : — " Landato ingentia rnra, ExigDnm colito " : " Praise big farms ; stick by little ones." The wisdom of the advice for these days of steam-engines, reapers, and high wages, is more than questionable ; but it is in perfect agreement with the notions of a great many old- fashioned fanners who live nearer to the heathen past than they imagine. The cattle of Vir^l are certainly no prize-animals. Any good committee would vote them down inconti- nently : — " Cni tuipe caput, cui ploiima cervix," (iii. 52,) would not pass muster at any fair of the last century, whatever Professor Daubeny may say. The horses are better; there is the dash of high venture in them ; they have snuffed battle ; their limbs are suppled to a bounding gallop, — as where in the ^neid every resounding hoof- beat upon the dusty plain is repeated in the pauses of the poem.* The fourth book of the Georgics is full of the mur- mur of bees, showing how the poet had listened, anJ had loved to listen. After describing minutely ho*" • " Qnalrupedante putt em sonitu qnatit ungula campom." VIRGIL. 6» and where tlie homes of the honey-makers are to be placed, he offers them this delicate attention: — " Then o*er the running stream or standing lake A passage for thy weaiy people make ; With osier tloats the standing water strew; Of massy stones make bridges, if it flow; That basking in the sun thy bees may lie. And, resting there, their flaggy pmions diy." Drtdbii. Who cannot see from this how tenderly the man had watched the buzzing yellow-jackets, as they circled and stooped in broad noon about some little pool in the rills that flow into the Lago di Garda ? For hereabout, of a surety, the poet once sauntered through the noon- tides, while his flock cropped the "milk-giving cytisus,"* upon the hills. And charming hills they are, as my own eyes can witness : nay, my little note-book of travel shall itself tell the story. (The third shelf, upon the right, my boy.) • This plant, so often mentioned and commended by classic wiitem, Prof- Daubeny believes to be identical with the Medicago arborea of the Greek Archipelago : p. 170, JRoman Husbatidry. Heresbach (transla- tion of Bamaby Googe) describes it as "a plant all hairy & whytish, 4S Rhamnus is, having branches halfe a yard long & more, where- Dpon groweth leavis like unto Fenigreke or clover, but something lesse, having a rising crest in the midst of them ' — Art of Ai*- ^andty, Book I. M WET DATS. An Mpisode. NO matter how many years ago, — I was going froin Milan, (to which place I had come by Piacenza and Lodi,) on my way to Verona by Brescia and Pes- chiera. At Desenzano, or thereabout, the blue lake of Benaco first appeared. A few of the higher mountains that bounded the view were still capped with snow, though it was latter May. Through fragrant locusts and mulberry-trees, and between irregular hedges, we dashed down across the isthmus of Sermione, where the ruins of a Roman castle flout the sky. Hedges and orchards and fragrant locusts still hem the way, as we touch the lake, and, rounding its south- em skirt, come in sight of the grim bastions of Pes- chiera. A Hungarian sentinel, lithe and tall, I see pacing the rampart, against the blue of the sky. "Wom- en and girls come trooping into the narrow road, — for it is near sunset, — with their aprons full of mul berry-leaves. A bugle sounds somewhere within the fortress, and the mellow music swims the water, and beats with melodious echo — boom on boom — against Sermione and the farther shores. The sun just dipping behind the western mountains, with a disk all golden, pours down a flood of yellow tight, tinting the mulberry-orchards, the edges of the Roman castle, the edges of the waves where the lake AN EPISODE. 55 Btirs, and spreading out into a bay of gold where the lake lies still. Virgil never saw a prettier sight there ; and I waa thinking of him, and of my old master beating off spondees and dactyls with a red ruler on his thread- bare knee, when the sun sunk utterly, and the purple shadows dipped us all in twilight. " £l arrivato, Signore ! " said the vetturino. True enough, I was at the door of the inn of Peschiera, and snuffed the stew of an Italian supper. Virgil closes the first book of the Georgics with a poetic forecast of the time when ploughmen should touch upon rusted war-weapons in their work, and turn out helmets empty, and bones of dead soldiers, — as indeed they might, and did. But how unlike a poem it will sound, when the schools are opened on the Rap- pahannock again, and the boy scans, — choking down his sobs, — " Ant gravibos rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, Grandiaqne eftbssis mirabitur ossa sepnlcris," and the master veils his eyes ! I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican success, and became more than ever an adulator of the ruling powers. I can fancy him at a palace tea-drink- ing, where pretty court-lips give some witty turn to his " Sic Vos, non Vohis," and pretty court-eyes glance ten- derly at Master Maro, who blushes, and asks some 66 WET DAYS. Sabina (not Poppaea) after Tibullus and his Delia But a great deal is to be forgiven to a man who can turn compliments as Virgil turned them. What can bo more exquisite than that allusion to the dead boy Mar- cellus, in the Sixth Book of the -SIneid ? He is read- ing it aloud before Augustus, at Eome. Maecenas is there from his tall house upon the Esquiline ; possibly Horace has driven over from the Sabine country, — for, alone of poets, he was jolly enough to listen to the reading of a poem not his own. Above all, the calm- faced Octavia, Cassar's sister, and the rival of Cleo- patra, is present. A sad match she has made of it with Antony ; and her boy Marcellus is just now dead, — dying down at Baiae, notwithstanding the care of that famous doctor, Antonius Musa, first of hydropaths. Virgil had read of the Sibyl, — of the entrance to Hades, — of the magic metallic bough that made Charon submissive, ' — of the dog Cerberus, and his sop, — of the Greeks who welcomed ^neas, — then of the father Anchises, who told the son what brave fata should belong to him and his, — warning him, mean- time, with alliterative beauty, against the worst of wars, — " Ne, pueri, ne tanta animis assuescite bella, Nen patriffi validas in viscera vertite vires," — too late, alas ! There were those about Augustus who could sigh over this. AN EPISODE. 57 Virgil reads on : Anchises is pointing out to JEz^eaa tnat old Marcellus who fought Hannibal ; and beside him, full of beauty, strides a young hero about whom the attendants throng. "And who is tLe young hero," demands wiEneas, " over whose brow a dark fate is brooding ? " (The bereaved Octavia is listening with a yearning heart.) And Anchises, the tears starting to his eyes, says, — " Seek not, O son, to fathom the sorrows of thy kin- dred. The Fates, that lend him, shall claim him ; a jealous Heaven cannot spare such gifts to Rome. Then, what outcry of manly grief shall shake the battlements of the city ! what a wealth of mourning shall Father Ti- ber see, as he sweeps past his new-made grave ! Never a Trojan who carried hopes so high, nor ever the land of Eomulus so gloried in a son." (Octavia is listening.) " Ah, piety ! alas for the ancient faith ! alas for the right hand so stanch in battle ! None, none could meet him, whether afoot or with reeking charger he pressed the foe. Ah, unhappy youth ! If by any means thou canst break the harsh decrees of Fate, thou wilt be — Marcellus ! " It is Octavia's lost boy ; and she is carried out faint- ing. But "Virgil receives a matter of ten thousand sesterces 58 WET DAYS. a line, — which, allowing for diiTereuce in exchange and value of gold, may (or may not) have been a matter of ten thousand dollars. With this bouncing bag of ses- terces, Virgil shall go upon the shelf for to-day. Tihillus and Horace. npiBULLUS was the son of a Koman gentleman who ■*- had been proscribed in the fierce civil wars of the Republic, and who probably lost his head, while his es- tates were ravaged by pillaging soldiers. Such a record gave the poet a wholesome horror of war, which he emphasizes with a vengeance up and down throughout his elegies. Yet he had his own experience of battles, — at Philippi and in Aquitania ; but he loved better a quiet country-home which he possessed on the edge of the Campagna, midway between the heights of Tibur and of Tusculum. Horace, I dare say, made him pass- ing visits there, on his way to the ^'frigidum Praneste " it lay upon the direct road thither from Rome, and I suspect that they two made many a jolly night of it together. Certain it is that Tibullus was not inveter- ate in his prejudices against a social glass. I quote a little testimony thereto from the opening elegy of his second book : — " Now quafi FaleniiM, let my Chian wine, PiD^d from the cask, in massy gobleta ehine 1 TIBULLUS AND BORAGE. 69 Drink deep, mv friends, all, all, be madly gajr , 'T were sacrilegious not to reel to-day." The poet loved the country only iess than his Delia and Nemesis. And when the latter gives him the slip in Rome, and retires to her farm-villa, he vows that he will follow her, (IIL Book 2,) and if necessary, disguise himself as one of her henchmen of the fields. " Cupid joys to leam the ploughman's phrase, And, clad a peasant, o'er the fallows strays. Oh how the weighty prong I '11 busy wield, Should the fair wander to the labored field ! A farmer then the crooked ploughshare hold, Whilst the dull ox throws up the unctuous mould: I 'd not complain though Phoebus burnt the lands. And painful blisters swelled my tender hands." Over and over he weaves into his elegies some tender rural scene which shows not only his own taste, but what beauties were relished by his admirers — of whom he counted so many — in Eome. I must name Horace for the reason of his " Proetd beatiis,'' etc., if I had no other ; but the truth is, that thoxigh he rarely wrote intentionally of country-matters, yet there was in him that fulness of rural taste which bubbled over — in grape-clusters, in images of rivers, in snowy Soracte, in shade of plane-trees; nay, he could not so much as touch an amphora but the purple juices of the hill-side stained his verse as they stained his lip. See, too, what a charming rural spirit there is 60 WET DAYS in his ode to Septimius, (YL 2) ; and the opening to Torquatus * (VTL 4) is the limning of one who has followed the changes of the bursting spring with hia whole heart in his eyes: — The snow is goce, the grass is eeeo, Tlie woods wear waving robes of green; 'T is spring again, — she wakes, she walces, The ic7 fetters all she breaks ; And every brooklet, wanton, free, Goes singing sweetly down the lea. Pliny'i Coutvtry-I'laceg. ON my last wet day I spoke of the elder Pliny, and now the younger Pliny shall tell us something of one or two of his countiy-places. Pliny was a govern- * " Diffugen nives, ledennt jam gramina campis," — every school-boy knows it: but what every school-boy does not know, and but few of the masters, is this charming, jingling rendering of II into the Venetian dialect: — ** La neve x& andjida, Su i prU toma i flori De cento colorl, E a dosBO de i &lbori La fogia 6 tornada A brli vestir. " Ohe gusto e dilute Che di qti61a t&ra Cambi^a de ci^ia, E I flumi che placidl SbaasM nd so' ISto Ta z6zo in te U mar ! " This, with other odes, is prettily turned by Sig. Pietio Bnssolino, ■nd given as an appendix to the Serie degS Seritti in JXaUtio Fcn» nana, by Bart Gamba. PLINTS COUNTRY-PLACES. 61 inent-oflBcial, and was rich : whether these facts had any bearing on each other I know no more than I should know if he had lived in our times. I know that he had a charming place down by the sea, near to Ostia. Two roads led thither : " both of them," he says, " in some parts sandy, which makes it heavy and tedious, if you travel in a coach ; but easy enough for those who ride. My villa " (he is writing to his friend Gallus, Lib. II. Epist. 20) " is large enough for all convenience, and not expensive." He describes the portico as aflfording a capital retreat in bad weather, not only for the reason that it is pro- tected by windows, but because there is an extraordinary projection of the roof. " From the middle of this por- tico you pass into a charming inner court, and thence into a large hall which extends towards the sea, — so near, indeed, that under a west wind the waves ripple on the steps. On the left of this hall is a large loung- ing-room {cuUculum), and a lesser one beyond, with windows to the east and west. The angle which this lounging-room forms with the hall makes a pleasant lee, and a loitering-place for my family in the winter. Near thia again is a crescent-shaped apartment, with windows which receive the sun all day, where I keep my favorite authors. From this, one passes to a bedchamber by a raised passage, under which is a stove that commu- nicates an agreeable warmth to the whole apartment 62 WET DAYS. The other rooms in this portion of the villa are fat the freedmen and slaves ; but still are suflSciently weli ordered {tarn mundis) for my guests." And he goes on to describe the bath-rooms, the cool- ing-rooms, the sweating-rooms, the tennis-court, "which lies open to the warmth of the afternoon sun." Adjoin- ing this is a tower, with two apartments below and two above, — besides a supper-room, which commands a wide lookout along the sea, and over the villas that stud the shores. At the opposite end of the tennis-court is another tower, with its apartments opening upon a museum, — and below this the great dining-hall, whose windows look upon gardens, where are box-tree hedges, and rosemary, and bowers of vines. Figs and mulber- ries grow profusely in the garden ; and walking under them, one approaches still another banqueting-hall, re- mote from the sea, and adjoining the kitchen-garden. Thence a grand portico {cryptoporticus) extends with a range of windows on either side, and before the portico is a terrace perfumed with violets. His favorite apart- ment, however, is a detached building, which he has himself erected in a retired part of the grounds. It has a warm winter-room, looking one way on the ter- race, and another on the ocean; through its folding- doors may be seen an inner chamber, and within this asriin a sanctum, whose windows command three views totally separate and distinct, — the sea, the woods, or PLINY'S COUNTRY-PLACES. 88 the villas along the shore. " Tell me," he says, " if ab this is not very channing, and if I shall not have the honor of your company, to enjoy it with me ? " If Plhiy regarded the seat at Ostia as onlj a con venient and inexpensive place, we may form some notion of his Tuscan property, which, as he says in his lettef to his friend Apollinaris, (Lib. V. Epist. 6,) he prefers to all his others, whether of Tivoli, Tusculimi, or Pales- trina. There, at a distance of a hundred and fifty miles from Rome, in the midst of the richest corn-bearing and olive-bearing regions of Tuscany, he can enjoy country quietude. There is no need to be slipping on his toga ; ceremony is left behind. The air is healthful ; the scerie is quiet. " Studiis animum, venatu corpus exerceo." " If you were to come here and see the numbers of old men who have lived to be grandfathers, and great grandfathers, and hear the stories they can entertain you with of their ancestors, you would fancy yourself bom in some former age. The disposition of the country is the most beautiful that can be imagined: figure to yourself an immense amphitheatre, but such as only the liand of Nature could form. Before you lies a vaot extended plain, bounded by a range of mountains whose summits are crowned with lofty and venerable woods, which supply variety of game ; from hence, as the mountains decline, they are adorned with under- wood. Intermixed with these are little hills of m 84 WET DAYS. Strong and fat a soil that it would be difficult to find « single stone upon them : their fertility is nothing infe- rior to that of the lowest grounds ; and though their harvest, indeed, is something later, their crops are as well ripened. At the foot of these hills the eye is presented, wherever it turns, with one unbroken view of numberless vineyards, which are terminated by a bor- der, as it were, of shrubs. From thence you have a prospect of adjoining fields and meadows below. The soil of the former is so extremely stiff, and upon the first ploughing it rises in such vast clods, that it is neces sary to go over it nine several times with the largest oxen and the strongest ploughs, before they can he thoT' oughhf broken ; whilst the enamelled meadows produce trefoil, and other kinds of herbage as fine and tender as if it were but just sprung up, being continually refreshed by never-failing rills." I will not follow him through the particularity of the description which he ^ves to his friend ApoUinaris. There are the wide-reaching views of fruitful valleys and of empurpled hill-sides ; there are the fresh winds sweeping from the distant Apennines ; there is the gestatio with its clipped boxes, the embowered walks, the colonnades, the marble banquet-rooms, the baths, the Carystian columns, the soft, embracing air, and the >iolet sky. I leave Pliny seated upon a bench in a marble alcove of his Tuscan garden. From this bench, FLINTS COUNTRY-PLACES. M the water, gushing through several little pipes, as if i* were pressed out by the weight of the persons reposing upon it, falls into a stone cistern underneath, whence it is received into a polished marble basin, so artfully contrived that it is always full, without ever overflowing. " When I sup here," he writes, " this basin serves for a table, — the larger dishes being placed round the margin, while the smaller ones swim about in the form of little vessels and water-fowl." Such alfresco suppers the coimtry-gentlemen of Italy ate in the first century of our era ! Pliny was always a friend of the ruling powers, and knew how to praise them. One more illustration of his country-estates I venture to give, on the following page, in a drawing from Castell. It will be observed that there are indications of an approach, in some portions of the grounds, to what is called the natural style, which is currently supposed to be a modem suggestion. There are reasons, however, to believe the contrary ; not the least of which may be found in a certain passage in the " Annals of Tacitus," * cited by Horace Walpole, (Vol. n. p. 523,) which shows as great irreverence for the stately formalities of gar- dening as either Bepton or Price could have desired. • " Ceterum Nero usus est patriae minis, extruxitque domum, in qua h<>ud perinde gemmse et aurum miraculo essent, solita pridem e: lu^u vulgata; quam arva, et stagna, et, in modum soUtudinum^ hinc silvcB^ iruU aperia spaUa, et prospecUu, magistris et machinatoribus severe et celere quibus ingenium et audacia erat etiam quic iiatura denega ▼isset per artem tentare." — Lib. XV. 5 66 WKT DAYS. PLINY'S VILLA.* • Ibcplanation of references : — 1. vaia. 3. Gestatio. i. Walk around terrace. 4, 4. 8 lopes with forms of beasU in boxwood. 5, 5. '1 enaces. PALLADIUS. 67 Palladius. rjALLADIUS wrote somewhere about the middle -^ of the fourth century. A large part of his work is arranged in the form of a calendar for the months, and it closes with a poem which is as inferior to the poems of the time of Augustus as the later emperors were inferior to the Caesars.* There is in his book no notable advance upon the teachings of Columella, whom he frequently quotes, — as well as certain Greek author- ities of the Lower Empire. I find in his treatise a somewhat fuller list of vegetables, fruits, and field-cropa 6. Hippodrome. 16. Underwood on declivities of 7. Plane-trees around hippodrome. hill. 8. Cypress - trees forming wall of 17. Vineyards. green. 18. Grain-fields. 9. Garden-alcoves. 19. River. 10. Wall of box. 20. Temple of Ceres. 11. Little meadow of garden. 21. Farmery. 12, 12. Circles within which were 22. Vivarium or Park. landscapes in miniature, with 23. Kitchen-garden, mountains, brooks, trees, etc. 24. Orchard. 13. Walks diverging, shrouded in 25. Apiaiy. moss. 26. Snaileiy. 14. Meadow. 27. Hutch for dormice. 16. Hills covered with heavy 28. Osiers. wood. 29. Aqueduct. * I drop in a note a little confirmatory stanza De PrunitB^ " Pruna suis addunt felicla germina memtsira, Donaque cognato corpore l83ta fenint. Exarmat foetus, sed bnuihia roboria armat Castaneffi prunus jussa tenere laieu.** Vbe boany is as bad as tlie poetry. 68 WET DAYS. than belongs to the earlier writers. I find more variety of treatment. I see a waning faith in the superstitions of the past : Bacchus and the Lares are less jubilant than they were ; but the Christian civilization has no; yet vivified the art of culture. The magnificent gar- dens of Nero and the horticultural experiences of the great Adrian at Tivoli have left no traces in the method or inspiration of Palladius. Professor Davheny. T WILL not pass wholly from the classic period -*- without allusion to the recent book of Professor Daubeny on Roman husbandry. It is charming, and yet disappointing, — not for failure, on his part, to trace the traditions to their sources, not for lack of learning or skill, but fbr lack of that afflatus which should pour over and fill both subject and talker, where the talker is lover as well as master. Dauben/s husbandry lacks the odor of fresh-turned ground, — lacks the imprint of loving familiarity. He is clearly no fanner : every man who has put his hand to the plough (aratori crede) sees it. Your blood does not tingle at his story of Boreas, nor a dreamy languoi creep over you when he talks of punny south-winds. Had he written exclusively of bees, or trees, or flowers, there woulc. have been a charming murmur, THE DARK AGE. 69 like the swiurrus of the poets, — and a fragrance as of crushed heaps of lilies and jonquils. But Daubeny approaches fanning as a good surgeon approaches a cadaver. He disarticulates the joints superbly ; but there is no tremulous intensity. The bystanders do not feel the thrill with which they see a man bare his arm for a capital operation upon a live and palpitating body. The Dark Age. fj^ROM the time of Palladius to the time of Pietro -'- Crescenzi is a period of a thousand years, a period as dreary and impenetrable as the snow-cloud through which I see faintly a few spires staggering : so along the pages of Muratori's interminable annals gaunt fig- ures come and go ; but they are not the figures of far- mers. Goths, wars, famines, and plague succeed each other in ghastly procession. Boethius lifts, indeed, a little rural plaint from out of the gloom, — " Felix nimiam prior aetas, Contenta fidelibuB arris," • — but the dungeon closes over him ; and there are out- standing orders of Charlemagne which look as if he had an eye to the crops of Italy, and to a good vegeta *De Contol. Phil., Lib. II. 70 WET DAYS. We stew with his Transalpine dinners, — but for the most part the land is waste. Dreary and tangled marsh-lands, with fevers brooding over them, are aroimd Ferrara and Mantua, and along all the upper valley of the Arno. Starveling peasants are preyed upon by priests and seigneurs. No man, powerful or humble, could be sure of reaping what he sowed. I see some such monster as Eccelino reaping a harvest of blood. I see Lombards pouring down from the mountain- gates with falcons on their thumbs, ready to' pounce upon the purple columhcs that trace back their lineage to the doves Virgil may have fed in the streets of Man- tua. I see torrents of people, the third of them women, driven mad by some fanatical outcry, sweeping over the whole breadth of Italy, and consuming all green things as a fire consumes stubble. Think of what the fine villa of Pliny would have been, with its boxwood bowers and floating dishes, under the press of such crusaders! It was a precarious time for agricultural investments : I know nothing that could match it, un- less it may have been the later summers' harvests in the valley of the Shenandoah. Upon a parchment (strumenfo) of Ferrara, bearing date A. D. 1113, (Annals of Miu-atori,) I find a memo- randum of contract which looks like reviving civiliza- tion. " Terram autem illam quara roncaho, frui debeo per artnos tres ; postea reddam se-r-aticum." The Latip GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 7« is stiff, but the sense is sound. "If I grub up wild -land, I shall hold it three years for pay." I also find, in the same invaluable storehouse of medi seval history, numerous memoranda of agreements, in virtue of which the tenant was to deliver to the land- lord, or other feudal master, a third or a fourth part of all the grain raised, duly threshed, besides a third por- tion of the wine, and, in some instances, a special return for the cottage, of a young chicken, five sheep, three days' work with oxen, and as many of personal labor (cum manibus). From the exceeding moderation of this apportionment of shares, at a period when the working-farmer or rent-payer (livellario) was reckoned little better than a brute, we may reasonably infer the poverty of the harvests, and the difficulties of culti- vation. Greoponica G-eoponicorwm. r SHALL make no apology for introducing next to -^ the reader the " Geoponica Geoponicorum," — a somewhat extraordinary collection of agricultural opin- ions, usually attributed, in a loose way, to the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who held the Byzantine throne about the middle of the tenth century. It was undoubtedly under the order of Constantine that the collection took its present shape ; but whether a body of manuscripts under the same name had not previ 72 WET DAYS. ously existed, and, if so, to whom is to be credited the authorship, are questions which have been discussed through a wilderness of Greek and Koman type, by the various editors. The edition before me (that of Niclas, Leipsic) gives no less than a hundred pages of prolegomena, prefaces, introductory observations, with notes to each and all, interlacing the pages into a motley of patchwork ; the whole preceded by two, and followed by five stately dedications. The weight of authority points to Cassia- nus Bassus, a Bithynian, as the real compiler, — not- withstanding his name is attached to ' particular chap- ters of the book, and notwithstanding he lived as early as the fifth century. Other critics attribute the collec- tion to Dionysius Uticensis, who is cited by both Varro and Columella. The question is unsettled, and is not worth the settling.* My own opinion — in which, however, Niclas and Needham do not share — is, that the Emperor Por- phyrogenitus, in addition to his historical and judicial labors,! wishing to mass together the best agricultural • The work was translated by the Rev. T. Owen of Qneen'e College, Oxford, and published in 1805. I have not, however, been able to se« a copy of this translation. From a contempoiary notice in the Monthly Review, (Oct. l&OG,) I am led to believe that it met with reiy little favor. Arthur Young also speaks of the work with ill- founded contempt, in his introduction to A Coune of ExperimenU (to. t See Gibbon, — opening of Chapter LIII. GEOPONICA GEOPONICORUM. 78 opinions of the day, expiessed that wish to some trusted Byzantine official (we may say Iiis Commissioner of Patents). Whereupon the Byzantine official (commis- sioner) goes to some hungry agricultural friend, of the Chersonesus, and lays before him the plan, with promise of a round Byzantine stipend. The agricul- tiuul friend goes lovingly to the work, and discovers some old compilation of Bassus or of Dionysius, into which he whips a few modem phrases, attributes a few chapters to the virtual compiler of the whole, makes one or two adroit allusions to local scenes, and carries the result to the Byzantine official (commissioner). The official (commissioner) has confidence in tne opitt ions and virtues of his agricultural friend, and indorses the book, paying over the stipend, which it is found necessary to double, by reason of the unexpected cost of execution. The official (commissioner) presents the report to the Emperor, who receives it gratefully, — at the same time approving the bill of costs, which has grown into a quadruple of the original estimates. This hypothesis wUl explain the paragraphs which so puzzle Niclas and Needham ; it explains the evi- dent interpolations, and the local allusions. The only extravagance in the hypothesis is its assumption that the officials of Byzantium were as rapacious as oui own. Thus far, I have imagined a certain analogy between 74 WET DAYS. the work in vienr and the " Patent Office Agricultural Reports." * The analogy stops here : the " Greoponica " is a good book. It is in no sense to be regarded as a work of the tenth century, or as one strictly Byzantine : nearly half the authors named are of Western origin, and I find none dating later than the fifth century, — while many, as Apuleius, Fiorentinus, A&icanus, and the poor brothers Quintilii, who died under the stab of C!ommodus, belong to a period preceding that of PaUa- dius. Aratus and Democritus (of Abdera) again, who are cited, are veterans of the old Greek school, who might have contributed as well to the agriculture of Thrace or Macedonia in the days of Philip as in the days of the Porphyrogenitus. The first book, of meteorologic phenomena, is nearly identical in its teachings with those of Aratus, Yarro, and Virgil. The subject of field-culture is opened with the standard maxim, repeated by all the old writers, that the master's eye is invaluable.f The doctrine of * I am glad to say that the Report of the Department of Agriculture for 1862 shows a great gain — in aiTangement, in width of discussion and In practical value. Made virttUe, Diim. NetoUm ! t As a curious illustration of the rhetoric of the different agronomes, I give the various wordings of this universal maxim. The " Geoponica" has, — " TloU£> rdv iypbv ajieivu votel deairoTov smc^i irapovaia." Lib. 11. cap. i. Columella savs, — " Ne ista quidem praesidia tantum poUent, quan. turn vel una prcesentia domini." I. i. 18. Cato says, — " Fions occipitio prior est." Cap. iv. Palladi'u puts it, — " Prassent'a domini provectus est agn." I. vl GEOPONICA hEOPONICOEOM. 75 rotation, or frequent change of crops, is laid down with unmistakable precision. A steep for seed (hellebore) is recommended, to guard against the depredations of birds or mice. In the second book, in certain chapters credited to Fiorentinus, I find, among other valuable manures mentioned, sea-weed and tide-drift, (T« e/c r^s fioAao-- oTjs Se lKppaa-a-6ix€va jipwiS-rj,) which I do not recall in any other of the old writers. He also recommends the refuse of leather-dressers, and a mode of promoting putrefaction in the compost-heap, which would almost seem to be stolen from " Bommer's Method." He fiir- ther urges the diversion of turbid rills, after rains, over grass lands, and altogether makes a better compend of this branch of the subject than can be found in the Roman writers proper. Grain should be cut before it is fully ripe, as the meal is the sweeter. What corre- spondent of our agricultural papers, suggesting this as a novelty, could believe that it stood in Greek type as early as ever Greek types were set ? A farm foreman should be apt to rise early, should win the respect of his men, should fear to tell an untruth, regard religioiLS observances, and not drink too hard. The elder Pliny imtes, — "Majores fertilissimiuii in agro aculnig domini esse dixeront." Hist. Nat., Lib. XVIII. cap. ii. And Crescenzi, more than a thousand years later, rounds it into Ital ian thus : — "La presentia del eignore utilita o del campo ; e chi t ban dona la vigna sara abandonato da lei da lavorttori." Lib. II. cap. ix. 76 WET DAYS. Three or four books are devoted to a very full dis- cussion of the vine, and of wines, — not di£fering materially, however, from the Columellan advice. In disLHissing the moral aspects of the matter, this Geo- ponic author enumerates other things which will intoxi- cate as well as wine, — even some waters ; also the wine made from barley and wheat, which barbarians drink. Old m'ien, he says, are easUy made dnmk ; women not easily, by reason of temperament ; but by drinking enough they may come to it Where the discourse turns upon pears, (Lib. X. cap. xxiii.,) it is urged, that, if you wish specially good fruit, you should bore a hole through the tnmk at the groimd, and drive in a plug of either oak or beech, and draw the earth over it If it does not heal well, wash for a fortnight with the lees of old wine : in any event, the wine-lees will help the flavor of the fruit Almost identical directions are to be found in PaUadius, (Tit XXV.,) but the above is credited to Diophanes, who lived in Asia Minor a full century before Christ Book XL opens with flowers and evergreens, intro- duced (by a Latin translation) in a mellifluous roll of genitives : — " plantcUionem rosarum, et liUorum, et vio' larum, et reliquorum jlorum odoratorum." Thereafter k given the pretty tradition, that red roses came of nec- tar spilled from heaven. Love, who bore the celestial vintage, tripped a wing, and overset the vase ; and the GEOPOmCA GEOPOmCORmi. 77 nectai, spilling on the valleys of the earth, bubbled up in roses. Next we have this kindred story of the lilies. Jupiter wished to make his boy Hercules (born of a nortal) one of the gods : so he snatches him from the bosom of his earthly mother, Alcmena, and bears him to the bosom of the godlike Juno. The milk is spiUed from the full-mouthed boy, as he traverses the sky, (making the Milky Way,) and what drops below stars and clouds, and touches earth, stains the ground with — lilies. In the chapter upon pot-herbs are some of those allusions to the climate of Constantinople which may have served to accredit the work in the Byzantine court I find no extraordinary methods of kitchen- garden culture, — unless I except the treatment of muskmelon-seeds to a steep of milk and honey, in order to improve the flavor of the fruit (Cap. xx.) The remaining chapters relate to ordinary domestic ani- mals, with diversions to stags, camels, hare, poisons, scorpions, and serpents. I can cheerfully commend the work to those who have a snowy day on their hands, good eyesight, and a love for the subject A ND now, while the snow lasts, let us take one look at Messer Pietro Crescenzi, a Bolognese of th« 78 WET DAYS. fourteenth century. My copy of him is a little, fa^ unctuous, parchment-bound book of 1534, bought upnc a street-stall under the walls of the University of Bo- logna. Through whose hands may it not have passed since its printing ! Sometimes I seem to snuflf in it the taint of a dirty-nanded friar, who loved his pot-herbs better than his breviary, and plotted his yearly garden on some shelf of. the hills that look down on Castagnolo : other times I scent only the mould and the damp of some monastery shelf, that guarded it quietly and clean- ly while red-handed war raged around the walls. Crescenzi was a man of good family in Bologna, being nephew of Crescenzi di Crescenzo, who died in 1268, an ambassador in Venice. Pietro was educated to the law, and, wearjring of the civil commotions in his native town, accepted judicial positions in the indepen- dent cities of Italy, — Pisa and Asti among others ; and after thirty years of absence, in which, as he says, he had read many authors,* and seen many sorts of farming, he gives his book to the world. Its arrangement is very similar to that of Palladius, to which he makes frequent reference. Indeed, he does something more and worse than to refer to him : he Bteals from him by the page. To be sure he had some * " E molti libK d' antichi e de' novelli eavi less! e Btudiai, e diycra* e vaiie operaxioci de' coltivatori delle terre vidi e craobbi." CRESCENZI. 79 nine hundred years of margin, since Palladius lived, In the course of which the stock of papyrus had been cut off; vellum was dear, and rag-paper was hard- ly yet in vogue. It is not probable, therefore, that those for whose benefit Crescenzi wrote would detect his plagiarisms. Palladius stole from the Greeks far and near ; and in repeating the theft Crescenzi only restored to the Italians what was theirs by inherit- ance. But it must not be supposed that he is wholly depend- ent upon Palladius. He writes upon the arrangement of farmeries like one who had built them, and of horses like one who loved them : he tells us of their good points and of their bad points, and how they should be tested. He is more sensitive than were the Eoman writers to the disadvantages of a wet soil, and advises how it may be treated. He gives rules for mortar- making, and suggests that the timber for house-building be cut in November or December, in the old of the moon. Both Palladius and himself urge the use of earthen pipes for conducting water, and give a cement (quick-lime mixed with oil) for making water-tight their junction.* In matters of physiology he shows a near approach • Lib. I. cap. ix. The pipes named — doccioni di ierra — cou!d no^ have differed materially from our draimng-tile, which we aie accnv lomed to regard as a modem invention. 80 WET DAYS. to modem views : he insists that food fur plants niuM be in a liqviid form.* He quotes Columella's rule for twenty-four loads {car- rette) of manure to hill-lands per acre, and eighteen to level land ; and adds, — " Our people put the double of this," — " Inostri mettano piu chel doppio." But the book of our friend Crescenzi is interesting not so much for its maxims of agronomic wisdom as for its association with one of the most eventful periods of Italian history. The new language of the Penin- sula f was just now crystallizing into shape, and was presently to receive the stamp of currency from the hands of Dante and Boccaccio. A thriving commerce through the ports of Venice and Amalfi demanded all the products of the hUl-sides. Milan, then having a population of two hundred thousand, had turned a great river into the fields, which to this day irrigates thousands of acres of rice -lands. Wheat was grown in profu- sion, at that time, on fields which are now desolated by the malaria, or by indolence. In the days of Crescenzi, gunpowder was burned for the first time in battle ; and for the first time crops of grain were paid for in bills of exchange. All the Peninsula was vibrating with the throbs of a new and more splendid life. The art that * " II proprio cibo delle piante sara alcunn humido ben mischiato." Cap. xiii. t Crescenzi's book waa written in Latin, but was very shortly after (pgrhaps by himself) rendered into the street-ton^e <>f Italy. A FLORENTINE FARM. 81 had cropped out of the fashionable schools of Byzan> tium was fast putting them in eclipse ; and before Cres- cenzi died, if he loved art in fresco as he loved art in gardens, he must have heard admiringly of Cimabuc, and Giotto, and Orcagna. A Florentine Farm. T N 1360 a certain Paganino Bonafede composed a -*- poem called " H Tesoro de' Kustici " ; but I believe it was never published ; and Tiraboschi calls it rather dull, — " poeo felice" If we could only bar publicity to all the poeofelice verses ! In the middle of the fifteenth century the Florentine Poggio * says some good things in a rural way ; and still later, that whimsical, disagreeable Politiano, t who was a pet of Lorenzo de' Medici, published his " Rusticus." Roscoe says, with his usual strained hyperbole, that it is inferior in kind only to the Georgics. The fact is, it compares with the Georgics as the vilest of the Medici compare with the grandest of the Caesars. The young Micheie Verini, of the same period, has given, in one of his few remaining letters, an eloquent description of the Cajano farm of Lorenzo de' Medici It lay between Florence and Pistoia. The river Om' • JSpisloh de Laude SurU. t 8«e Rfcscoe, Mfe of Lorenzo de^ Mtdici, Chai>. VIU 82 WET DAYS. brone skirted its fields. It was so successfully irrigated tliat three crops of grain grew in a year. Its barns had stone floors, walls with moat, and towers like a captle. The cows he kept there (for ewes were now superseded) were equal to the supply of the entire city of Florence. Hogs were fed upon the whey ; and peacocks and pheas< ants innumerable roamed through the woods. Folitiano also touches upon the same theme in stiff hexameters. They occur in his poem of " Sylva," which was written in praise of Homer, but which closes with a descriptive dash at the farm of the great Florentine, The reader shall have it, as Englished by Mr. Ito» coe: — " Go on, Lorenzo, then, the Muses' pride, Fierce the hard rock and scoop the mountain's side; The distant streams shall hear thy potent call. And the proud arch receive them as they fall. Thence o'er thy fields the genial waters lead. That with luxuriant verdure crown the mead. There rise thy mounds th' opposing flood that ward} There thy domains thy faithful mastiffs guard : Tarentum there her horned cattle sends. Whose swelling teats the milky rill distends; There India's breeds of various colors range, Pleased with the novel scene and pastures stranga. Whilst nightly closed within their sheltered stall For the due treat their lowing offspring call. Meantime the milk in spacious coppers boils, With arms upstript the elder rustic toils. The young assist the curdled mass to squeeze A FLORENTINE FARM. M And place in cooling shades the new-made cheese. Where mulberry-groves their length of shadow spread Secure the silk-worm spius his lustrous thread; And, culled from every flower the plunderer meets, The bee regales thee with her rifled sweets ; There birds of various plume and various note Flutter their captive wings: with cackling throat The Faduan fowl betrays her future breed, And there the geese, once Homers preservers, feed. And ducks amusive sport amidst thy floods, And doves, the pride of Venus, throng thy woods." While I. write, wandering in fancy to that fair plain where Florence sits a queen, with her girdle of shining rivers, and her garland of olive-bearing hills, — the snow is passing. The spires have staggered plainly and stiffly into sight Again I can count them, one by one. I have brought as many authors to the front as there are spires staring at me from the snow. Let me marshal them once more : — Verini, the young Florentine ; Politiano, who cannot live in peace with the wife of his patron ; Crescenzi, the magistrate and farmer joined ; the half-score of dead men who lie between the covers of the " Geoponica " ; the martyr Boethius, who, under the consolations of a serene, per- haps Christian philosophy, cannot forget the charm of the fields ; Palladius, who is more full than original ; Pliny the Consul, and the friend of Tacitus ; TibuUus, Jhe elegiac lover; Horace, whose very laugh is brim- 84 WET DAYS. ming with the buxom cheer of the country ; and .ast, — Vir^. I hear no such sweet bugle- note as his along all the line. Hark 1 — " Claudite jam rivos, poeri, Bat prata bibemnt." Even so : Claudite jam libros, parvuli J — Shut ap the books, my little ones ! Enough for to-day. THIRD DAT. A Picture of Rain. TTTILL any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, ' ' a good, rattling, saucy shower ? There is room in it for a rare handling of the brush : — the vague, in- distinguishable line of hills, (as I see them to-day,) ^ the wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by the wind, and trending eagerly downward, — the swift, petulant dash into the little pools of the highway, mak- ing fairy bubbles that break as soon as they form, — the land smoking with excess of moisture, — and the pelted leaves all wincing and shining and adrip. I know no painter who has so well succeeded in put- ting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner ; and in this I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf his " Rivers of France " : a book over which I have spent a great many pleasant hours, and idle ones too, — if it be idle to travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill sides spotty with vineyards, and great bridges wallow 86 WET DAYS ing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of Honfleur putting to sea- There are skies, as I said, in Bome of these pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his distance from home : no actual rain-driit stretching from them, but such unmis- takable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little par- allel wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order every scythe out of the field. In the " Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, OS I turn over the pages, an actual thunder-storm is breaking. The scene is somewhere upon tlie Lower Seine. From the middle of the right of the picture the lofty river-bank stretches far across, forming all the background ; — its extreme distance hidden by a bold thrust of the left bank, which juts into the picture just far enough to shelter a village, whose spire stands gleam- ing upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods black as night Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky, from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a few clifis upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know that a fierce wind is driving the black billows on ; yet all the water under the lee of the shores is as tranquil ai SOUTHERN FRANCE AND TROUBADOURS. 87 a dream ; a white sail, near to the white village, hangs slouchingly to the mast : but in the foreground the tem- pest has already caught the water; a tall lugger is scudding and careening under it as if mad ; the crews of three fishermen's boats, that toss on the vexed water, are making a confused rush to shorten sail, and you may almost fancy that you hear their outcries sweeping down the wind. In the middle scene, a little steamer is floating tranquilly on water which is yet calm ; and a column of smoke piling up from its tall chimney rises for a space placidly enough, until the wind catches and whisks it before the storm. I would wager ten to one, upon the mere proof in the picture, that the fisher- men and the washerwomen in the foreground will be drenched within an hour. When I have once opened the covers of Turner, — especially upon such a wet day as this, — it is hard for me to leave him until I have wandered all up and down the Loire, revisited Tours and its quiet cathedral, and Blois with its stately chateau, and Amboise with its statelier, and coquetted again with memories of the Maid of Orleans. Sowthem France and Trovhadourt. IjlROM the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the ■'- branching valleys which sidle awajf from it far dowa «8 WET DAYS. into the country of the Auvergne. Turner does not go tliere, indeed ; the more 's the pity ; but I do, since it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps excepted) in all France. The valleys are green, tlie brooks are frequent, the rivers are tortuous, the moun- tains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower the roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, through the pleasant Bourbonnois. that Tristram Shandy met with the poor, half-crazed Maria, piping her evening service to the Virgin. And at that thought I must do no less than pull down my " Tristram Shandy," (on which the dust of years has accumulated,) and read again that tender story of the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her hair caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, from which she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the evening air. It is not a little singular that a British author should have supplied the only Arcadian resident of all this Arcadian region. The Abb6 Delille was, indeed, bom hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and within marketing - distance of the beautiful Clermont But Ihere is very little that is Arcadian, in freshness or simplicity, in either' the " Gardens " or the other verse of Delille. Out of his own mouth (the little green-backed book, my boy) I wir condemn him : — SOUTHERN FRANCE AND TROUBADOURS. S9 " Ce n'est plus cette simple et rustique d^esse Qui suit ses vieilles lois ; c'est une enchanteresse Qui, la baguette en main, par ies hardis travaux Fait nattre des aspects et des tr^sois nouveaux, Compose un sol plus riche et des races plus belles', Fertilise Ies monts, dompte Ies rocs lebelles." The baguette of Delille is no shepherd's crook ; it has more the fashion of a drumstick, — baguette de tambour. If I follow on southward to Provence, whither I am borne upon the scuds of rain over Turner's pictures, and the pretty Bourbonnois, and the green mountains of Auvergne, I find all the characteristic literature of that land of olives is only of love or war : the vines, the olive-orchards, and the yellow hill-sides pass for noth- ing. And if I read an old Sirvente of the Troubadours, beginning with a certain redolence of the fields, all this yields presently to knights, and steeds caparisoned, — " Cavalliers ab cavals anuatz." The poem from which I quote has a smooth sound and a certain promise of ruralities. It is attributed to Bertrand de Bom,* who lived in the time when even the lion-hearted King Richard turned his brawny fin- gers to the luting of a song. Let us listen : — " The beautiful spring delights me well, When flowers and leaves are growing ; And it pleases my heart to hear the swell Of the birds' sweet thorns flowinfr ■ M. Kaynouard, Poesies des Iroubadours, II. 208. »0 WET DAYS In the echoing wood ; And I love to see, all scattered around. Pavilions and tents on the martial ground, And my spirit finds it good To see, on the level plains beyond, Gay knights and steeds caparisoned." But as the Troubadour nestles more warmly Into th« rhythm of his verse, the birds are all forgotten, and ths beautiful spring, and there is a sturdy clang of battle^ that would not discredit our own times : — " I tell yon that nothing my soul can cheer, Or banqueting or reposing, Like the onset ciy of ' Charge them ! ' rung From each side, as in battle closing ; Where the horses neigh. And the call to ' aid ' is echoing loud. And there, on the earth, the lowly and proud In the foss together lie. And yonder is piled the mingled heap Of the brave that scaled the trenches steep. " Barons ! your castles in safety place. Your cities and villages, too. Before ye haste to the battle-scene: And Papiol ! quickly go. And tell the lord of ' Yes and No ' That peace already too long hath been I " * * I cannot forbear taking a bit of margin to print the closing stan- cas of the original, which carry the clas*! of sabres in their rei; lounj. ** le us die que tan no m* a saber Manjars nl beure nl dormir. Cum a quant aug uridar ; A lorl AMONG THE ITALIANS. 91 I am on my way to Italy, (it may as well be con- fessed,) where I had fully intended to open my rainy day's work ; but Turner has kept me, and then Au- vergne, and then the brisk battle-song of a Trouba- dour. Among ike Italians. WHEN I was upon the Cajano farm of Lorenzo the Magnificent, during my last " spell of wet," it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant com- memorative poem of " Ambra," which Lorenzo himself wrote, and which, whatever may be said against the conception and conduct of it, shows in its opening stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of rural images — fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cy- presses in which late birds lurked, sharp-leaved juni- pers, and sturdy pines fighting the wind — as ever he D' ambas las partz ; et aug agnir Cavals TOitz per V ombratge, Et aug crldar : Aidate ! Aidatz ! E Tei cazer per los fossatz Paucs e grans per V erbatge, E Tei lo8 mortz que pels costatz An los tronsons outre passatz, «< BaroB, metetz en gatge Castels e Tilas e ciutatz, Enans q* usquecs no us guerreia^ " Fapiol, d' agradatge Ad Oc t No t> 3n Tai Tiata, Dk 11 que trop estan en patl." 92 WET DAYS. had been of antique jewels, or of tlie verse of such as Politiano. And if I have spoken slightingly of this latter poet, it was only in contrast with Virgil, and in view of his strained Latinity. When he is himselfi and wraps his fancies only in his own sparkling Tuscan, we forget his classic frigidities, and his quarrels with Madonna Clarice, and are willing to confess that no pen of his time was dipped with such a relishing gusto into the colors of the hyacinths and trembling pansies, and into all the blandishments of a gushing and wan- ton spring. I may particularly designate a charming little rural poem of his, entitled " Le Montanine," charmingly translated by Parr GresweU.* But classical affectation was the fashion of that day A certain Bolognese noble, Bero by name, wrote ten Latin books on rural affairs ; yet they are little known, and never had any considerable reputation. Another scholar, Pietro da Barga, who astonished his teachers by his wonderful proficiency at the age of twelve, and who was afterward guest of the French ambassador in Venice, wrote a poem on rural matters, to which, with an exaggerated classicism, he gave the Greek name of " Cynegeticon" ; and about the same time Giuseppe Voltolina composed three books on kitchen-gardening I name these writers only out of sympathy with their * See Wm. Fair GresweU'a Memoirt of Politiano, vritb transl» tioiu. AMONG THE ITALIANS. 93 topics : I would not advise the reading of them : it would involve a long journey and scrupulous search to find them, through I know not what out-of-the-way libraries ; and if found, no essentially new facts or the« ones could be counted on which are not covered by the treatise of Crescenzi. The Pisans or Venetians may possibly have introduced a few new plants from the East ; the example of the Medici may have suggested some improvements in the arrangement of forcing- houses, or the outlay of villas ; but in all that regarded general husbandry, Crescenzi was still the man. I linger about this period, and the writers of this time, because I snuff here and there among them the perfume of a country bouquet, which carries the odor of the fields with it, and transports me to the " em- purpled hill-sides " of Tuscany. Shall I name Sanna- zaro, with his "Arcadia"? — a dead book now, — or " Amyntas," who, before he is tall enough to steal apples from the lowest boughs, (so sings Tasso,) plunges head and ears in love with Sylvia, the fine daughter of Montano, who has a store of cattle, " riehissimo ness in life makes us strongly suspect that he deserved it all. There are good points in his poem, showing close observation, good sense, and excellent judgment. His rules of farm-practice are entirely safe and judicious, and make one wonder how the man who could give such capital advice could make so capital a failure. In the secret lies all the philosophy of the difference be- tween knowledge and practice. The instance is not witiiout its modem support : I have tiie honor of ac- quaintance with several gentlemen who lay down charming rules for successful husbandry, every time fliey pay the country a visit ; and yet even their poultry- account is always largely against the constipated hens. I give one or two specimens of Tusser's mode of preacliment ; the first from his March's husbandry : — " Sow bailejr in March, in April, and Hxy, The later in aand, and the sooner in el»j. THOMAS TUSSER. 141 What worser for barle}* than wetness and cold ? What better to skilful than time to be bold? " Let barley be harrowed finely as dust^ Then workmanly trench it, and fence it ye muat. This season well plied, set sowing an end, And praise and pray God a good hars-est to send. " Some rolleth their barley straight after a rain, When first it appeareth, to level it plain; The barley so used the better doth grow, And handsome ye make it, at harvest to mow. " At spring (for the summer) sow garden ye shall, At harvest (for winter) or sow not at all. Oft digging, removing, and weeding, ye see, Makes herb the more wholesome and greater to be." Again in his teaching for February he says, very riirewdly : — " Who slacketh his tillage a carter to be, For groat got abroad, at home lose shall three ; And so by his donig, he brmgs out of heart Both land for the com and horse for the cart. " Who abuseth his cattle, and starves them for meat, By carting or ploughing his gain is nyt great: Where he that with labor can use them aright, Hath gain to his comfort, and cattle in plight." Fuller, in his " Worthies," says Tusser " spread hi.s bread with all sorts of butter, yet none would stick ftereon." In short, though the poet wrote well on li^ WET DAYS. farm-practice, he certainly was not a good exemplar of farm-successes. "With all his excellent notions about sowing and reaping, and rising with the lark, I should look for a little more of stirring mettle and of dogged resolution in a man to be recommended as a tenant I cannot help thinking less of him as a farmer than as a kind-hearted poet ; too soft of the edge to cut very deeply into hard-pan, and too porous and flimsy of character for any compacted resolve: yet taking life tenderly, withal; good to those poorer than himself making a rattling appeal for Christmas charities ; hos- pitable, cheerful, and looking always to the end with an honest clearness of vision : — " To death we must stoop, be we higli, be we low, But how, and how suddenly, few^ be that know; What carry we, then, but a sheet to the grave, (To cover this carcass,) of all that we have? " Sir Ekgh Piatt. QIR HUGH PLATT, who lived in the latter part of ^^ the sixteenth century, is called by Mr. Weston in his catalogue of English authors, " the most ingenious husbandman of his age.'' He is elsewhere described as a gentleman of Lincoln's Inn, who had two estates in the country, besides a garden in St. Martin's Lane. He was an enthusiast in agricultural, as well as horticul SIR BUGS PL ATT. 143 lairal inquiries, corresponding largely with leading farmers, and conducting careful experiments within Iiis own grounds. In speaking of that " rare and peer- less plant, the grape," he insists upon the wholesome- ness of the wines he made from his Bednall-Greene garden : " And if," he says, " any exception shold be taken against the race and delicaoie of them, I am content to submit them to the censure of the best niouthes, that professe any true skill in the judgement of high country wines : although for their better credit herein, I could bring in the French Ambassador, who (now almost two yeeres since, comming to my house of purpose to tast these wines) gaue this sentence upon them : that he neuer drank any better new wine in France." I must confess to more doubt of the goodness of the wine than of the speech of the ambassador ; French ambassadors are always so complaisant ! Again he indulges us In the story of a pretty conceit whereby that "delicate Knight," Sir Francis Carew, proposed to astonish the Queen by a sight of a cherry- tree in full bearing, a month after the fruit had gone by in England. This secret he performed, by " strain- ing a Tent or couer of canuass ouer the whole tree, and wetting the same now and then with a scoope or home, as the heat of the weather required : and so, by with- olding the sunne beams from reflecting upon the ber 144 WET DAYS. Hes, they grew both great, and were very long before they had gotten their perfect cherrie-colour : and when he was assured of her Majestie's comming, he remoiied the Tent, and a few sunny dales brought them to their fidl ma;urities.'' These notices are to be found in his " Flores Para- disae." Another work, entitled " Dyuers Soyles for manuring pasture and arable land," enumerates, in ad- dition to the usual odorous collection, such extraordi- narily new matters (in that day) as "salt, street-dirt, clay, Fullers earth, moorish earth, fern, hair, calcination of all vegetables, malt dust, soap - boilers ashes, and marie." But what I think particularly commends him to notice, and makes him worthy to be enrolled among the pioneers, is his little tract upon " The Setting of Ctorne."* In this he anticipates the system of "dibbling' grain, which, notwithstanding, is spoken of by writers within half a century f as a new thing ; and which, it is needless to say, still prevails extensively in many parts of England. If the tract alluded to be indeed - the work of Sir Hugh Piatt, it antedates very many of the suggestions and improvements which are usually • This is not mentioned either by FeUx>n in his Porlraiis^ etc., by Johnson in liis BistOTy of Gardening^ or by Loudon. Donaldson give* the title, and the headings of the chapters. 1 also observe that it ii Uluded to by a late writer in the L/mdon Q mrterly. "■See Young, Annals of Agriculture, Vol III. p. 219, et leq. SIR HUGH PLATT. lH accorded to Tull. The latter, indeed, proposed the drill, and repeated tillage ; but certain advantages, be- fore unconsidered, such as increased tillering of Individ ■ ual plants, economy of seed, and facility of culture, are common to both systems. Sir Hugh, in consecutive chapters, shows how the discovery came about ; " why the come shootes into so many eares"; how the ground is to be dug for the new practice ; and what are the several instruments for- making the holes and covering the grain. He further relates, with a simplicity which is almost suspicious, that the art of dibbling grain originated with a silly wench who had been put by her master to the setting of carrots and radishes ; and having some seed-wheat in her bag, she dropped some kernels into the holes prepared for the carrots, and these few ker- nels shot up with such a wonderfiil luxuriance as had never been seen before. I cannot take a more courteous leave of this worthy gentleman than by ^ving his own envoi to the most considerable of his books : — " Thus, gentle Reader, having acquainted thee with my long, costly, and labo- rious collections, not written at Adventure, or by an imaginary conceit in a Scholler's private studie, but wrung out of the earth, by the painfull hand of experi- ence : and having also given thee a touch of Nature, whom no man as yet ever durst send naked into the 10 146 WET DAYS. worlde without her veyle : and Expecting, by thy good fc'ntertainement of these, some encouragement for higher and deeper discoveries hereafter, I leave thee to the Grod of Natiu-e, from whom all the true lipht of Nature proceedeth." Gervase Mar&ham. GERVASE MARKHAM must have been a rois- tering gallant about the time that Sir Hugh was conducting his experiments on " Soyles " ; for, in 1501, he had the honor to be dangerously wounded in a duel which he fought in behalf of the Countess of Shrews- bury ; there are also some painful rumors current (in old books) in regard to his habits in early life, which weaken somewhat our trust in him as a quiet country- coimsellor. I suspect, that, up to mature life, at any rate, he knew much more about the sparring of a game-cock than the making of capons. Yet he wrote books upon the proper care of beasts and fowls, as well as upon almost every subject connected with hus- bandry. And that these were good books, or at least in large demand, we have in evidence the memoran- dum of a promise which some griping bookseller ex- torted from him, under date of July, 1617: — ** 1, Gervase Slarkham, of London, Gent, do promiM GERVASE MARKUAM. 147 hereafter never to write any more book or books to be printed of the diseases or cures of any cattle, as horse, oxe, cowe, sheepe, swine and goates, &c. In witness whereof, I have hereunto sett my hand, the 21'' day of Julie. " Gekvis Markham." I have already alluded to his edition of the " Mai- son Eustique " of Liebault ; and notwithstanding the reli^ously meditative air which belongs to some por- tions of his " Country Contentments," he had a hand in the concoction of one or two poems that kindled greatly the ire of the Puritan clergy. From a book of his to which he gave the title of " The English Husbandman " I venture to copy on the next page a little plan of an English farm-house, which he assures us is given not to please men of dignity, but for the profit of the plain husbandman. There is no doubt but he was an adroit book-maker ; and the value of his labors, in respect to practical husbandry, was due chiefly to his art of arranging, compacting, and illustrating the maxims and practices already received. His observations upon diseases of cattie and upon horsemanship were doubtless based on experimental knowledge ; for he was a rare and ardent sportsman, and possessed all a sportsman's keenness in the detection of infirmities. In this connection I qrote a little passage about the U8 WET DAYS. 1 r ,„■: D 1 p B-^Jii: — i' ■ B G [f ~ "^ J ■ d , J 1 =3 I ■ c 1 H ■ K N I i 1 mf ^ ' ^T^^V^tJV^^ h=:z.\ L . A MODEL ENGLISH FARM-HOUSE, A. D. 1600.* manner of " putting a Cocke into battel," which he has interpolated upon the grave work of the Councillor Heresbach. " When your cocke is equally matched, it is then your part to give him all the naturall and lawfull advan- tages, which may availe for his conquest; as first to * Explanation of references: — "A. Signifies the great hall. H. Inner cellar to serve for larder. B. The dining-parlor for stran- I. Buttery. * gers. K. Kitchen. C. Closet for use of mistress. L. Dairy-house. D. Strangers' lodging. M. Milk-house. E. Staircase to room over parlor. K. A faire sawne pale. F. Staircase to goodman's room. O. Great gate t( rideintohall-dora. G. The ekrene in the hall. P. Place for pump." (iERVASE MARKHAM. 149 disburden him of all things superfluous, as exti-avagant feathers about his head, the long feathers of his Mane, even from the head to the Shoulders, and this must be done as close to the necke as may be, for the least feather his enemy can catch hould on, is a ladder by which ho will rise to destroy him; also the sma'l feathers about his rumpe and others of like nature. As thus he takes away things superfluous, so you must add to those which have anything wanting, as if his Beake be rough, you must smooth it, but not weaken it ; if his Spurres be blunt and uneven, you must sharpen them and make them so piercing that on the smallest entrance, they may run up to the very beame of the leg i and for his wings you must make them like the wings of a Dragon, every feather like a ponyard, stab- bing and wounding wheresoever they touch : this done rub his head over with your own Spittel, and so leave him to Fortune." The advice may seem somewhat out of date, and yet I cannot help being reminded by it of the way in which our politicians prepare their Presidential candidates. The last suggestion of Markham (as cited above) is particiflarly descriptive. It would be unfair to the good man's memory to leave him pitting a cock ; so I will give the reader some of his hints in regard to the appointments of the English housewife. 150 WET DAYS. " Let her garments," he says, (and it might be said in New England,) " be comely and strong, made as well to preserve health, as to adorn the person, altogether with- out toyish garnishes, or the gloss of light colors, and as far from the vanity of new and fantastick fashions, as near to the comely imitation of modest matrons. Let her dyet be wholsome and cleanly, prepared at due hours, and cooked with care and diligence; let it be rather to satisfie nature, than her afiections, and apter to kill hunger, than revive new appetites. Let it pro- ceed niore from the provision of her own yard, than the furniture of the markets ; and let it be rather es- teemed for the ikmUiar acquaintance she hath with it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries. " To conclude, our English Housewife must be of chaste thoughts, stout courage, patient, untired, watch- ful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not fre- quent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skilfuU in the worthy knowl- edges which do belong to her vocation." Again he gives us the details of a " humble feast of a proportion which any good man may keep in his fiunily." " As thus : — first, a sliield of brawn with mustard ; GERVASE MARKHAM. 151 secondly, a boyl'd capon ; thirdly, a boyl'd piece of beef ; fourthly, a chine of beef rested ; fifthly, a neat's tongue rosted ; sixthly, a pig rosted ; seventhly, chewits baked ; eightly, a goose rosted ; ninthly, a swan rosted ; tenthly, a turkey rosted ; eleventh, a haunch of venison rosted ; twelfth, a pasty of venison ; thirteenth, a kid with a pudding in the belly ; fourteenth, an olive pye ; the fifteenth, a couple of capons; the sixteenth, a custard or dowsets." This is what Master Gervase calls a frugal dinner, for the entertainment of a worthy friend ; is it any wonder that he wrote about " Coimtry Contentments " ? My chapter is nearly fidl ; and a burst of sunshine is flaming over all the land under my eye ; and yet I am but just entered upon the period of English literary history which is most rich in rural illustration. The mere backs of the books relating thereto, as my glance ranges over them, where they stand in tidy platoon, start a delightfully confused picture to my mind. I think it possible that Sir Hugh Piatt may some day entertain at his Bednall-Greene garden the wor- shipful Francis Bacon, who is living down at Twicken- ham, and who is a thriving lawyer, and has written es- says, which Sir Hugh must know, — in which he dis- courses shrewdly upon gardens, as well as many kindred matters ; and through his wide correspondence, Sii 152 WET DAYS. Hugh must probably have heard of certain new hcrbg which have been brought home from Virginia and the Eoanoke, and very possibly he is making trial of a to- bacco-plant in his garden, to be submitted some day to his friend, the French ambassador. I can fancy Gervase Markham " making a night of it" with those rollicking bachelors, Beaumont and Fletcher, at the " Mermaid," or going with them to the Globe Theatre to see two Warwickshire brothers. Ed- mund and Will Shakspeare, who are on the boards there, — the latter taking the part of Old Knowell, in Ben Jonson's play of " Every Man in his Humour.'' His friends say that this Will has parts. Then there is the fiery and dashing Sir Philip Sidney, who threatened to thrust a dagger into the heart of poor Molyneux, his father's steward, for opening private letters (which poor Molyneux never did) ; and Sir Philip knows all about poetry and the ancients; and in viitue of his knowledges, he writes a terribly magnil- oquent and tedious " Arcadia," which, when he comes to die gallantly in battle, is admired and read every- where : nowadays it rests mostly on the shelf. But the memory of his generous and noble spirit is far live- lier than his book. It was through him, and his friend- ship, probably, that the poet Spenser was gifted by the Queen with a fine farm of three thousand acres among the Bally-Howra hills of Ireland. GEliVASE MARKUAM. 153 And it was here that Sir Walter Kaleigh, that " shep- herd of the sea," visited the poet, and found him seated " amongst the coolly shade Of the green alders, by the Mulla's shore." Did the gallant privateer possibly talk with the far- mer about the introduction of that new esculent, the potato ? * Did they talk tobacco ? Did Colin Clout have any observations to make upon the rot in sheep, or upon the probable " clip " of the year ? Nothing of this; but "He pip'd, I sung; and when he sung, I pip'd: By chaunge of tunes each making other meny. " The lines would make a fair arg^ument of the poef s bucolic life. I have a strong faith that his farming was of the higgledy-piggledy order ; I do not believe that he could have set a plough into the sod, or have made a good " cast " of barley. It is certain, that, when * Introduced probably by Sir Walter Raleigh about 1586. But the vegetable was a delicacy (or at least a rarity) in James I.'s time; and in 1619 a small number were bought for the Queen's use at one shil- ling per pound. In 1662 they were recommended by the Royal Society for more extended cultivation. ScottBum, Outlines of Modem Farming, p. 43, gives (without au- thority) the year 1750 as the date of their final introduction as a field- crop. Parkinson, in his Theairum Botnnicum, first published in 1640, n»ii es among garden-vegetables, " Spanish potatoes, Virginia potatoes, and Canada potatoes (Jerusalem artichoke)." See also Johnson, ifistoj of Gardening, p. 103. John Mortimer, writing as late as 1707, ( Country man's Katendai;) says of the potato, '' The root is very near the nature of the Jerusalem artichoke, but not so good or wholesome. These are planted either of roots or seeds, and may probably be propagated in great quantities, and prove good food for swine." 164 WET DAYS. the Tyrone rebels burned him out of Eilcolman Castle he took no treasure with him but his Elizabeth and the two babes ; and the only treasures he left were the ashes of the dear child whose face shone on him there for the last time, — " bright with many a cuil That clustered round her head." I wish I could love his " Shepherd's Calendar " ; but I cannot. Abounding art of language, exquisite fan- cies, delicacies innumerable there may be ; but there is no exhilarating air from the mountains, no crisp breezes, no songs that make the welkin ring, no river that champs the bit, no sky-piercing falcon. And as for the " Faery Queene," if I must confess it, I can never read far without a sense of suffocation from the affluence of its beauties. It is a marvellously fair sea and broad, — with tender winds blowing over it, and all the ripples are iris-hued ; but you long for some brave blast that shall scoop great hollows in it, and shake out the briny beads from its lifted waters, and drive wild scuds of spray among the screaming cur- lews. In short, I can never read far in Spenser without tak- Iqg a rest, — as we farmers lean upon our spades, when the digging is in unctuous fat soil that lifts heavily. And so I leave the matter, — with the " Faerj Queene " in my thought, and leaning on my spade. FIFTH DAT. English Weather. WE are fairly on English ground now ; of course, it is wet weather. The phenomena of the Brit- ish climate have not changed much since the time when the rains " let fall their horrible pleasure " upon the head of the poor, drenched outcast, Lear. Thunder and lightning, however, which belonged to that partic- ular war of the elements, are rare in England. The rain is quiet, fine, insinuating, constant as a lover, — not wasting its resources in sudden, explosive outbreaks. During a foot-tramp of some four hundred miles, which I once had the pleasure of making upon English soU, and which led me from the mouth of the Thames to its sources, and thence through Derbyshire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, and all of the Lake coimties, I do not think that the violence of the rain kept me housed for more than five days out of forty. Not to say that the balance showed sunshine and a bonny sky ; on the 156 WET DAYS. contrary, a soft, lubricating mist is the normal conditioB of the British atmosphere ; and a neutral tint of gray sky, when no wet is falling, is almost sure to call out from the country-landlord, if communicative, an explo- sive and authoritative, " Fine morning, this. Sir ! " The really fine, sunny days — days you believed in rashly, upon the sunny evidence of such blithe poets as Herrick — are so rare, that, after a month of British travel, you can count them on your fingers. On such a one, by a piece of good fortune, I saw all the parterres of Hampton Court, — its great vine, its labyrinthine walks, its stately alleys, its ruddy range of brick, its clipped lindens, its rotund and low-necked beauties of Sir Peter Lely, and the red geraniums flaming on the window-sills of once royal apartments, where the pen- sioned dowagers now dream away their lives. On another such day, Twickenham, and all its delights of trees, bowers, and villas, were flashing in the sun as brightly as ever in the best days of Horace Walpole or of Pope. And on yet another, after a weary tramp, I toiled up to the inn-door of " The Bear," at Woodstock; and after a cut or two into a ripe haunch of Oxford- shire mutton, with certain " tiny kickshaws," I saw, for the first time, under the light of a glorious sunset, that exquisite velvety stretch of the park of Woodstock, — . dimpled with water, dotted with forest-clumps, — where Tompanies of sleek fallow-deer were grazing by the ENGLISH WEATHER. 157 huudred, where pheasants whirred away down the aisles of wood, where memories of Fair Rosamond and of Rochester and of Alice Lee lingered, — and all brought to a ringing close by Southey's ballad of " Blenheim," as the shadow of the gaunt Marlborough column slanted across the path. There are other notable places, however, which seem — so dependent are we on first impressions — to be al- ways bathed in a rain -cloud. It is quite impossible, for instance, for me to think of London Bridge save as a great reeking thoroughfare, slimy with thin mud, with piles of mnbrellas crowding over it, like an army of tur- tles, and its balustrade streaming with wet. The charm- ing little Dulwich Gallery, with its Berghems, Gainsbor- oughs, and Murillos, I remember as situated somewhere (for I could never find it again of my own head) at a very rainy distance from London, under the spout of an interminable waterfall. The guide-books talk of a pretty neighborhood, and of a thousand rural charms thereabout ; I remember only one or two draggled po licemen in oil-skin capes, and with heads slanted to the wind, and my cabby, in a four-caped coat, shaking him- self like a water-dog, in the area. Exeter, Gloucester, and Glasgow are three great wet cities in my mem- ory, — a damp cathedral in each, with a damp-coated usher to each, who shows damp tombs, and wliose tafU is dampening to the last degree. I suppose they have 158 WET DAYS. Eunshine in these places, and in the light of the sun I am sure that marvellous gray tower of Gloucester must make a rare show ; but all the reports in the world will not avail to dry up the image of those wet days of ■visit Considering how very much the fair days are over- balanced by the dirty, thick, dropping, misty weather of England, I think we take a too sunny aspect of her history : it has not been under the full-faced smiles of heaven that her battles, revolutions, executions, and pageants have held their august procession ; the rain has wet many a May-day and many a harvesting, whose traditional color (through tender English verses) is gaudy with yellow sunshine. The revellers of the " Midsummer Night's Dream " would find a wet turf eight days out of ten to disport upon. "We think of Bacon without an umbrella, and of Cromwell without a mackintosh ; yet I suspect both of them carried these, or their equivalents, pretty constantly. Ealeigh, indeed, threw his velvet cloak into the mud for the Virgin Queen to tread upon, — from which we infer a recent Ehower ; but it is not often that an historical incident is BO suggestive of the true state of the atmosphere. History, however, does not mind the rain : agriculture inust More especially in any view of British agri- cidture, whether old or new, and in any e-stimate of its dieories or progress, due consideration must be had fot ENGLISH WEATHER. 159 the geuerous dampness of the British atmosphere. To this cause is to be attributed primarily that wonderfi.1 velvety turf which is so unmatchable elsewhere ; to th« same cause, and to the accompanying even temperature, is to be credited very much of the success of the turnip-culture, which has within a century revolution- ized the agriculture of England ; yet again, the mag- ical eflfects of a thorough system .of drainage are no- where so demonstrable as in a soil constantly wetted, and giving a steady flow, however small, to the discharging tile. Measured by inches, the rain - fall is greater in most parts of America than in Great Britain ; but this fall is so capricious with us, often so sudden and violent, that there must be inevitably a large surface-discharge, even though the tile, three feet below, is in working or- der. The true theory of skilful drainage is, not to carry away the quick flush of a shower, but to relieve a soil too heavily satm'ated by opening new outflows, setting new currents astir of both air and moisture, and thus giving new life and an enlarged capacity to lands that were dead with a stagnant over-soak. Bearing in mind, then, the conditions of the British climate, which are so much in keeping with the " wet weather " of these studies, let us go back again to old Markham's day, and amble along — armed with our umbrellas — through the current of the seventeenth century. 160 WET DAYS. Time of James the First. J' AMES I., that conceited old pedant, whose " Coum terblast to Tobacco" has worked the poorest oi results, seems to have had a nice taste for fruits ; and Sir Henry Wotton, his ambassador at Venice, writing from that city in 1622, says, — " I have sent the choic- est melon-seeds of all kinds, which His Majesty doth expect, as I had order both from my Lord Holdemess and from Mr. Secretary Calvert." Sir Henry sent also with the seeds very particular directions for the culture of the plants, obtained probably from some head-gar dener of a Priuli or a Morosini, whose melons had the full beat of Italian sunshine upon the south slopes of the Vicentine mountains. The same ambassador sends at that date to Lord Holdemess " a double-flowering yellow rose, of no ordinary nature " ; * and it would be counted of no ordinary nature now, if what he avers be true, — that " it flowreth every month from May till almost Christmas." King James took special interest in the establishment of his garden at the Theobald Palace in Hertfordshire : there were clipped hedges, neat array of linden-avenues, fountains, and a Mount of Venus within a labyrinth ; twelve miles of wall encircled the park, and the soldier; of Cromwell founi fine foraging-ground in it, when they • ReU^via WotUmana, p. 317, el leq. TIME OF JAMES THE FIRST. IGl entered upon the premises a few years later. The schoolmaster-king formed also a guild of gardeners in the city of London, at whose hands certificates of capa- city for garden-work were demanded, and these to be given only after proper examination of the applicants. Lord Bacon possessed a beautiful garden, if we may trust his own hints to that effect, and the added praises of Wotton. Cashiobury, Holland House, and Greenwich gardens were all noted in this time ; and the experi- ments and successes of the proprietor of Bednall-Greene garden I have already alluded to. But the country- gentleman, who lived upon his land and directed the cultivation of his property, was but a very savage type of the Bedford or Oxfordshire landholders of our day. It involved a muddy drag over bad roads, after a heavy Flemish mare, to bring either one's self or one's crops to market Sir Thomas Overbury, who draws such a tender pic- ture of a " Milke-Mayde," is severe, and, I dare say, truthful, upon the country-gentleman. "His conversa- tion," says he, " amongst his tenants is desperate : but amongst his equals full of doubt His travel is seldome farther than the next market towne, and his inquisition is about the price of corne : when he travelleth, t e will goe ten mile out of the way to a cousins house of his to save charges ; and rewards servants by taking them by the hand when hee departs. Nothing under a 11 162 WET DAYS tuh-ptena can draw him to London: and when he it there, he sticks fast upon every object, casts his eye« away upon gazing, and becomes the prey of every cut- piu«e. When he comes home, those wonders serve him for his holy-day talke. If he goe to court, it is in yellow stockings: and if it be in winter, in a slight tafety cloake, and pumps and pantofles." The portrait of the smaller farmer, who, in this time, tilled his own ground, is even more severely sketched by Bishop Earle. " A plain country fellow is one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lye fallow and untilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and not enough to be idle or melancholy. .... His hand guides the plough, and the plough his thoughts, and his ditch and land-mark is the very mound of his medita- tions. He expostulates with his oxen very understand- ingly, and speaks gee, and ree, better than English. His mind is not much distracted with objects, but if a good fat cow come in his way, he stands dumb and astonished, and though his haste be never so great, will fix here half an hours contemplation. His habitation is some poor thatched roof, distinguished from his barn by the loop-holes that let out smoak, which the rain had long since washed through, but for the double ceiling of bacon on the inside, which has hung there from hi» grandsires time, and is yet to make rashers for pos- terity. He apprehends Gods blessings only in a good TIME OF JAMES THE FIRST. 163 year, or a fat pasture, and never praises him but on good ground." Such were the men who were to be reached by the agricultural literature of the day ! Yet, notwithstand- ing this unpromising audience, scarcely a year passed but some talker was found who felt himself competent to expound the whole art and mystery of husbandry. Adam Speed, Gent., (from which title we may pre- sume that he was no Puritan,) published a little book in the year 1626, which he wittily called " Adam out of Eden.'' In this he undertakes to show how Adam, un- der the embarrassing circumstance of being shut out of Paradise, may increase the product of a farm from two hundred pounds to two thousand pounds a year by the rearing of rabbits on furze and broom ! It is all mathematically computed; there is nothing to disap- point in the figures ; but I suspect there might be in the rabbits. Gentleman Speed speaks of turnips, clover, and po- tatoes ; he advises the boiling of " butchers' blood " for poultry, and mixing the " pudding " with bran and other condiments, which will " feed the beasts very fat" The author of " Adam out of Eden " also indulges himself in verse, which is certainly not up to the meas- gre of " Paradise Lost" This is its taste : — " Each soyl hath no likmg of every grain, Nor barley nor wheat is for every vein ; 164 WET DAYS. Yet know I no country so barren of soyl Bat some kind of come may be gotten with toyL Thongh husband at home be to count the cost what, Yet thus huswife within is as needful as tnat: What helpeth in store to have never so much, Half lost by ill-usage, ill huswifes, and such? " The papers of Bacon upon subjects connected with rural life are so familiar that I need not recur to them. His particular suggestions, however sound in themselves, (and they generally are sound,) did by no means meas- ure the extent of his contribution to the growth of good husbandry. But the more thorough methods of investigation which he instituted and encom-aged gave a new and healthier direction to inquiries connected not only with agriculture, but with every experimental art Thus, Gabriel Platte, publishing his "Observations and Improvements in Husbandry," about the year 1638, thinks it necessary to sustain and illustrate them with a record of " twenty experiments." Sir Richard "Weston, too, a sensible up - country knight, has travelled through Flanders about the same time, and has seen such success attending upon the turnip and the clover culture there, that he urges th€ same upon his fellow-landholders, in a " Discourse of Husbandrie.'' SAMUEL HARTLIB. 165 Samuel HartUh. rriHE book last named was published under the au- -^ spices of Hartlib, — the same Master Samuel Hartlib to whom Milton addressed his tractate " Of Education," and of whom the great poet speaks as " a person sen* hither [to England] by some good Providence from a far country,- to be the occasion and incitement of great good to this island." This mention makes us curious to know something more of Master Samuel Hartlib. I find that he was the son of a Polish merchant, of Lithuania, was him- self engaged for a time in commercial transactions, and came to England about the year 1640. He wrote sev- eral theological tracts, edited sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Eichard Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcom- ings of British husbandry. He also proposed a grandiose scheme for an agricultural college, in order to teach youths " the theorick and practick parts of this most ancient, noble, and honestly gainfull art, trade, or mys- tery." Another work published by him, entitled " The Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, em- braces epistles from various farmers, who may be sup- posed to represent the progressive agriculture of Eng- land. Among these letters I note one upon " Snag- greet," (shelly earth from river-beds) ; another upon 166 WEl^ DAYS. " Seaweeds " ; a third upon " Sea-sand " , and a fourth \ti>oi. " Woollen-rags." I also excerpt from tlie same book a diagram of a farm-outlay which some ingenious correspondent con- tributed, and which — however well it may appear on paper — I would by no means advise an amateur far- mer to adopt. I give it only as a curious relic of the agricultural whims of that day. It is signed Coressey Dymock. The contributor observes that it may form the plot of an entire " Lordship," or may serve for a farm of two or three hundred acres. Hartlib was in good odor during the days of the Commonwealth ; for he lived long enough to see that bitter tragedy of the executed king before Whitehall Palace, and to hold over to the early years of the Res- toration. But he was not in favor with the people about Charles 11.; the small pension that Cromwell had bestowed fell into sad arrearages ; and the story is, that he died miserably poor. It is noticeable that Hartlib, and a great many sensi- ble old gentlemen of his date, spoke of the art of hus- bandry as a mystery. And so it is; a mystery then, and a mystery now. Nothing tries my patience more than to meet one of those billet-headed farmers who — whether in print or in talk — pretend to have solved the mystery and mastered it. Take my own crop of com yonder upon the flat SAMCEL HART LIB. 167 DIAGRAM OP FABU-OUTLAT.* • Explanation of references: — A. Dwelling-house in centre. B. Kitchen-garden. C. Orchard. D. Choice garden. E. Physicall garden. F. F. Daily and laundry. G. Sheep-cotes. H, H. Closes for swine. K, K. Great corn-bams U Stables and swine-styet. M, M. Little houses for poultry. N. Standing racks. Q, Q. Closes for single animals. K, R. Closes for mares and foal. S. S. Pastures for sheep. T, T. Closes for work-purpose*. V. Pasture for fat beeves. W. Close for diseased beasta. X. Close for saddle-horse. Y. Clo?e for weaning calves. 1(58 WET ^AYS. which I have watched since the day when it first shot ap its little dainty spears of green, until now its spin- dles are waving like banners : the land has been faith- fully ploughed and fed and tilled ; but how gross appli* ances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that nave been searching, day by day, every cranny of the soil, — to the broad leaflets that, week by week, have stolen out from their green sheaths to wanton with the wind and caress the dews ! Is there any quick-witted farmer who shall tell us with anything like definiteness what the phosphates have contributed to all this, and how much the nitrogenous manures, and to what degree the de posits of humus ? He may establish the conditions of a sure crop, thirty, forty, or sixty bushels to the acre, (seasons favoring) ; but how short a reach is this toward determining the final capacity of either soil or plant ! How often the most petted experiments laugh us in the face ! The great miracle of the vital labora- tory in the plant remains to mock us. We test it ; we humor it ; we fondly believe that we have detected its secret : but the mystery stays. A bumpkin may rear a crop that shall keep him from starvation ; but to develop the utmost capacity of a given soil by fertilizing appliances, or by those of tillage, is the work, I suspect, of a wiser man than be- longs to our day. And when I find one who fancies he has resolved all the conditions which contribute ta COMMONn'E^LTH AND RESTORATION. 169 this miracle of God's, and can control and fructify at his will, I have less respect for his head than for a good one — of Savoy cabbage. The great problem of Adam's curse is not worked out so easily. The sweat- ing is not over yet. If, however, we are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless mystery. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. If our plummet- lines do not reach the bottom, it is only because they are too short ; but they are growing longer. Every year a new secret is laid bare, which, in the flush of triumph, seems a crowning development; whereas it presently appears that we have only opened a new door upon some further labyrinth. Period of the Commonwealth and Restoration. rriHROUGHOUT the seventeenth century, the prog- -*- ress in husbandry, without being at any one period very brilliant, was decided and constant. If there was anything like a relapse, and neglect of g5od culture, it was most marked shortly after the Restoration. The country-gentlemen, who had enter- tained a wholesome horror of Cromwell and his troop- ers, had, during the Commonwealth, devoted them selves to a quiet life upon their estates, repairing the 170 WET DAYS. damages which the Civil War had wrought in Iheii fortunes and in their lands. The high price of farm- products stimulated their efforts, and their country- isolation permitted a harmless show of the chivalrous contempt they entertained for the new men of the Commonwealth. "With the return of Charles they abandoned their estates once more to the baUifi^, and made a rush for the town and for their share of the " leeks and onions." But the earnest men had been constantly at work. Sainfoin and turnips were growing every year into credit. The potato was becoming a crop of value; and in the year 1664 John Foster devoted a treatise to it, entitled, "England's Happiness increased, or a Sure Eemedy against all Succeeding Dear Tears, by a Plantation of Roots called Potatoes." For a long time the crop had been known, and Sir Thomas Overbury had made it the vehicle of one of his sharp witticisms against people who were forever boasting of their ancestry, — their best part being be- low ground. But Foster anticipates the full value of what had before been counted a novelty and a curios- ity. He advises how custards, paste, puddings, and even bread, may be made from the flour of potatoes. John Worlidge in 1669 gave to the public a " System of Husbandry " very full in its suggestions, — advising green fallows, and even recommending and describin| COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 171 a drill for the patting in of seed, and for distributing with it a fine fertilizer. Evelyn, also, about this time, gave a dignity to rural pursuits by his " Sylva " and " Terra," both these trea- tises having been recited before the Royal Society The " Terra " is something muddy,* and is by no means exhaustive ; but the " Sylva " for more than a century was the British planter's hand-boolc, being a judicious, sensible, and eloquent treatise upon a sub- ject as wide and as beautiful as its title. Even "Walter Scott, — himself a capital woodman, — when he tells (in " Kenilworth ") of the approach of Tressilian and his Doctor companion to the neighborhood of Say's Court, cannot forego his tribute to the worthy and cultivated author who once lived there, and who in his " Sylva " gave a manual to every British planter, and in his life an exemplar to every British gentleman. Evelyn was educated at Oxford, travelled widely upon the Continent, was a firm adherent of the royal party, and at one time a member of Prince Ruperfs famous troop. He married the daughter of the British ambassador in Paris, through whom he came into pos- session of Say's Court, which he made a gem of beauty. But in his later years he had the annoyance of seeing his fine parterres and shrubbery trampled • Of clay he aaya, " It is a cursed step-dame to almost all vegeta- tion, as having few or no meatuses foi the percolation of alimenta •howeis." ■ J 72 WET DAYS. down by that Northern boor, Peter the Great, who made his residence there while studying the mysteries of ship-building at Deptford, and who had as little rev- erence for a parterre of flowers as for any other of th« tenderer graces of life. The British monarchs have always been more re gardful of those interests which were the object of Evelyn's tender devotion. I have already alluded to the horticultural fancies of James I. His son Charles was an extreme lover of flowers, as well as of a great many luxuries which hedged him against all Puritan sympathy. " Who knows not," says Milton, in his re- ply to theEIKON B A2IAIKH, " the licentious remiss- ness of his Sunday's theatre, accompanied with that reverend statute for dominical jigs and May-poles, pub- lished in his own name," etc. ? But the poor king was fated to have little enjoyment of either jigs or May-poles ; harsher work belonged to his reign ; and all his garden-delights came to be lim- ited finally to a little pot of flowers upon his prison- window. And I can easily believe that the elegant, wrong-headed, courteous gentleman tended these poor flowers daintily to the very last, and snufied their fra- grance with a Christian gratitude. Charles was an appreciative lover of poetry, too, as well as of Nature. I wonder if it ever happened to him, in his prison-hours at Carisbrooke, to come upon COMMON WEALTH AND RES2 'JRATION. 178 Milton's " L' Allegro," (first printed in the very year of the Battle of Naseby,) and to read, — " In thy right hand lead with thee The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty ; And if I give thee honor due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her, and live with thee. In unreproved pleasures free ; To hear tlie lark begin his flight. And, singing, startle the dull night. From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise ; Then to come, in spite of sorrow. And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweetbrier, or the vine. Or the twisted eglantine." How it must have smitten the King's heart to re- . member that the tender poet, whose melody none could appreciate better than he, was also the sturdy Puritan pamphleteer whose blows had thwacked so terribly upon the last props that held up his tottering throne ! Cromwell, as we have seen, gave Master Hartlib a pension ; but whether on the score of his theological tracts, or his design for an agricultural college, woulc" be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the Pro- tector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of trees was measured by their capacity for timber. Yet that rare masculine energy, which ha and his men carried with them in their tread all ovet 174 WET DAYS. England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productivo agriculture. Charles 11. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In his long residence at Paris he had grown into a gieat fondness for the French gardens. He afterward sent for Le Notre — who had laid out Versailles at an ex- pense of twenty millions of dollars — to superintend the planting of Greenwich and St. James. Fortu- nately, no strict unitation of Versailles was entered upon. The splendors of Chatsworth garden grew in this time out of the exaggerated taste, and must have delighted the French heart of Charles. Other artists have had the handling of this great domain since the days of Le Notre. A crazy wilderness of rock-work, amid which the artificial waters commit freak upon freak, has been strewed athwart the lawn ; a stately con» servatory has risen, under which the Duke may drive, if he choose, in coach and four, amid palm-trees, and the monster vegetation of the Eastern archipelago ; the little glass temple is in the gardens, under which the Victoria lily was first coaxed into British bloom ; a model village has spnmg up at the Park gates, in which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on rural ornamentation. But the sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incon- gruity ; the charm of realism is wanting ; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures, — cleas COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION. 17fi and deft as the painted figures ; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to — sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous ; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land ; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hom-'s drive away, toward Mat- lock. And the stiff parterres, terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a scene. I\ indeed, as at Versailles, they bounded and engrossed the view, so that natural surfaces should have no claim upon your eye, — if they were the mere setting to a monster palace, whose colonnades and balusters of marble edged away into colonnades and balusters of box-wood, and these into a limitless extent of long green lines, which are only lost to the eye where a dis- tant fountain dashes its spray of golden dust into the air, — as at Versailles, — there would be keeping. But the Devonshire palace has quite other setting. Blue Derbyshire hills are behind it ; a grand, billowy slope of the comeliest park-land in England rolls down from its terrace-foot to where the Derwent, under hoary oaks, washes its thousand acres of meadow-vale, with a flow as charming and limpid as one of Virgil's eclogues. It is such a setting that carries the great quadrangle of Chatsworth Palace and its flanking artificialities of rock and garden, like a black patch upon the face of a fine woman of Queen Anne's court. This brings us upon our line of march again 176 WET DAYS. CSiarles 11. loved stiff gardens ; James IL loved stifl gardens ; and William, with his Low-Comitry tastes^ outstiffened both, with his "topiaiy box a-row." Lord Bacon has commended the formal style to public admiration by his advocacy and example. The lesson was repeated at Cashiobury by the most noble the Earl of Essex (of whom Evelyn writes, — " My Lord is not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen of his age "). So also that famous garden of Moor- Park in Hertfordshire,* laid out by the witty Duchess of Bedford, to whom Dr. Donne addresses some of his piquant letters, was a model of old-fashioned and stately graces. Sir William Temple praises it beyond reason in his " Garden of Epicurus," and cautions readers against undertaking any of those irregularities of garden - figures which the Chinese so much affect He admires only stateliness and primness. "Among us," he says, " the Beauty of Building and Planting is placed chiefly in some certain Proportions, Symmetries, or Uniformities ; our Walks and our Trees ranged so as to answer one another, and at exact Distances." From all these it is clear what was the garden-drift of the century. Even Waller, the poet, — who could be more affluent with his moneys than most poets, — • Not to be confounded Tvith Temple's own home — of the umt tune — in Surrey, where his heirt was buned under an nm. OLD ENGLISB BOMBS. 177 spent a large sum in levelling tlie hills about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poe< and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.) Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities, breaks in upon these geometric for- malities with the rounded graces of the garden which he planted in Eden. There " the crisped brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold With mazy error under pendent shades, Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art In beds and curious knots, but Xature boon Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain." Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise — the ideal of man's happiest estate — variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance ; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller and of Hampton Court Old English Somes. AND now from some lookout - point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damage.' that Peter 12 178 W£T DAYS. the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford hom^ let us take a bird's-eye glance at rural England. It is raining ; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn by stout Flemish mares, — for thorough-breds are as yet unknown, — is covered with a sail-cloth to keep the wet away from the six " insides." The grass, wherever the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now. The wheat in the near county of Herts is fair, and will turn twenty bushels to the acre ; here and there an enterprising landholder has a small field of dibbled grain, which will yield a third more. John "Worlidge's drill is not in request, and is only talked of by a few wiseacres who prophesy its ultimate adoption. The fat bullocks of Bedford wiU not dress more than nine hundred a head ; and the cows, if killed, would not ovemm five hundred weight. Horses " run at grass " for eighteenpence per week ; oxen and cows at sixpence to a shilling, according to size.* There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of turnips but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moor- land, which has been planted with forest-trees, in ac- cordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. "Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear * 7%e Country GmUeman'i Vade - Ifecum, by Giles Jicob, Gent, 1T17. OLD ENGLISH HOMES. 179 great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies of cranes. The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care of some pupil of John Eose or of Quintinie, have their espaliers, — their plums, their pears,* and their grapes. These last are rare, however, (Parkinson says sour, too,) and bear a great price in the London market One or two horticulturists of extraordinary enterprise have built greenhouses, warmed, Evelyn says, "in a most ingenious way, by passing a brick flue underneath the beds." But these were quite exceptional among the country- gentry, — fully as much so as the ruralist of our time who has his orchard-house, and who entertains his friends in May or June with a dwarf nectarine upon the table, in full bearing. I suspect that if we had wan- dered, in the days of which I speak, into the house of a Dorsetshire squire, we should have found in the great hall terriers, spaniels, and hounds lying about promis- cuously, with, very likely, a litter of cats in a big arm- chair ; there would have been an oaken table covered with cards and dice-boxes ; in a cupboard of the wain- scot I am sure we should have found a venison-pasty, and a black case-bottle of " something warming." Very * Sir William Temple gives this list of his pears: — Blanqaet, Robin, Bousselet, Pepin, Jargonel ; and for antomn Buree, Tertlongue, and Bergamot. 180 WET DAYS. likely upon some double-decked table which has the air of an altar there would be a Bible and the " Book of Martyrs " ; but for aU the flax-haired squire had to do with them, they would be dusty ; and ten to one a hawk's-hood or a fox-skin might be lying on them. Tobacco-pipes would not be out of sight, and a stale scent of them would mingle with the smell of terriers and half-dried otter-skins. Worlidge and Evelyn would be as much sneered at (if ever heard of) by such a squire as the progressive agriculturists are by our old- fashioned men now ; and like these last the old squire would hold tenaciously upon life, — mounting a horse at fourscore, and knowing nothing of spectacles.* I can fancy such an old gentleman saying to his after- dinner guest, with Shallow, (who lived so long before him,) " Nay, you shall see mine orchard : where in an arbor, we will eat a last year's pippin of my own graflT- ing, with a dish of carraways, and so forth." Yet this flax-haired, rotund squire, so loud-mouthed and tyrannic in his own household, would hardly ven- ture up to London, for fear of the footpads on the heath and the insolence of the blackguard Cockneys. 11)15 wife should be some staid dame, lean, but rosy of viiage, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery, who could bandy words on occasions with the squire, yet DTt speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patchesi • See Gilpin's Forest Scenery, Vol. II. pp. 23-26. OLD ENGLISH HOMES. Idl A daughter, it may be, illumines the place, (who knows ?) — " ycleped Dawsabel A maiden fair and iree ; * And for she was her fathers heir Full well she was ycond the leir Of mickle courtesy, " Her features all as fresh above, As is the grass that grows by Dove, And lythe as lass of Kent Her skin as soft as Leinster wool, As white as snow on peakish Hull, Or swan that swims in Trent." Draytoh. A great many of the older exotic plants ■would, I suppose, be domesticated at the door, and possibly wife or daughter would have plead successfully with the squire for the presence of a few rare bulbs from Hol- land ; but whether these or not, we may be sure that there was a flaming parterre of peonies, of fleurs-de- lis, and of roses ; yet all of these not half so much valued by the good- wife as her bed of marjoram and of thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a Non - Conformist, Baxter's " Sainf s Rest " ; while the husband (if he ever reads at all) regales himself with a thumb-worn copy of " Sir Fopling Flutter," or, if he live well into the closing years of the century, with De Foe's " True-born Englishman." 1*8 WET DAYS. A Brace of Pastorals. POETIC feeling was more lacking in the couutry-liffl than in the illustrative literature of the period. To say nothing of Milton's brilliant little' poems " L' Allegro " and " H Penseroso," which flash all over with the dews, there are the charming " Characters " of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the graceful discourse of Sir "William Temple. The poet Drummond wrought a music out of the woods and waters which lingers allur- ingly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys of Hawthomden. John Dryden, though a thorough cit, and a man who would have preferred his arm-chair at Will's Coffee-House to Chatsworth and the fee of all its lands, has yet touched most tenderly the " daisies white " and the spring, in his adaptation of " The Flower and the Leaf." But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet day to a close with the naming of two honored pasto- rals. The first, in sober prose, is nothing more nor less than Walton's "Angler." Its homeliness, its calm, sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty per- fume of flowers, its delicate shadowing-forth of the Christian sentiment which lived by old English fire^' tides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the highest style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infi- nitely better,) — these make the " Angler " a book that BRACE OF PASTORALS. 183 Stands among the thumb-worn. There is good mar- rowy English in it; I know very few fine writers of our times who could make a better book on such a sub- ject to-day, — with all the added information, and all the practice of the newspaper-columns. What Walton wants to say he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning ; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen ; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them — straight. Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout -fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphry Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout I have many excellent friends — capita] fishermen — whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be confided in. I excuse it ; I take off twenty per cent, from their estimates without eitlier hesitation, anger, or reluctance. I do not think I should have trusted in such a mat- ter Charles Cotton, although he was agricultural as well as piscatory, — having published a " Planter's Manual." I think he could, and did, draw a long bow. I suspect innocent milkmaids were not in the habit of singing Kit Marlowe's songs to the worshipful Mb Cotton. 184 WET DAYS. One pastoral remains to mention, published at tho very opening of the year 1600, and spending its fine forest-aroma thenceforward all down the century. I mean Shakspeare's play of " As You Like It" From beginning to end the grand old forest of Arden is astir overhead ; from beginning to end the brooks brawl in your ear; from beginning to end you smell the bruised ferns and the delicate-scented wood-flowers. It is Theocritus again, with the civiliza- tion of the added centuries contributing its spangles of reason, philosophy, and grace. Who among all the short-kirtled damsels of all the eclogues will match us this fair, lithe, witty, capricious, mirthful, buxom Rosa- lind ? Nowhere in books have we met with her like, — but only at some long-gone picnic in the woods, where we worshipped " blushing sixteen " in dainty boots and white muslin. There, too, we met a match for sighing Orlando, — mirrored in the water; there, too, some diluted Jaques may have " moralized " the excursion for next day's " Courier,'' and some lout of a Touchstone (there are always such in picnics) passed the ices, made poor puns, and won more than his share of the smiles. "Walton is English all over ; but " As You Like If [b as broad as the sky, or love, or folly, or hope. SIXTH BAY. A British Tavern. TT is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left -*- upon the branches save a few yellow flutterers on the tips of the willows and poplars, and the bleached company that will be clinging to the beeches and the white-oaks for a month to come. All others are whipped away by the night-winds into the angles of old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies, there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the newly planted weigelias and spruces, until the snows and February suns and April mists and May heats shall have transmuted them into fat anj unctuous mould. A close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the leaks of the mossy roof, testing all the. newly laid drains, pressing the fountain at my door to an exuber- ant gush, — a rain that makes outside work an impos- sibility; and as I sit turning over the leaves of an old book of engravings, wondering what drift my rainy- 186 WET DAYS. day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view of Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, in the luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its shadows, but recalling vividly the cloudy April morn- ing on which, fifteen years agone, I left the inn of the " Green Man and Black's Head," in the pretty town of Ashbourne, and strolled away by tlie same road or which Mr. Charles Cotton opens his discourse of fish- ing with Master " Viator,'' and plunged down the steep valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three miles and more, under towering crags, and on soft, spongy bits of meadow, beside the blithe river where Walton had cast, in other days, a gray palmer-fly, — past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, and the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose lintel was graven in the stone the interlaced initials of " Piscator, Junior," and his great master of the rod. As the rain began to patter on the sedges and the pools, I climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derby- shire side, and striding away through the heather, which belongs to the rolling heights of this region, I presently found myself upon the great London and Manchester highway. A broad and stately thorough- fare it had been in the old days of coaching ; but now a close, fine turf invested it all, save one narrow strip of Macadam in the middle. The mile-stones, which had been showy, p.iinted afiairs of iron, were now deeply A BRITISH TAVERN. 187 bitten and blotched with rust Two of them I had passed, without sight of house or of other traveller, save one belated drover, who was hurrying to the fair at Ashbourne ; as I neared the third, a great hulk of building appeared upon my left, with a crowd of aspir- ing chimneys, from which only one timid little pennant of smoke coiled into the harsh sky. The gray, inhospitable-looking pile proved to be one of the old coach-inns, which, with its score of vacant chambers and huge stable-court, was lefl stranded upon the deserted highway of travel. It stood a little space back from the road, so that a coach and four, or, in- deed, a half-dozen together, might have come up to the door-way in dashing style. But it must have been many years since such a demand had been made upon the resources of bustling landlord and of attendant grooms and waiters. The doors were tightly closed ; even the sign-board creaked uneasily in the wind, and a rampant growth of ivy that clambered over the porch so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not at all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to thfi bell, and heard the echo repeated from the deserted stable-court ; there was the yelp of a hound somewhere within, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman re- ceived me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, showed me into a great dingy parlor, where a murky fire was struggling in the grate. A score of roistering 188 WhT DAYS. travellers might have made the stately parlor gay ; and I dare say they did, in years gone ; but now I had only for company — their heavy old arm-chairs, a few prints of " fast coaches " upon the wall, and a superannuated greyhound, who seemed to scent the little meal I had ordered, and presently stalked in and laid his thin nose, with an appealing look, in my hands. His days of coursing — if he ever had them — were fairly over; and I took a charitable pride in bestowing upon him certain tough morsels of the rump-steak, garnished with horse-radish, with which I was favored for dinner. I had intended to push on to Buxton the same after noon ; but the deliberate sprinkling of the morning had quickened by two o'clock into a swift, pelting rain, the very counterpart of that which is beating on my windows to-day. There was nothing to be done but to make my home of the old coach-inn for the night; and for my amusement — besides the slumber- ous hound, who, after dinner, had taken up position upon the faded rug lying before the grate — there was ft " Bell's Messenger " of the month past, and, as good luck would have it, a much-bethumbed copy of a work on horticulture and kindred subjects, first printed some- where about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and entitled " The Clergyman's Recreation, showing the Pleasure and Profit of the Art of Gardening, ' by the Reverend John Laurence. EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 189 It was a queer book to be found in this preteitioua aid coach-inn, with its silken bell-pulls and stately par lors ; and I thought how the roisterers who came thun- dering over the road years ago, and chucked the bar- maids under the chin, must have turned up their noses, after their pint of crusted Port, at the " Clergyman's Recreation." Yet, for all that, the book had a rare in- terest for me, detailing, as it did, the methods of fruit- culture in England a hundred and forty years ago, and showing with nice particularity how the espaliers could be best trained, and how a strong infusion of walnut- leaf tea will destroy all noxious worms. And now, when, upon this other wet day, and in the quietude of my own library, I come to measure the claims of this ancient horticulturist to consideration, I find that he was the author of some six or seven dis- tinct works on kindred subjects, showing good knowl- edge of the best current practice ; and although he in- curred the sneers of Mr. TuU, who hoped " he preached better than he ploughed," there is abundant evidence that his books were held in esteem. Early English G-ardeners. i^ONTEMPOEARY with the Rev. Mr. Laurence ^-^ were London and Wise, the famous horticulturists Df Brompton, (whose nursery, says Evelyn, "was the 190 WET DAYS. greatest work of the kind ever seen or heard o^ eithei in books or travels,") also Switzer, a pupil of the .atter and Professor Richard Bradley. Mr. London was the director of the royal gardens under "William and Mary, and at one time had in his charge some three or four hundred of the most consid- erable landed estates in England. He was in the habit of riding some fifty miles a day to confer with his sub- ordinate gardeners, and at least two or three times in a season traversed the whole length and breadth of England, — and this at a period, it must be remem- bered, when travelling was no holiday-afifair, as is evi- dent from the mishaps which befell those well-known contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, — Joseph An- drews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of Mr. London are to be seen even now in the older parts of the grounds of Blenheim and of Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well known by a great many horticultural and agricultural works, which in his day were " on sale at his seed-shop in "Westminster HaU." Chiefest among these was the " Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general direc- tions for the management of country-estates, while it indulged in some prefatory magniloquence upon the dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It i? the first of all arts, he claims; for " tho' Chirurgery EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 191 may plead high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of Genesis that operation is recorded of taking the rib from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the very current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gar- dening.'' It surprises us to find that so radical an in- vestigator shouldentertain the belief, as he clearly did, that certain plants were produced without seed by the vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. He is particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, " Northern lads," who, with " a little learning and a great deal of impudence, know, or pretend to know, more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest South-country man does in seven years." His agricultural observations are of no special value, nor do they indicate any advance from the practice of Worlidge. He deprecates paring and burning as ex- haustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter fallow- ing and marling, and affirms that " there is no super- ficies of earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in its own bowels something or other for its own improve- ment." In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the clipped trees and other excesses of the Dutch school, yet advises the construction of terraces, lays out his ponds by geometric fonnulie, and is so far devoted to out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a royal institution for the instruction of ingenious young ^92 WET DAYS. men, who, on being taken into the service of noblemen and gentlemen, would straightway people their grounds with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had published his famous papers on the " Pleasures of th« Imagination " tliree years before.* Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his daj, — a man of general scientific acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volimies upon subjects connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for attachment to other men's wares,t and, finally, only escaping the indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in 1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum," etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnaeus, and his accoimt of British cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his " New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel " invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kalei- • The Spectators 414 and 477, which urge particularly a better taste in gardening, are dated 1712; and the first volume of the /c&- nographia (under a different name, indeed) appeared in 1715. t This is averred of the translation of the (Economics of Xenj. phoD, before cited in these papers, and published under FrofesM^ Bradley's name. EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 193 loscope. The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the Astor collection ; and, strange to say, there are only two (if we may believe Blr. Donaldson) in the library of the British Museum. I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Ca« tawbas blighted,) a rather ill-natured pleasure in read- ing how the Duke of Rutland, in the beginning of the last century, was compelled to " keep up fires from Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the ripening of his grapes ; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great boast in that time. The quiet country - squires — such as Sir Eoger de Coverley — had to content themselves with those old- fashioned fruits which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with filbert-bushes.* In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers, which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George L) in early March. Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at tlie end of April ; and the season of cauliflowers, *Jofepli Andrews, Bk. III. en. 4, where Fielding, tMef that b* traa, •ppropriates the storj' that Xenophon tells of Cyrus. 13 194 WET DAYS. which used to be limited to a single month, now reached over a term of six months. Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1 730, says, — "I have more fruit - trees and kitchen - garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, describing her entertainment at the table of the Elector of Han- over, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit she had never seen before. Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its complexion Dutch William was dead and buried. Addison had written in praise of the natural disposition of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place near Rugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the suggestions of those papers to which I have already alluded. Milton was in better odor than he had been, and people had begun to realize that an arch-Puritan might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated landholders had seen that charming garden - picture where the luxmious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress Armida spread her nets. Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison ; but liis Twickenham garden was a very stiff affair. Bridgman was the first practical landscape-gardener who ventured to ignore old rules ; and he was followed dosely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsucces.»- JEIHRO TVLL. 19^ fill landscape-painter, who came into such vogue as a man of taste that he was employed to fashion the furni- ture of scores of country -villas ; and "Walpole * tells us that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to design Birtliday gowns for them : — " The one he dressed iu a petticoat decorated with columns of tlie five orders ; the other, like a bronze, in a copper-colored satin, with ornaments of gold." Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orleans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the " Faerie Queene " is mentioned as an educator. Jethro Tull. AND now let us leave gardens for a while, to dis- cuss Mr. J«thro Tull, the great English cultivator of the early half of the eighteenth century. I suspect that most of the gentry of his time, and cultivated peo- ple, ignored Mr. Tull, — he was so rash and so head- strong and so noisy. It is certain, too, that the edu- cated farmers, or, more strictly, the writing farmers, opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward off his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture. And he fought back bravely ; I really do not think f Vat • WorkaofEarlof Orford Vol. III. p. 490. 196 WET DAYS. an editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upoi him, — in vigor, in personality, or in coarseness. Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopaedists who followed upon his period have treated his name with a neglect that leaves but scanty gleanings for his personal history. His father owned landed property in Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man ; he studied for the law, (which will account for his address in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour of Europe, returned to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal homestead, and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he had gained in his Southern travels. HI health drove him to France a second time, whence he returned once more, to occupy the famous "Prosperous Farm" in Berkshire.; and here he opened his batteries afresh upon the existing methods of farming. The gist of his proposed reform is expressed in the title of his book, " The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He believed in the thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all field-crops, from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling was, of course, essential ; and to make it economical, horse-labor was requisite : the drill and the horse-hoe were only subsidiary to the main end of thorough TILLAGE. Sir Hugh Piatt, as we Jiave seen, had before sug- gested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill; but TuU gave force and point and practical efiScacy to JETHRO TULL. 197 their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to these old gentlemen ; and it is quite possible that his theory may have been worked out from his own observations. He certainly gives a clear account of the growth of his belief, and sustains it by a great many droll notions about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be admissible in the botanies of to-day. Shall I give a sample ? "Leaves," he says, "are the parts, or bowels of a plant, which perform the same office to sap as the lungs of an animal do to blood ; that is, they purify or cleanse it of the recrements, or fuliginous steams, received in the circulation, being the unfit parts of the food, and per- haps some decayed particles which fly off the vessels through which blood and sap do pass respectively." It does not appear that the success of TuU upon •' Prosperous Farm " was such as to give a large war- rant for its name. His enemies, indeed, alleged that he came near to sinking two estates on his system ; this, however, he stoutly denies, and says, "I propose no more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate be- hind me better than I found it Yet, owned it must be, that, had I, when I first began to make trials, known as much of the system as I do now, the practice of ft would have been more profitable to me.'' Farmers ia other parts of England, with lands better adapted to the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves cf it, IM WET DAYS. very muca to their advantage. Tull, like a great many earnest reformers, was almost always in difficulty with those immediately dependent on him ; over and o\er he insists upon the " inconveniuncy and slavery attending the exorbitant power of husbandry servants and labor- ers over their masters." He quarrels with their wages, and with the short period of their labor. Pray, what would Mr. Tull have thought, if he had dealt with the Drogheda gentlemen in black satin waistcoats, who are to be conciliated by the farmers of to-day ? I think I can fancy such an encounter for the quer- ulous old reformer. " Mike ! blast you, you booby, you 've broken my drill ! " And Mike, (putting his thumb deliberately in the armlet of his waistcoat,) " Mgester Tull, it 's not the loikes o' me '11 be leestening to insoolting worrds. I '11 take me money, if ye plase." And with what a fury "Meester" Tull would have slashed away, after this, at "Equivocus," and all his newspaper-antagonists ! I wish I could believe that Tull always told the exact truth ; but he gives some accounts of the perfection to which he had brought his drill * to which I can lend only a most meagre trust ; and it is unquestionable (hat his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him utterly contemptuous of aU old-fashioned methods of procedure. In this respect he was not alone among • See Chap. VII. p. 104, Cobbett's edition. JETHRO TVLL. 199 reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would supply the lack of manure, and his neighbors currently reported that he was in the habit of dumping his manure-carts in the river. This charge Mr. Tull firmly denied, and I dare say justly. But I can readily believe that the rumors were current ; country-neighborhoods offer good starting-points for such lively scandal. The writer of this book has heard, on the best possible authority, that he is in the habit of planting shrubs with their roots in the air. In his loose, disputadve way, and to magnify the im- portance of his own special doctrine, Tull affirms that the ancients, and Virgil particularly, m-ged tillage for the simple purpose of destroying weeds.* In this it seems to me that he does great injustice to oiu- old fri@nd Maro. Will the reader excuse a moment's dalliance with the Gceorgics again ? " Multnm adeo, raetris gUbaa qmfrangit inertet, Ttmincasque trahit crates, jurat arva ; . . . . Et qui prosciaso quae suscitat asquore terga RuTSus in obliquum verso perrnmpit aratro, Exercetque ftequens tellurem, atque imperat arvis." f That "imperat" look^ like something more than • Chap. IX. p. 136, Cobbett's edition. t " He does his land great service who brnaks the sluggish cloda irilh harrows, and drags over them the willow hurdles ; . . . . who tean up the ridges of his furrowed plain, and ploughs crosswise, and orei and ^ver again stirs his field, and with masterly hand subdues it.'* 20C WET DAYS. weed-killing ; it looks like subjugation ; it looks lik« pulverization at the hands of an imperious master. But behind all of Tull's exaggerated pretension, and unaffected by the noisy exacerbation of his speech there lay a sterling good sense, and a clear comprehen- sion of the existing shortcomings in agriculture, which gave to his teachings prodigious force, and an influence measured only by half a century of years. There were few, indeed, who adopted literally and fully his plans, or who had the hardihood to acknowledge the irate Jethro as a safe and practical teacher ; yet his hints and his example gave a stimulus to root-culture, and an atten- tion to the benefits arising from thorough and repeated tillage, that added vastly to the annual harvests of Eng- land. Bating the exaggerations I have alluded to, his views are stiU reckoned sound ; and though a hoed crop of wheat is somewhat exceptional, the drill is now al- most universal in lie best cultivated districts of Great Britain and the Continent ; and a large share of the forage-crops owe their extraordinary burden to horse- hoeing husbandry. Even the -exaggerated claims of TuU have had theii adTOcates in these last days ; and the enei^tic farmer of Lois-Weedon, in Northamptonshire, is reported to be growing heavy crops of wheat for a succession of years, without any supply of outside fertilizers, and rely- ing wholly upon repeated and perfect pulverization of JETHRO TULL. 201 the soil.* And Mr. Way, the distinguished chemist of the Royal Societj , in a paper on " The Power of Soils to absorb Manure," t propounds the question as follows : — " Is it likely, on theoretical considerations, that the air and the soil together can by any means be made to yield, without the application of manure, and year after year continuously, a crop of wheat of from thirty to thirty-five bushels per acre ? " And his reply is this : — " I confess I do not see why they should not do so.' A practical farmer, however, (who spends only his wet days in-doors,) would be very apt to suggest here, that the validity of this dictum must depend very much on the original constituents of the soil. Under the lee of the Coombe Hills, on the extreme southern edge of Berkshire, and not far removed from the great highway leading from Bath to London, lies the farmery where this restless, petulant, suffering, ear- nest, clear-sighted Tull put down the burden of life, a hundred and twenty years ago. The house is unfortu- nately largely modernized, but many of the out-build- ibgs remain unchanged ; and not a man thereabout, or in any other quarter, could tell me where the former occupant, who fought so bravely his fierce battle of the drill, lies buried. * It is to be remarked, however, that tl e Eev. Mr. Smith, (famei of Lois-Weedon,) by the distribution of his crop, avails himself virtu- ally of a clean fallow, every alternate year. t Tramactiom, V>".. XXX. p. 140. 202 WET DAYS. ManhuTry and Lancelot JBrotim. A BOUT the middle of the last century, there li' ed ■^-^ in the south of Leicestershire, in the parish of Church-Langton, an eccentric and benevolent clergy* man by the name of William Hanbury, who conceived the idea of establishing a great charity which was to be supported by a vast plantation of trees. To this end he imported a great variety of seeds and plants from the Continent and America, established a nursery of fifty acres in extent, and published "An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme to make it Conducive to the Glory of Gtod and the Advantage of Society." But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted neighbors, — among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty trees. And not content with this, they served twenty-seven difierent copies of writs upon him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he ^ves de> tailed account in his curious history of the " Charitable Foundations at Chiu-ch-Langton." He tells us that the ' venomous rage " of these old ladies (who died shortly after, worth a million of doUars) did not even spare his dogs ; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into thrtr entrails. HANBURY AND LANCELOT BROWN. 203 Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alivej which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. "Wade, a substan- tial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and piti- ful : — "I myself heard them," he says, " ten days after they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a dis- tance, inquired what dogs they were. 'Thei/ are some dogs that are lost, Sir,' said they ; ' thei/ have been lost some time.' I concluded only some poachers had been there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight had left their dogs behind them. In short, the howling and barking of these dogs was heard for near three weeks, when it ceased. Mr. "Wade's dogs were missing, but he could not suspect those dogs to be his ; and the noise ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about tliem soon also ceased. Some time after, a person, being amongst the bushes where the howling was heard, dis- covered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. "Wade's servant, told him he thought something had been buried there. ' Then' said the man, 'it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over.' He soon brought a spade, and upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest share of the hind parts, of the little one." The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughtei 204 WET DAYS. of innocents showed " a dying blaze of goodness " bj bequeathing twelve thousand poimds to charitable soci- eties ; and " thus ended," says Hanbury, " these two poor, unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentle- women.'' The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried dogs. I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity- plantation of CLurch-Langton is still thriving. About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week, he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly the Same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years ago. All over England the new man was sent for ; all over England he rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never contracted to execute his own designs, and — from lack of facility, perhaps — he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities " o^ a place, WILLIAM SHENSTONB. 206 and which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own. He was accused of sameness ; but the man who at one time held a thousand lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of contrasts without startling affectations. I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Ad- dison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little land- scapes of Gainsborough. William Shenstone. ENOUGH will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather, for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to speak of that sad, exceptional man, Wil- liam Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners, — and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lav- bhed on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a 206 WET DAYS. time when people were reading the " Elegy " of Graj the Homer of Pope, and the " Cato " of Addison. I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was a wretched farmer ; yet the Leas- owes was a capital grazing farm, when he took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Wor- cester and Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the plough-tail ; and his plaintivs elegy, that dates from an April day of 1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth : — "Again the laboring hind inverts the soil ; Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave; Another spring renews the soldier's toil, And finds jne vacant in tlie rural cave. " Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortimate in having Dr. Johnson for his biogra- pher.* It is hard to conceive of a man who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers, or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one • Mm. Piozzi says, " He [Dr. Johnson] hated to hear about pros- pects and views, and laying out ground, and taste in gardening ; — ' That was the best garden,' he said, ' which produced most roots and, fruits ; and that water was most to be prized which contained most fist. Walking in a wood when it rained was, I think, the only rural image which pleased his fancy. He loved the sight of fine forest- trees, however, an 1 detested Brighthelmstone Downs, ' because it was a country so truly desolate,' he said, ' that if one had a mind to hang one's self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it wouli b« diiiicnlt to find a tree on which to fasten the rone.' '' — Croker's Bot- vtU, Vol. U p. 209. WILLIAM SHENSrONE 207 side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapsestics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair- powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, witli ro- settes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the sky ! With what a " Faugh ! " the great gerund- grinder would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away ! And Shenstone, or rather his mem- ory, caught the besom of just such a sneer. But other critics were more kindly and appreciative ; among them, Dodsley the bookselling author, who wrote " The Economy of Human Life," * (the " Pro- verbial Philosophy " of its day,) and Whately, who gave to the public the most elegant and tasteful dis- cussion of artificial scenery that was perhaps ever written. Shenstone studied, as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a very con- siderable estate, which fortunately some relative ad- ministered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's death, it lapsed into the poefs improvident hands. Even then a sensible tenant of his own name, and a * Dodsley was also the author of a stiS and anreadable poem oa Agncultuie " 208 WET DAYS. distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of Leasowos ; but when Shenstone came to live with him, neither house nor grounds were large enough for the joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the tenant, who had his beeves to fatten and his rental to pay. So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account ; and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he made of it The good soul had none of Mr. TuU's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind bal lad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the " beasts " ordered away from their accustomed graz- ing -fields. A new thicket had been planted, which must not be disturbed ; the orchard was uprooted to give place to some parterre ; a fine bit of meadow was flowed with a miniature lake ; hedges were shorn away without mercy ; arbors, grottos, rustic seats. Arcadian temples, sprang up in all outlying nooks ; so that the annual product of the land came presently to be lim- ited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.* • Eepton is somewhat severe in his condemnation of Leasowes and of Shenstone's taste, not, that I can perceive, because he objects to errors of detaij, but because he ignores in toto the practicability oi nniting farm-culture "with any tasteful management of landscape. I bavtf no doubt that Leasowef was a wretchedly managed farm eco WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 209 I tbinh that the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. "With thi? ambition holding him and mastering him, what mat- tered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt ? If he had only an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his grottos, — this was his customer. He longed for such, in troops, — ' as a poet longs for readers, and as a far- mer longs for sun and rain. And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cul- tivated person in England, but, before tlie death of Shenstone, had heard of the rare beauty of his home of Leasowes. Lord Lyttelton, who lived near by, at the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests to see what miracles the hare-brained, sensitive poet had wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the com- pany of distinguished guests, — maddened, if they look at his alcove from the wrong direction, — wondering if that shout that comes booming to his sensitive ear means admiration, or only an unappreciative surprise, nomically speaking; yet I see no reason to forbid the conj unction, nnder proper hands, of a great deal of landscape-beauty m>\ a profit' ably conductei grazing-farm. 14 210 WET DAYS. — dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet dwells on the first public mention of his poem. In his "Egotisms," (well named,) he writes, — "Why re- pine ? I have seen mansions on the verge of "Wales that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court /tnd where they speak of a glazed window as a great ^epe of magnificence. All things figure by comparison." And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, was, I dare say, a sweet morsel to him. He saw very little of the world in his later years, save that part of it which at odd intervals found its way to the delights of Leasowes ; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet the world upon fair terms. " The generality of man- kind," he cynically says, "are seldom in good humor but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape or other." * Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land ; yet there are few cul- tivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the "Reader" book of the High School ! " I have fbnnd oat a gift for my feir; I have found where the wood-pigeons breed: Bnt let me that plander forbear; • Dtiached Thoughts nn Men and Wanntrs : Wm. Shenston*. WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 211 She wHl say 't was a baroarons deed. For he ne'er could be true, she averred, Who could rob a poor bird of its young: And I loved her the more, when I heard Such tenderness fall from her tongue." And what a killing look over at the girl in the comer, in check gingham, with blue bows in her hair, as I read (always on the old school-benches), — " I have heard her with sweetness unfold How tha* pity was due to — a dove: That it ever attended the bold; And she called it the sister of krve. But her words such a pleasure convey, So much I her accents adore Let her speak, and whatever she say, Methinks 1 should love her the more.** There is a rhythmic prettiness in this ; but it is the prettiness of a lover in his teens, and not the kind we look for from a man who stood five feet eleven in his stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely enough, Shenstone had the physique of a ploughman or a prize-fighter, and with it the fine, sensitive brain of a woman ; a Greek in his refinements, and a Greek in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the othei ■Olid than he ever did in this. SEVENTH DAT. John AlercromMe. T BEGIN my day with a canny Scot, who was born -■- in Edinburgh in 1726, near which city his father conducted a large market-garden. As a youth, aged nineteen, John Abercrombie (for it is of him I make companion this wet morning) saw the Battle of Preston Pans, at which the Highlanders pushed the King's-men in defeat to the very foot of his father's garden-walL Whether he shouldered a matchlock for the Castle-peo- ple and Sir John Cope, or merely looked over from the kale-beds at the victorious fighters for Prince Charley I cannot learn ; it is certain only that before CuUoden, and the final discomfiture of the Pretender, he avowed himself a good King's-man, and in many an after-year, over his pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle which surged wrathfully around his father's kale-garden by Preston Pans. But he did not stay long in Scotland ; he became gar- JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 213 dener for Sir James Douglas, into whose family (below- stairs) he eventually married ; afterwards he had expe- rience in the royal gardens at Kew, and in Leicestei Fields. Finally he became proprietor of a patch of ground in the neighborhood of London ; and his success here, added to his success in other service, gave him such reputation that he was one day waited upon (about the year 1770) by Mr. Davies, a London bookseller, who invited him to dine at an inn in Hackney ; and at the dinner he was introduced to a certain Oliver Goldsmith, an awkward man, who had published four years before a book called " The Vicar of Wakefield." Mr. Davies thought John Abercrombie was competent to write a good practical work on gardening, and the Hackney dinner was intended to warm the way toward such a book. Dinners are sometimes given with such ends even now. The shrewd Mr. Davies was a little doubtful of Aber- crombie's style, but not at all doubtful of the style of the author of " The Traveller.'' Dr. Goldsmith was not a man averse to a good meal, where he was to meet a straightforward, out-spoken Scotch gardener; and Mr. Davies, at a mellow stage of the dinner, brought forward his little plan, — which was that Abercrombie should prepare a treatise upon gardening, to be revised and put in shape by the author of " The Deserted Village." The dinner at Hackney was, I dare say, a good one ; the scheme looked promising to a man whose vegetable- 214 WET DAYS. carts streamed every morning into London, and to tha Doctor, mindful of his farm-retirement at the six-mile stone on the Edgeware Road ; so it was all arranged between them. But, like many a publisher's scheme, it miscarried. The Doctor perhaps saw a better bargain in the Lives of Bolingbroke and Pamell ; * or perhaps his appoint- ment as Professor of History to the Royal Academy put him too much upon his dignity. At any rate, the world has to regret a gardening-book in which the shrewd practical knowledge of Abercrombie would have been refined by the grace and the always alluring limpidity of the style of Goldsmith. I kiiow that the cultivators pretend to spurn graces of manner, and affect only a clumsy burden of language, under which, I am sorry to say, the best agriculturists have most commonly labored; but if the transparen* simplicity of Goldsmith had once been thoroughly in- fused with the practical knowledge of Abercrombie, what a book on gardening we should have had ! What a lush verdure of vegetables would have tempted us ! What a wealth of perfume would have 6xuded from the flowers ! But the scheme proved abortive. Goldsmith said, " I think our friend Abercrombie can write better about plants than I can." And so doubtless he could, so far aa • Pubbshed 1770-'71. .WBN ABERCROMBIE. 215 kno'wledge of their habits went. Eight ytars after, Aberorombie prepared a book called " Every Man his own Gardener " ; but so doubtful was he of his own reputation, that he paid twenty pounds to Mr. Thomas Mawe, the fashionable gardener of the Duke of Leeds, for the privilege of placing Mr. Mawe's name upon the title-page. I am sorry to record such a scurvy bit of hypocrisy in so competent a man. The book sold, how- ever, and sold so well, that, a few years after, the elegant Mr. Mawe begged a visit from the nursery-man of Tot- tenham Court, whom he had never seen ; so Aberorom- bie goes down to the seat of the Duke of Leeds, and finds his gardener so bedizened with powder, and wear- ing such a grand air, that he mistakes him for his Lord- ship ; but it is a mistake, we may readily believe, which the elegant Mr. Mawe forgives, and the two gardeners become capital friends. Abercrombie afterward published many works under his own name ; * among these was " The Gardener's Pocket Journal," which maintained an unflagging popu- larity as a standard book for a period of half a century. This hardy Scotchman lived to be eighty ; and when he could work no longer, he was constantly afoot among the botanical gardens about London. At the last it was a fall " down-stairs in the dark " that was the cause of death ; and fifteen days after, as his quaint biographers * Johnson enumerates fifteen. 216 WET DAYS. tell us, " he expired, just as the clock upon St. Paul't struck twelve, — between April and May": as If the ripe old gardener could not tell which of these twin gar- den - months he loved the best ; and so, with a foot planted in each, he made the leap into the realm of eter- nal spring. A noticeable fact in regard to this out-of-door old gentleman is, that he never took " doctors'-stuff" in his life, until the time of that fatal fall in the dark. He was, however, an inveterate tea-drinker ; and there was another aromatic herb (I write this with my pipe in my mouth) of which he was, up to the very last, a most ardent consumer. A Philosopher and Two Poets. "TN the year 1766 was published for the first time a -*- posthumous work by John Locke, the great philos- opher and the good Christian, entitled, " Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives," * — written, very likely, after his return from France, down in his pleasant Essex home, at the seat of Sir Francis Masham. Were the book by me, I should love to give the reader a sample of the manner in whicb ' Most of the bibliographers have omitted mention of this treatise It may be tbimd in the collected edition of Locke's vrorks, London 1823, Vol. X. A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS 217 the author of " An Essay ooneernmg Human Under- standing" wrote regarding horticultural matters. No one can doubt but there is wisdom in it '' I believe you think me," he writes in a private letter to a friend, "too proud to undertake anything wherein I should acquit myself but imworthily." This is a sort of pride — not very common in our day — which does not go before a fall. I name a poet next, — not because a great poet, for he was not, nor yet because he wrote "The English Gsrden," * for there is sweeter garden-perfume in many another poem of the day that does not pique our curi- osity by its title. But the Reverend "William Mason, if not among the foremost of poets, was a man of most kindly and liberal sympathies. He was a devoted Whig, at a time when Whiggism meant friendship for the American Colonists ; and the open expression of this friendship cost him his place as a Eoyal Chaplain. I will remember this longer than I remember his " English Garden," — longer than I remember his best couplet of verse : — " While throngh the west, where sinks the crimson day, Meek twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray." It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to say ill- * Of which the first book was published in 1772. This author ia to be distinguished from George Mason, who in 1763 published An Euaf on Design in Gardening 218 WET DAYS. natured things, (Horace Walpole among them,) that U the later years of his life he forgot his first love of Lib- eralism and became politically conservative. But it must be remembered that the good poet lived into the time when the glut and gore of the French Revolution made people hold their breath, and when every man who lifted a humane plaint against the incessant creak and crash of the guillotine was reckoned by all mad re- formers a conservative. I think, if I had lived in that day, I should have been a conservative, too, — however much the pretty and bloody Desmoulins might have made faces at me in the newspapers. I can find nothing iu Mason's didactic poem to quote. There are tasteful suggestions scattered through it, bet- ter every way than his poetry. The grounds of his vic- arage at Aston must have ofiered charming loitering- places. I will leave him idling there, — perhaps con- ning over some letter of his friend the poet Gray ; per- haps loun^ng in the very alcove where he had inscribed this omitted verse of the " Elegy," — " Here scattered oft, the loveliest of the year, By hands unseen, are showers of violets found; The redbreast loves to baild and warble here, And little footsteps lightly print ti.e ground." If, indeed, he had known how to strew such gems through his " English Garden," we should have had a poem that would have outshone " The Seasons." A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS. 210 And this mention reminds me, that, although I have slipped past his period, I have said no word as yet of the Roxburgh poet ; but he shall be neglected no longer. (The big book, my boy, upon the third shelf, with a worn back, labelled Thomson.) This poet is not upon the gardeners' or the agricul- tural lists. One can find no farm-method in him, — in- deed, little method of any sort ; there is no description of a garden carrying half the details that belong to Tasso's garden of Armida, or Rousseau's in the letter of St Preux.* And yet, as we read, how the coimtry, with its woods, its valleys, its hill-sides, its swains, its toil- ing cattle, comes swooping to our vision ! The leaves rustle, the birds warble, the rivers roar a song. The Sim beats on the plains; the winds carry waves into the grain ; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains. The minuteness and the accuracy of his observation are something wonderful ; if farmers should not study him, our young poets may. JSe never puts a song in the throat of a jay or a wood-dove ; he never makes a mother-bird break out in bravuras; he never puts a sickle into green grain, or a trout in a slimy brook ; he could picture no orchis growing on a hill-side, or colum- bine nodding in a meadow. If the leaves shimmer, you may be sure the sun is &hining; if a piimrose light- ens on the view, you may be sure there b some covert * Lettre XI. Liv. IV. NouoeUe ffeloise. 220 WET DAYS. which the primroses love ; and never by any license does a white flower come bliisliing into his poem. 1 will not quote, where so much depends upon the at- mosphere which the poet himself creates as he waves his enchanter's wand. Over all the type his sweet power compels a rural heaven to lie reflected ; I go from budding spring to blazing summer at the turning of a page ; on all the meadows below me (though it is March) I see ripe autumn brooding with golden wings ; and winter howls and screams in gusts, and tosses tern- pests of snow into my eyes — out of the book my boy has just now brought me. One verse, at least, I will cite, — so full it is of all pastoral feeling, so brimming over with the poef s pas- sion for the country : it is from " The Castle of Indo' lence": — " I care not, Fortnne, what you me deny: You cannot rob me of free Nature's grace; You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening fece* You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by Uring stream at eve : Let health my nerres and finer fibres brace, And 1 their toys to the great children leave; Of fiincy, rsoson, virtue, nought can me bereave." LORD KAMES. 2SJ IJord Karnes. ANOTHEll Scotchman, Lord Karnes (Htnry Homa by name,) who was Senior Lord of Sessions in Scotland about the year 1760, was best known in his own day for his discussion of " The Principles of Equi- ty " ; he is known to the literary world as the author of an elegant treatise upon the " Elements of Criticism " ; I beg leave to introduce him to my readers to-day as a sturdy, pracUcal farmer. The book, indeed, which serves for his card of introduction, is called " The Gen- tleman Farmer " ; * but we must not judge it by our experience of the class who wear that title nowadays. Lord ■ Kames recommends no waste of money, no ex- travagant architectm'e, no mere prettinesses. He talks of the plough in a way that assures us he has held it some day with his own hands. People are taught, he says, more by the eye than the ear ; show them good culture, and they will follow it As for what were called the principles of agriculture, he found them involved in obscurity ; he went to the book of Nature for instruction, and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting everything. He condemns the Roman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbos- • First published is 1766. 222 WET DATb. ity of Varro.* Nor is lie any more tolerant of Scotch superstitions. He declares against wasteful and care, less farming in a way .that reminds us of our good friend Judge , at the last county-show. He urges good ploughing as a primal necessity, and insists upon the use of the roller for rendering the sur- face of wheat-lands compact, and so retaining the moist- ure ; nor does he attempt to reconcile this declaration with the Tull theory of constant trituration. A great many excellent Scotch farmers still hold to the views of his Lordship, and believe in " keeping the sap " in fresh-tilled land by heavy rolling ; and so far as regards a wheat or rye crop upon light lands, I think the weight of opinion, as well as of the rollers, is with them. Lord Kames, writing before the time of draining- tile, dislikes open ditches, by reason of their interfer- ence with tillage, and does not trust the durability of brush or stone underdrains. He relies upon ridging, and the proper disposition of open furrows, in the old Greek way. Turnips he commends without stint, and the Tull system of their culture. Of clover he thinks as highly as the great English farmer, but does not be- lieve in his notion of economizing seed : " Idealists," he says, " talk of four pounds to the acre ; but when BOwn for cutting green, I would advise twenty -four * Citing, in confirmation, that passage commencing, — " Nunc dkaa mgri qitibut rebut colantar," etc. LORD KAMES. S'iS pounds." This amount will seem a little startling, I fancy, even to farmers of our day. He advises strongly the use of oxen in place of horses for all farm-labor ; they cost less, keep for less, and sell for more ; and he enters into arithmetical calcu- lations to establish his propositions. He instances Mr. Burke, who ploughs with four oxen at Beaconsfield. How drolly it sounds to hear the author of " Letters on a Kegicide Peace " cited as an authority in practical farming ! He still further urges his ox-working scheme, on grounds of public economy : it will cheapen food, forbid importation of oats, and reduce wages. Again, he recommends soiling,* by all the arguments which are used, and vainly used, with us. He shows the worth- lessness of manure dropped upon a parched field, com- pared with the same duly cared for in court or stable ; he proposes movable sheds for feeding, and enters into a computation of the weight of green clover which will be consumed in a day by horses, cows, or oxen : " a horse, ten Dutch stone daily ; an ox or cow, eight stone ; ten horses, ten oxen, and six cows, two hundred and wenty-eight stone per day," — involving constant cart Rge : still he is convinced of the profit of the method. His views on feeding ordinary store-cattle, or accus- toming them to change of food, are eminently prac- tical. After speaking of the desirableness of proirid- • Pp. 177-179, edition of 1802, Edinburgh. 224 WET DAYS. ing a good stock of vegetables, he continues, — " And yet, after all, how many indolent farmers remain, who for want of spring food are forced to turn their cattle But to grass before it is ready for pasture ! which not only starves the cattle, but lays the grass-roots open to be parched by sun and wind." Does not this sound as if I had clipped it from the " Country Gentleman " of last week ? And yet it was written nearly ninety years ago, by one of the most accomplished Scotch judges, and in his eightieth year, — another Varro, packing his luggage for his last voy- age. One great value of Lord Kames's talk lies in the particularity of his directions: he does not despise mention of those minutiae a neglect of which makes so many books of agricultural instruction utterly useless. Thus, in so small a matter as the sowing of clover- seed, he tells how the thumb and finger should be held, for its proper distribution ; in stacking, he directs how to bind the thatoh; he tells how mown grass should be raked, and how many hours spread;* and his directions for the making of clover-hay could .lot be improved upon this very summer. " Stir it not the day it is cut Turn it in the swath the forenoon of the next day; and in the afternoon put it up in small cocks. The third day put two cocks into one, enlarg • Pp. 166, 167. LORD KAMES. 225 Ing eveiy day the cocks till they are ready for thp tramp rick [temporary field-stack]." The reader wil! not fail to remark hov/ nearly this method agrees with the one cited in my First Day, from the treatise of Heresbach. A small portion of his book is given up to the dis- cussion of the theory of agriculture ; but he fairly warns his readers that he is wandering in the dark If all theorists were as honest ! He deplores the ig norance of TuU in asserting that plants feed on earth ; air and water alone, in his opinion, fui'nish the supply of plant-food. All plants feed alike, and on the same material ; degeneracy appearing only in those which are not native : white clover never deteriorates in Eng- land, nor bull-dogs. But I will not linger on his theories. He is repre- sented to have been a kind and humane man ; but this did not forbid a hearty relish (appearing often in his book) for any scheme which promised to cheapen labor. " The people on landed estates," he says, " are trusted by Providence to the owner's care, and the proprietor is accountable for the management of them to the Great God, who is the Creator of both." It does not seem to have occurred to the old gentleman that some day people might decline to be " managed." He gave the best proof of his practical tact, in the conduct of his estate of Blair-Drummond, — uniting u 226 WET DAYS. there all the graces of the best landscape-gardening with profitable returns. I take leave of him with a single excerpt from his admirable chapter on Gardening in the " Elements of Criticism " : — " Other fine arts may be perverted to excite irregular, and even vicious emotions; but gar- dening, which inspires the purest and most refined pleasures, cannot fail to promote every good aifection. The gayety and harmony of mind it produceth inclin- eth the spectator to communicate his satisfaction to others, and to make them happy as he is himself, and tends naturally to establish in him a habit of humanity and benevolence." It is humiliating to reflect that a thievish orator at one of our Agricultural Fairs might appropriate page after page out of the " Gentleman Farmer " of Lord Karnes, written in the middle of the last century, and the county-paper, and the aged directors, in clean shirt- collars and dress-coats, would be full of praises " of the enlightened views of our esteemed fellow-citizen." And yet at the very time when the critical Scotch judge was meditating his book, there was erected a land light-house, called Dunston Column, upon Lincoln Heath, to guide night travellers over a great waste of land that lay a half-day's ride south of Lincoln. And when Lady Robert Manners, who had a seat at Blox- holme, wished to visit Lincoln, a groom or two were CLARIDGE, MILLS, AND MILLER. 227 Bent out the morning before to explore a good path and families were not unfrequently lost for days * to- gether in crossing the heath. This same heath — made up of a light fawn-colored sand, lying on " dry, thirsty stone " — was, twenty years since at least, bloom- ing all over with rank, dark lines of turnips ; trim, low hedges skirted the level highways ; neat farm-cottages were flanked with great saddle-backed ricks; thou- sands upon thousands of long-woolled sheep cropped the luxuriant pasturage, and the Dunston column was but an idle moniuuent of a waste that existed no longer. Claridge, Hills, and Miller. ABOUT the time of Lord Kames's establishment at Blair-Drummond, or perhaps a little earlier, a certain Master Claridge published "The Country Calendar ; or, The Shepherd of Banbury's Rules to know of the Change of the Weather." It professed to be based upon forty years' experience, and is said to have met with great favor. I name it only be- cause it embodies these old couplets, which still lead a vagabond life up and down the pages of country- Almanacs : — • See Article of Philip Pusey, M. P., in Tramactioru of tie Boyai Rxw^, Vol. XIV. 228 WET DAYS. " If the grass gnyws in Janiveer, It grows the worst for't all the year." " The Welshman had rather see his dam oa the biet Than to see a fair Febraeer." " When April blows his horn. It '8 good both for hay and com." " A cold May and a windy Makes a fiill bam and a findy." " A swarm of bees in May Is worth a load of hay; But a swarm in July Is not worth a fly." "Will any couplets of Tennyson reap as 'arge a fame? About the same period, John Mills, a FeUow of the Royal Society, published a work of a totally different character, — being very methodic, very full, very clear. It was distributed through five volumes. He enforces the teachings of Evelyn and Duhamel, and is com- mendatory of the views of Tull. The Rotherhara plough is figured in his work, as well as thirteen of the natural grasses. He speaks of potatoes and turnips as established crops, and enlarges upon their impor- tance. He clings to the Yirgilian theory of small farms, and to the better theory of thorough tillage. In 1759 was issued the seventh edition of MiDer"! CLARIDGE, MILLS, AND MILLER. 22S * Gardener's Dictionary," * in which was fbr the first lime adopted (in English) the classical system of Lin- naeus. If I have not before alluded to Philip Miller, it is not because he is undeserviniy lie was a cor- respondent of the chiefs in science over the Continent of Europe, and united to his knowledge a rare practical skill. He was superintendent of the famous Chelsea Gardens of the Apothecaries Company. He lies buried in the Chelsea Church-yard, where the Fellows of the Linnaean and Horticultural Societies of London have erected a monument to his memory. Has the reader ever sailed up the Thames, beyond Westmin- ster ? And does he remember a little spot of garden- ground, walled in by dingy houses, that lies upon the right bank of the river near to Chelsea Hospital? If he can recall two gaunt, flat-topped cedars which sentinel the walk leading to the river -gate, he will have the spot in his mind, where, nearly two hundred years ago, and a full century before the Kew parterres were laid down, the Chelsea Garden of the Apothe- caries Company was established. It was in the open country then ; and even Philip Miller, in 1722, walked to his work between hedge - rows, where sparrows chirped in spring, and in winter the fieldfare chat- tered : but the town has swallowed it ; the city-smoko has starved it; even the marble image of Sir Hans • First published in 1724. 880 WET DAYS. Sloane in its centre is but the mummy of a stutua Yet ill the Physic Grarden there are trees struggling still which Philip Miller planted; and I can readily believe, that, when the old man, at seventy - eight, (through some quarrel with the Apothecaries,) took his last walk to the river-bank, he did it with a sink- ing at the heart which kept by him till he died. Thomas Wliately. I COME now to speak of Thomas Whately, to whom I have already alluded, and of whom, from the scantiness of all record of his life, it is possible to say only very little. He lived at Nonsuch Park, in Surrey, not many miles from London, on the road to Epsom. He was engaged in public affairs, being at one time secretary to the Earl of Suffolk, and also a member of Parliament But I enroll him in my wet-day service simply as the author of the most appreciative and most tasteful treatise upon landscape-gardening which has ever been written, — not excepting either Price or Repton. It is entitled, " Observata'ons on Modem Giardening,'' and was first published in 1770. It was the same year translated, into French by Latapie, and was to the Continental gardeners the first revelation of the graces which belonged to English cultivated landscape. In the course of the book he gives vivid THOMAS WHATELY. 2S\ descriptions of Blenheim, Hagley, Leasowes, Clare- mont, and several other well-known British places. He treats separately of Parks, "Water, Farms, Gar- dens, Ridings, etc., illustrating each with delicate and tender transcripts of natural scenes. Now he takes us to the cliffs of Matlock, and again to the farm-flats of Wobum. His criticisms upon the places reviewed are piquant, full of rare apprehension of the most delicate natural beauties, and based on principles which every man of taste must accept at sight. As you read him, he does not seem so much a theorizer or expounder as he does the simple interpreter of graces which had escaped your notice. His sugges- tions come upon you with such a momentum of truth- fulness, that you cannot stay to challenge them. There is no argumentation, and no occasion for it. On such a bluff he tells us wood should be planted, and we wonder that a hundred people had not said the same thing before ; on such a river-meadow the grassy level should lie open to the sun, and we wonder who could ever have doubted it. Nor is it in matters of taste alone, I think, that the best things we hear seem always to have a smack of oldness in them, — as if we remembered their virtue. " Capital ! " we say ; " but has n't it been said before ? " or, " Precisely ! I wonder I did n't do or say the same thing myself." Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any perfonn M2 WET DAYS. ance, you may be sure that it has befen directfed by ■ sound instinct. It is not a sort of criticism any one IS apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash gar- dening. Whately alludes to the analogy between landscape- painting and landscape-gardening : the true artists in either pursuit aim at the production of rich pictorial efiects, but their means are different. Does the painter seek to give steepness to a declivity? — then he may add to his shading a figure or two toiling up. The gardener, indeed, cannot plant a man there ; but a copse upon the summit will add to the apparent height, and he may indicate the difBculty of ascent by a hand-rail running along the path. The painter will extend his distance by the diminuendo of his moimtains, or of trees stretching toward the horizon : the gardener has, indeed, no handling of successive mountains, but he may increase apparent distance by leafy avenues leading toward the limit of vision ; he may even exaggerate the effect still further by so grad- uating the size of his trees as to make a counterfeit perspective. When I read such a book as this of Whately's, — so informed and leavened as it is by an elegant taste, — I am most painfully impressed by the shortcomings of very much which is called good landscape-garden- ing with us. As if serpentine walks, and glimpses of THOMAS WHATELY. 283 elaborated turf-ground, and dots of exotic evergreens in little circlets of spaded earth, compassed at all those, broad effects which a good designer should keep in mind ! "We are gorged with petit-mattre-vsm, and pretty littlenesses of all kinds. We have the daintiest of walks, and the rarest of shrubs, and the best of drain- age; but of those grand, bold effects which at once seize upon the imagination, and inspire it with new wor- ship of Nature, we have great lack. In private grounds we cannot of course command the opportunity which the long tenure under British privilege gives ; but the conservators of public parks have scope and verge ; let them look to it, that their resources be not wasted in the niceties of mere gardening, or in elaborate ar- chitectural devices. Banks of blossoming shrubs and tangled wild vines and labyrinthine walks will count for nothing in park - effect, when, fifty years hence, the scheme shall have ripened, and hoary pines pile along the ridges, and gaunt single trees spot here and there the glades, to invite the noontide wayfarer. A true artist should keep these ultimate effects always in his eye, — effects that may be greatly impaired, if not utterly sacrificed, by an injudicious multiplication of small and meretricious beauties, which in no way conspire to the grand and final poise of the scene. But I must not dwell upon so enticing a topic, or my wet day will run over into sunshine. One word 234 WET DAYS. more, however, I liave to say of the personality of the author who has suggested it. The reader of Sparks's Works and Life of Franklin may remember, that, in the fourth volume, under the head of " Hutch- inson's Letters," the Doctor details difficulties which he fell into in connection with " certain papers " he obtained indirectly from one of His Majesty's officials, and communicated to Thomas Gushing, Speaker of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts Bay. The difficulty involved others besides the Doctor, and a duel came of it between "William Whately and Mr. Temple. This William Whately was the brother of Thomas Whately, — the author in question, and the secretary to Lord Grenville,* in which capacity he died in 1772.t The " papers " alluded to were letters from Governor Hutchinson and others, expressing sympathy with the British Ministry in their efibrta to enforce a grievous Colonial taxation. It was cur- rently supposed that Mr. Thomas Wliately was the recipient of these letters ; and upon their being made public after his death, Wm. Whately, his brother and executor, conceived that Mr. Temple was the instru- ment of their transfer. Hence the duel. Dr. Frank- lin, however, by public letter, declared that this alle- gation was ill-founded, but would never reveal the * I find him named, in Dodsley's Armual XegUter for 1771, ' Ksepet «f His Blajealy's Private Roada." t Louden makes an enor in giving 1780 as the year of luf death. HORACE WALPOLE. 235 name of the party to whom he was iudebted. The Doctor lost his place of Postmaster -General for the Colonies, and was egregiously insulted by Wedder- bum in open Council ; but he could console himself with the friendship of such men as Lawyer Dunning, (one of the suspected authors of " Junius,") and with the eulogium of Lord Chatham. Horace Walpole. T I IHEBE are three more names belonging to this -•- period, which I shall bring under review, to finish up my day. These are Horace "Walpole, (Lord Or- ford,) Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith. Wal- pole was the proprietor of Strawberry Hill, and wrote upon gardening : Burke was the owner of a noble farm at Beaconsiield, which he managed with rare sagacity : Goldsmith could never claim land enough to dig a grave upon, until the day he was buried ; but he wrote the story of " The Vicar of Wakefield," and the sweet poem of " The Deserted Village." I take a huge pleasure in dipping from time to time into the books of Horace Walpole, and an almost equal pleasure in cherishing a hearty contempt for the man. With a certain native cleverness, and the tact of a showman, he paraded his resources, whether of garden, or villa, or memory, or ingenuity, so as to carry a larger 23 G WET DAYS. reputation for ability than he ever has deserved. His money, and the distinction of his father, gave hi.a an association with cultivated people, — artists, politicians, poets, — which the metal of his own mind would never have found by reason of its own gravitating power. He courted notoriety in a way that would have made him, if a poorer man, the toadying BosweU of some other Johnson giant, and, if very poor, the welcome buffoon of some gossiping journal, who would never weary of contortions, and who would brutify himself at the death, to kindle an admiring smile. He writes pleasantly about painters, and condescend- ingly of gardeners and gardening. Of the special beauties of Strawberry HiU he is himself historiog- rapher; elaborate copper plates, elegant paper, and a particularity that is ludicrous, set forth the charms of a villa which never supplied a single incentive to correct taste, or a single scene that has the embalm- ment of genius. He teUs us grandly how this room was hung with crimson, and that other with gold ; how "the tea-room was adorned with green paper and prints, .... on the hearth, a large green vase of German ware, with a spread eagle, and lizards for handles," — which vase (if the observation be not coxmted disloyal by sensitive gentlemen) must have been a very absurd bit of pottery. " On a shelf and brackets are two pot-pourris .of Nankin china; two HORACE WALPOLE. 237 pierced blue and white basous of old Delft ; and two sceaus [sic] of coloured Seve ; a biue and white vase and cover ; and two old Fayence bottles." When a man writes about his own furniture in this style for large type and quarto, we pity him more than if he had kept to such fantastic nightmares as the " Castle of Otranto." The Earl of Orford speaks in high terms of the literary abilities of the Earl of Bath: have any of my readers ever chanced to see any literary work of the Earl of Bath ? If not, I will supply the omission, in the shape of a ballad, " to the tune of a former song by George Bubb Doddington." It k entitled, " Strawberry Hill." " Some ray up Gunnersbury, For Sion some declare ; And some say that with Chisvick House No villa can compare. But ask the beaux of Middlesex, Who know the country well, If Strawb'ry Hill, if Strawb'ry Hill Don't bear away the bell? Since Denham sung of Cooper's, There 's scarce a hill around But what in song or ditty Is turned to fairy ground. Ah, peace be with their memories! 1 wish them wondrous well; But Strawb'ry Hill, but Strawb'fy HOI Must bear away the bell." 238 WET DAYS. It is no way surprising that a noble poet callable of writing such a ballad should have admired the villa of Horace Walpole : it is no way surprising that a propri- etor capable of admiring such a baUad should have printed his own glorification of Strawberry Hill. I am not insensible to the easy grace and the piq- uancy of his letters ; no man could ever pour more de- lightful twaddle into the ear of a great friend ; no man could more delight in doing it, if only the friend were really great I am aware that he was highly cultivated, — that he had observed widely at home and abroad, — that he was a welcome guest in distinguished circles ; but he never made or had a sterling friend ; and the news of the old man's death caused no severer shock than if one of his Fayence pipkins had broken. But what most irks me is the absurd dilettanteism and presiunption of the man. He writes a tale as if he were giving dignity to romance ; he applauds an artist as Dives might have thrown crumbs to Lazarus ; vain to the last degree of all that he wrote or said, he was yet too fine a gentleman to be called author ; if there had been a way of printing books, without recourse to the vulgar media of type and paper, — a way of which titled gentlemen could command the monopoly, — I think he would have written more. As I turn over the velvety pages of his works, and look at his catalogues, his Ion-mots, his drawings, his affectations of magnifi- EDMUND BURKE. 25J cence, I seem to see the fastidious old man shu£9ing with gouty step up and down, from drawing-room to li brary, — stopping here and there to admire some newly arrived bit of pottery, — pulling out his golden snuff- box, and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils, — then dusting his affluent shirt-frill with the tips of his dainty fingers, with an air of gratitude to Pro^ddenca for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Wal- pole, and of gratitude to Horace "Walpole for having created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill. Udmund Burke. I TURN from this ancient specimen of titled elegance to a consideration of Mr. Burke, with much the same relief with which I would go out from a perfumed drawing-room into the breezy air of a June morning. Lord Karnes has told us that Mr. Burke preferred oxen to horses for field-labor ; and we have Burke's letters to his bailiff, showing a nice attention to the economies of farming, and a complete mastery of its working de- tails. ' But more than anywhere else does his agricul- tural sagacity declare itself in his " Thoughts and De- tails on Scarcity." * Will the reader pardon me the transcript of a pas- sage or two ? " It is a perilous thing to try experiment! • Presented to Williain Pitt, 1796. 840 WET DAYS. on the farmer. The farmer's capital (except in a few persons, and m a very few places) is far more feeble than is commonly imagined. The trade is a very poor trade ; it is subject to great risks and losses. The capital, such as it is, is turned but once in the year ; in some branches it requires three years before the money is paid ; I believe never less than three in the turnip and grass-land course It is very rare that the most prosperous farmer, counting the value of his quick and dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, together with his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does make twelve or fifteen per centum by the year on his* capital.- In most parts of England which have fallen within my observation, I have rarely known a farmer wno to his own trade has not added some other employ- ment or traffic, that, after a course of the most unre- mitting parsimony and labor, and persevering in his business for a long course of years, died worth more than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in nearly the same equal conflict between industry and want in which the last predecessor, and a long line of predecessors before him, lived and died." In confirmation of this last statement, I may mendon that Samuel Ireland, writing in 1792, (" Picturesque Views on the River Thames,") speaks of a farmer named Wapshote, near Cheitsey, whose ancestors had resided on the place ever since the time of Alfred the Great ; EDMUND BURKE. 241 and amid all the chances and changes of centuries, not one of the descendants had either bettered or marred his fortunes. The truthfulness of the story is confirmed in a number of the " Monthly Review " for the same year. Mr. Burke commends the excellent and most useful works of his " friend Arthur Young," (of whom I shall have somewhat to say another time,) but regrets that he should intimate the largeness of a farmer's profits. He discusses the drill-culture, (for wheat,) which, he says, is well, provided " the soil is not excessively heavy, or encumbered with large, loose stones,* and provided the most vigilant superintendence, the most prompt activity, which has no such day as to-morrow in its calendar, com- bine to speed the plough ; in this case I admit," he says, "its superiority over the old and general methods." And again he says, — " It requires ten times more of labor, of vigilance, of attention, of skill, and, let me add, of good fortune also, to carry on the business of a fanner with success, than what belongs to any other trade." May not a farmer take a little pride b such testi- mony as this ? One of his biographers tells us, that, in his later years, the neighbors saw him on one occasion, at his home • At that day, horse-hoeing, at reRuIar uiten-als, wiis understood t* fonn part of what was counted drill-culture. 16 J*2 WET DAYS of Beaconsficld, leaning upon the shoulder of a favorite old horse, (which had the privilege of the lawn,) and sobbing. Whereupon the gossiping villagers reported the great man crazed. Ay, crazed, — broken by the memory of his only and lost sou Richard, with whom this aged saddle-horse had been a special favorite, — crazed, no doubt, at thought of the strong young hand whose touch the old beast waited for in vain, — crazed and broken, — an oak, ruined and blasted by storms. The great mind in this man was married to a great heart Croldsmith. r\0 I not name a fitting companion for a wet dav ■^-^ in the country, when I name Oliver Goldsmith ? Yet he can tell me nothing about farming, or about crops. He knew nothing of them and cared nothing for them. He would have made the worst farmer in the world. A farmer should be prudent aijd fore- sighted, whereas poor Groldsmith was always as improv- ident as a boy. A farmer should be industrious and methodical : Groldsmith had no conception of either industry or method. A farmer should be willing to be taught every day of his life, and Goldsmith was willing to be taught nothing. He had no more knowledge of gardening and of its proper appliances, than be had of economy I have GOLDSMITB. 248 no doubt that the grafting of a cherry-tiee would have been as abstruse a problem for him as the balancing of his account-book. Nay, if we may believe his own story, he had very little eye for the picturesque. He was delighted with the flat land and canals of Holland and reckoned them far prettier than the hills and rockf of Scotland. Writing to an early friend of the coun- try about Leyden, he says, "Nothing can equal its beauty. Wherever I turn my eyes, fine houses, ele- gant gardens, statues, grottos, vistas, present them- selves ; but when you enter their towns, you are charmed beyond description In Scotland hills and rocks intercept every prospect; here, 'tis all a continued plain. The Scotch may be compared to a tulip planted in dung; but I never see a Dutch- man in his own house, but I think of a magnifi- cent Egyptian temple dedicated to an ox." I have no doubt that this indifference to the picturesque as- pects of Nature was as honest as his debts. And yet, foi all this, and though circled about by rural scenes, I do still keep his " Essays " or his " Vicar " in my hand, or in my thought most lovingly. He carried with him out of Kilkenny West the heart of an Irish country-lad, and the odor of the meadows of West- meath never wholly left his thought The world is accustomed to regard his little novelj which Dr. Johnson bargained away for sixty guintaSi 244 WET DAYS. as a rural tale : it is sb quiet ; it is 30 simple ; its at mosphere is altogether so redolent of the country And yet all, save some few critical readers, will be surprised to learn that there is not a picture of natural scenery in the book of any length; and wherever an allusion of the kind appears, it does not bear the im- press of a mind familiar with the country, and prac- tically at home there. The Doctor used to go out upon the Edgeware road, — not for his love of trees, but to escape noise and duns. Yet we overlook liter- alness, charmed as we are by the development of his characters and by the sweet burden of his story. The statement may seem extraordinary, but I could tran- scribe every rural, out-of-door scene in the " Vicar of "Wakefield " upon a single half-page of foolscap. Of the first home of the Vicar we have only this account : — " We had an elegant house, situated in a fine coun- try and a good neighborhood." Of his second home there is this more full description : — " Our little habi- tation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and a prattling river before : on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My fkrm Consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given a hundred pounds for my predeces- sor's good-will. Nothing could exceed the neatness of ray little enclosures : the elms and hedge-rows appear ing with inexpressible beauty. My house consisted of GOLDSMITH. 245 but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness." It is quite certain that an author familiar with the country, and with a memory stocked with a multitude of kindred scenes, would have given a more determinate outline to this picture. But whether he would have given to his definite outline the fascination that belongs to the vagueness of Goldsmith, is wholly another question. Again, in the sixth chapter, Mr. Burchell is called upon to assist the Vicar and his family in " saving an after-growth of hay." " Our labors," he says, " went on lightly ; we turned the swath to the wind." It is plain that Goldsmith never saved much hay; turning the swath to the wind may be a good way of making it, but it is a slow way of gathering it. In the eighth chap- ter of this charming story, the Doctor says, — " Our family dined in the field, and we sat, or rather reclined, round a temperate repast, our cloth spread upon the hay. To heighten our satisfaction, the blackbirds answered each other from opposite hedges, the familiar redbreast came and pecked the crumbs from our hands, and every sound seemed but the echo of tranquillity." This is very fascinating ; but it is the veriest romanticism of country-life. Such sensible girls as Olivia and Sophia would, I am quite sure, never have spread the dinner cloth upon hay, which would most certainly have set all the gravy aflow, if the platters had not been fairly over 246 B ET DA YS. turned ; and as for the redbreasts, (with that rollicking boy Moses in my mind,) I think they must have been terribly tame birds. But this is only a farmer's criticism, — a Crispin feel- ing the bunions on some Phidian statue. And do I think the less of Goldsmith, because he wantoned with the literalism of the country, and laid on his prismatic colors of romance where only white light lay ? Not one whit It only shows how Genius may discard utter faithfulness to detail, if only its song is charged with a general simplicity and truthfulness that fill our ears uid our hearts. As for Goldsmith's verse, who does not love it? Who does not find tender reminders of the countiy in it? " Sweet was the sound, when oft, at evening's close. Up yonder hill the village murmur rose: There, as I passed with careless steps and slow. The mingled notes came softened from below; The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung, The sober herd that lowed to meet their young; The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool, The playful children just let loose from school; The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind, And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind; — These all in sweet confusion sought the shade, And filled each pause the nightingale had made." And yet the nightingale is a myth to us ; the milkmaid'i song comes all the way from a century back in Ireland GOLDSMITH. 247 neither one nor the other charms oui ear, listen faith fully as we may ; but there is a subtile rural aroma per- vading the lines I have quoted, which calls at every couplet a responsive memory, — which girls welcome at they welcome fresh flowers, — which boys welcome ijs they welcome childish romp, — which charms middle age away from its fierce wrestle with anxieties, and laps it in some sweet Elysium of the past. Not all the arts of all the modernists, — not " Maud," with its garden- song, — not the caged birds of Killingworth, singing up and down the village-street, — not the heather-bells out of which the springy step of Jean Ingelow crushes perfimie, — shall make me forget the old, sweet, even flow of the "Deserted Village." Down with it, my boy ! — (from the third shelf). G-o-L-D-s-M-i-T-H — a worker in gold — is on the back. And I sit reading it to myself, as a fog comes welter- ing in from the sea, covering all the landscape, save some half-dozen of the city-spires, which peer abore the drift like beacons. EiaHTH DAT. Arthur Young. TN these notes upon the Farm-Writers and the Pas- -*- torals, I have endeavored to keep a certain chron» logic order ; and upon this wet morning I find myself embayed among those old gentlemen who lived in the latter part of the eighteenth century. George IIL is tottering under his load of royalty ; the French Revo- lution is all asmoke. Fox and Sheridan and Burke and the younger Pitt are launching speeches at this Gallic tempest of blood, — each in his own way. Our American struggle for liberty has been fought bravely out; and the master of it has retired to his estates upon the Potomac. There, in his house at Mount Ver- non, he receives one day a copy of the early volumes of Young's "Annals of Agriculture," with the author's compliments, and the proffer of his services to execute orders for seeds, implements, cattle, or " anything else that might contribute to the General's rural amuse' ments.'' ARTHUR YOUNG. 249 The General, in his good old-fashioned way, returns the compliments with interest, and says, " I will give you the trouble. Sir, of providing and sending to the care of Wakelin Welch, of London, merchant, the fol- lowing articles : — " Two of the simplest and best-constructed plouglis for land which is neither very heavy nor sandy ; to be drawn by two horses; to have spare shares and coulters ; and a mould, on which to form new irons, when the old ones are worn out, or will require repair- ing. I will take the liberty to observe, that, some years ago, from a description or a recommendation thereof which I had somewhere met with, I sent to England for what was theft called the Rotherham or patent plough ; and, till it began to wear and was ruined by a bungling country-smith, that no plough could have done better work, or appeared to have gone easier with two horses ; but, for want of a mould, which I neglected to order with the plough, it became useless after the irons which came with it were much worn. " A little of the best kind of cabbage seed for field- culture. " Twenty pounds of the best turnip seed. " Ten bushels of sainfoin seed. " Eight bushels of the winter vetches. " Two bushels of rye-grass seed. " Fifty pounds of hop-clover seed." 230 W£T DAYS Tlie curious reader may be interested to know I ha this shipment of goods, somewhat injured by stowags in' the hold of the vessel, reached Mount Vernon just one week after "Washington had left it to preside over the sittings of the Constitutional Convention. And amidst all the eagerness of those debates under which the ark of our nationality was being hammered into shape, this great man of system did not omit to send to his farm-manager the most minute directions in respect to the disposition of the newly arrived seeds. Of those directions, and of the farm-method at the home of "Washington, I may possibly have something to say at another time: I have named the circumstance only to show that Arthur Young had a world-wide rep- utation as an agriculturist at this day, (1786-7,) al- though he lived for more than thirty years beyond it. Arthur Young was bom at a little village near to Bury St. Edmund's, (evermore famous as the scene of Pickwickian adventure,) in the year 1741. He had his schooling like other boys, and was for a time in a counting-room at Lynn, w'lere he plunged into litera- ture at iie unfledged age of seventeen, by writing a tract on the American-French war ; and this he followed ap with several novels, among which was one entitled " The Fair American." * I greatly fear that the book • By an odd coincidence, I observe that Washington made coc at bis first shipments of tqbacco (after his n;arriage irith Mrs. Cnfitia^ ARTHUR YOUNG. 261 iras not even* with the title: it has certainly slipped away from the knowledge of all the bibliographers. At twenty-two he undertook the management of the farm upon which his mother was living, and of which the lease was about expiring : here, by his own account, he spent a great deal more than he ever reaped. A little later, having come to the dignity of a married man, he leased a farm in Essex, (Samford Hall,) consisting of some three hundred acres. This, however, he aban- doned in despair very shortly, — giving a brother-farmer a hundred pounds to take it off his hands. Thereupon he advertises for another venture, gallops through all the South of England to examine those offered to his notice, and ends with renting a hundred-acre farm in Hertfordshire, which proved of "a hungry vitriolic gravel," where, he says, "for nine years, I occupied the jaws of a wolf." Meantime, however, his pen has not been idle ; for, previous to 1773, he had written and published no less than sixteen octavo volumes relating mostly to agricul- tural subjects, besides two ponderous quartos filled with tabular details of " Experiments on the Cultivation of all Sorts of Grain and Pulse, both in the Old and New Methods." This last was the most pretentious of his books, the iqjon e, vessel called " The Fair American." Did the ship ]k vuhlj give a name to the novel, or the novel a name to the ship? 252 WET LAYS. result of most painstaking labor, and by fkr the most useless and uninteresting ; it passed long ago into the waste-paper shops of London. A very full synopsis of it, however, may be found in four or five consecutive numbers of the old " Monthly Review " for 1771. The great fault of the book is, (and it is the fault of a good many books,) it does not prove what the author wants to prove. He had hoped by a long - continued course of minute experiments (and those detailed in his book count a thousand, and extend over a period of five years) to lay down an exact law of procedure for the guidance of his brother-farmers. But the brother- farmers did not weary themselves over his tables ; or if they did, they found themselves as much muddled as the experimenter himself. A good rule for dry weather was a bad one for wet ; and what might be advisable for Sufiblk would be wrong in Herts. Upon one occa- sion, where he shows a loss of nearly three pounds to the acre on drilled wheat, against a loss of two shilling^ fourpence on broadcast-sowing, he observes, — "Rea- son is so often mistaken in matters of husbandry, that it is never fully to be trusted, even in deducing conse- quences evident from experiment itself." By which we may safely conclude that the experiment disappointed his expectations. It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Young was quite youthful and inexperienced at the time of conducting these trials, and that he pos- ARTHUR YOUNG. 8SJ Bessed uoiie of that scientific accuracy wliich character- izes the analysis of farm-experiments at Gotliamstead or at Bechelbron. He says, with a diverting sincerity that he was never " absent more than a single week at a time from the field of his observations without leaving afifairs in charge of a trusty bailiff." He was too full of a constitutional unrest, and too much wedded to a habit of wide and rapid generalization, to acquit hunself well in the task of laborious and minute observation. His " Tours " through the English counties, and his " Letters to Farmers," were of great service, and were widely read. His "Farmer's Calendar" became a Standard work. He entertained at one time the project of emigrating to America; but, abandoning this, he enlisted as Parliamentary reporter for the " Morning Post," — walking seventeen miles to his country-home every Saturday evening, and returning afoot every Monday morning. His energy and industry were im- mense ; his information upon all subjects connected with agriculture, whether British or Continental, entirely unmatched. The Empress of Russia sent three lads to him to be taught the arts of husbandry, — at which, I venture, his plodding neighbors who " made the ends meet " laughed incontinently. He had also pupils from Fiance, America, Italy, Poland, Sicily, and Portugal. In 1784 he commenced the publication of his famous " Arnals of Agriculture,'' which grew to the enom lus 254 WET DAYS. mass of forty-five volumes, and in the com-se of whick dukes and princes and kings 'and republican generals were his correspondents. At the formation of the Board of Agriculture, he was named Secretary, with a salary and duties that kept him mostly in London' where he died at an advanced age in 1820. It is a somewhat remarkable fact, that a man so dis- tinguished in agriculture, so full of information, so ear- nest in advocacy of improved methods of culture, so doggedly industrious, should yet never have undertaken farming on his own account save at a loss. I attribute this very much to his zeal for experiments. If he could establish, or controvert, some popular theory by the loss of his crop, he counted it no loss, but a gain to hus- bandry. Such men are benefactors; such men need salaries ; and if any such are afloat with us, unprovided for, I beg to recommend them for clerkships in the Agricultural Bureau at Washington ; and if the Com- missioner shall hit upon one Arthur Young among the score of his proteges, the country will be better repaid than it usually is. Ellis avi BaJcewell. fTlHE « Practical Farmer," and other books of "WH. ■*- liam Ellis, Hertfordshire, were in considerable vogue in the days of Young, and received a little faint ELLIS AND BAKE WELL. 256 prdse from him, while he says that through half his works he is " a mere old woman." I notice that Ellis recommends strongly the plough ing-in of buckwheat,* — a practice which Washington followed extensively at Mount Vernon. He tells us tliat a cow is reckoned in his day to pay a clear profit of four pounds a year (for butter and cheese) ; but he adds, " Certain it is that no one knows what a cow wil. pay, unless she has her constant bellyful of requisite meat" And his talk about cider has such a relishy smack of a " mere old woman " that I venture to quote it " I have drank," he says, " such Pippin Cyder, as I never met with anywhere, but at Ivinghoe, just under our Chiltem HiUs, where their Soil is partly a chalky Loam : It was made by its Owner, a Farmer, and on my Recommendation our Minister went with me to prove it, and gave it his Approbation. This was made from the Holland Pippin: And of such a wholesome Nature is the Pippin of any Sort above all others, that I remember there is a Relation of its wonderful influ- ences, I think it was in Germany : A Mother and two or three of her Sons having a Trial at Law, were asked what they eat and drank to obtain such an Age, which was four or five hundred years that they all made up amongst them ; they answered, chiefly by eating the • Practical Farmer, hj William Ellis. London, 1769. 256 WET DAYS. Apple, and drinking its Juice. And I kneir an emi nent, rich Lawyer, almost eighty Years old, who waj very much debUitated through a tedious Sickness, on the telling him this Story, got Pippins directly, sliced them to the number of a dozen at a Time, and infused them in Spring-Water, and made it his common Drink, till Cyder -Time came on; also he fell on planting a number of Pippin-Trees in order to his enjoying their salubrious Quality, and a fine Plantation there is at this Day in his Grardens a few miles from me. This Practice of his drinking the Pippin Liquor and Cyder, answered extraordinary well, for he lived several Years after, in a pretty good State of Health." The next name I come upon, in this rainy-day ser- vice, starts a pleasant picture to my mind, — not offset by a British landscape, but by one of our own New England hills. A group of heavy, overgrown chestnuts stand stragglingly upon a steep ascent of pasture ; they are flanked by a wide reach of velvety turf covering the same swift slope of hill ; gray boulders of granite, scattered here and there, show gleaming spangles of mica ; clmnps of pokeweed lift sturdily a massive luxu- riance of stems and a great growth of purple berries ; occasional stimips arc cushioned over with mosses, green and gray ; and, winding among stumps and rocks, there comes trending down the green hill-side a comely flock of great, long-woolled sheep : they nibble at slraj ELUS AND BAKE WELL. 257 clover-blossoms ; they lift their heads and look, "I*" gardener and half butler — introduced me to the 260 WET DAYS. rooms where C!owper had passed so many a dreaiy hour and where he had been cheered by the blithe companj of Cousin Lady Hesketh. My usher remembered the crazy recluse, and, when we had descended to the garden, told me how much he, with other village - boys, stood in awe of him, — and how the poet used to walk up and down the garden- alleys in dressing-gown and white-tasselled cotton cap, muttering to himself; but what mutterings some of them were! " Thy silver locks, once auburn bright, Are still more lovely in my sight Tlian golden beams of orient light, My Maiyt " For could I view nor them nor thee, What sight worth seeing could I see ? The sun would rise in vain for me, My Mary 1 " Partakers of thy sad decline. Thy hands their little force resign, Yet, gently pressed, press gently mine. My Mary!" Afterward the shuffling old usher turns a key io a green gate, and shows me into the "Wilderness." Here I come presently upon the Temple, — sadly shat- tered, — and upon the urns with their mouldy inscrip- tions ; I wander through the stately avenue of lindeni WILLIAM COWPER. 261 to tlie Alcove, and, so true are the poet's descriptions, I recognize at once the seat of the Throclanortons, the " Peasant's Nest," the " Eustic Bridge," and far away a glimpse of the spire of Olney. Plainly as I see to-day the farm-flat of Edgewood smoking under the spring rains below me, I see again the fat meadows that lie along the sluggish Ouse reek- ing with the heats of July. And I bethink me of the bewildered, sensitive poet, shrinking from the world, loving Nature so dearly, loving friends like a child, lov- ing God with reverence, and yet with a great fear that is quickened by the harsh hammering of John Newton's iron Calvinism into a wild turbulence of terror. From this he seeks escape in the walks of the " Wndemess,'' and paces moodily up and down from temple to alcove, — in every shady recess still haunted by " a fearful looking-for of judgment," and from every sunny bit of turf clutching fancies by eager handful, to strew over his sweet poem of the " Task." A sweet poem, I repeat, though not a finished or a grand one ; but there is in it such zealous, earnest over- flow of country-love that we farmers must needs wel- coiiie it with open hearts. I should not like such a man as Cowper for a tenant, where any bargains were to be made, or any lambs to be killed ; nor do I think that the mere memory of his verse would have put me upon that July walk from 262 WET DAYS. Newport to Weston; but his letters and his sad life, throughout which trees and flowers were made almost his only confidants, led me to the scene where that strange marriage with Nature was solemnized. And though the day was babny, and the sun fairly golden, the garden and the alley and the trees and the wilder- ness were like a widow in her weeds. CHlbert White. /GILBERT "WHITE, of Selborne, belongs to this ^^ epoch ; and no lover of the country or of country- things can pass him by without cordial recognition and genial praise. There is not so much of incident or of adventure in his little book as would suffice to pepper the romances of one issue of a weekly paper in our day. The literary mechanicians would find in him no artful contrivance of parts and no rhetorical jangle of lan- guage. It is only good Parson White, who, wandering about the fields and the brook-sides of Selborne, scruti- nizes with rare clearness and patience a thousand mir- acles of God's providence, in trees, in flowers, in stones, in birds, — and jots down the story of his scrutiny with such simplicity, such reverent trust in His power and goodness, such loving fondness for almost every created thing, that the reading of it charms like Walton's storj of the fishes. GILBERT WHITE. 268 We Americans, indeed, do not altogether recognize his chaffinches and his titlarlcs ; his daws and his fern> owl are strange to us ; and his robin-redbreast, though undoubtedly the same which in our nursery-days flitted around the dead " Children in the "Wood," (while tears stood in our eyes,) and " painfully Did cover them witli leaves," is by no means our American redbreast For one, I wish it were otherwise ; I wish with all my heart that I could identify the old, pitying, feathered mourners in the British wood with the joyous, rollicking singer who perches every sunrise, through all the spring, upon the thatch of the bee - house, within stone's - throw of my window, and stirs the dewy air with his loud bravura. Notwithstanding, however, the dissimilarity of species, the studies of this old naturalist are directed with a nice particularity, and are colored with an unajfTected home- liness, which are very charming ; and I never hear the first whisk of a swallow's wing in summer but I feel an inclination to take down the booklet of the good old Parson, drop into my library-chair, and follow up at my leisure all the gyrations and flutterings and incuba^ tions of all the hirundines of Selbome. Every countty- liver should own the book, and be taught from it— • nicety of observation. 2S4 WET DA YS. T^rualer and Farm-ProJUs. THERE was another clergyman of a different stam{^ — the Reverend John Trusler of Cobhani, Surrey, — who wrote about this time a book on chronology, a few romances, a book on law, and another upon farming. He commenced public life as an apothecary ; from his drug-shop he went to the pulpit, thence to book-selling, and finally to book-making. I am inclined to think that he found the first of these two trades the more profita- ble one : it generally is. Mr. Trusler introduces his agricultural work by de- claring that it " contains all the knowledge necessary in the plain business of farming, unincumbered with theory, speculation, or experimental inquiry"; — by which it will be seen that the modesty of the author was largely overborne by the enterprise of the book- seller. The sole value of his treatise lies in certain statis- tical details with regard to the cost and profits of differ- ent crops, prices of food, rates of wages, etc. By his showing, the profit of an acre of wheat in 1780 was £2 10«. ; of barley, £3 3s. 6d. ; of buckwheat, £2 19«. ; and a farm of one hundred and fifty acres, judiciously man" aged, would leave a profit of £379. These estimates of farm-profits, however, at all timesy are very deceptive. A man can write up his own bal- ance - sheet, but he cannot make up his neighbor's TRUSLER AND FARM-PROFITS. 265 There will be too many screws — or pigs — loose, which he cannot take into the reckoning. The agricultural journals give us from time to time the most alluring " cash-accounts " of farm-revenue, which make me re- gard, for a month or two thereafter, every sober-sided farmer I meet as a Rasselas, — " choring " and " team- ing it " in a Happy Valley ; but shortly I come upon some retired citizen, turned farmer, and active member of a Horticultural Society, slipping about the doors of some " Produce and Commission Store " for his winter's stock of vegetables, butter, and fruits, — and the fact impresses me doubtfully and painfully. It is not often, unfortunately, that printed farm-accounts — most of all, model-farm-accounts — will bear close scrutiny. Some- times there is delicate reservation of any charge for personal labor or superintendence ; sometimes an equally cheerful reticence in respect to any interest upon capi- tal ; and in nearly all of them such miniature expression of the cost of labor as gives a very shaky consistency to the exhibit. Farmers, I am aware, are not much given to figures ; but outside " averagers " are ; and agricultural writers, if they indulge in figures, ought to show some decent respect for the proprieties of arithmetic. I have before me now the " Bi-Monthly Report of the United States Agricultural Department for January and February, 1864," in the course of which it is gravely asserted, 2C6 WET DATS that, in the event of a certain suggested tax on tobacco, " the tobacco-grower would find at the end of the yeai two hundred and ten per cent, of his crops unsold." Now I am not familiar with the tobacco-crop, and still less familiar with the Washington schemes of taxation ; bui whatever may be the exigencies of the former, and whatever may be the enormities of the latter, I find myself utterly unable to measure, even proximately, the misfortune of a tobacco-grower who should find himself stranded with two hundred and ten per cent, of his crop, after his sales were closed ! It is plainly a case involv- ing a pretty large quid pro quo, if it be not a clear one of mid quid. Sinclair and Others. SIR JOHN SINCLAIR, so honorably known in connection with British agriculture, dealt with an estate in Scotland of a hundred thousand acres. He parcelled this out in manageable farms, advanced money to needy tenants, and by his liberality and en- terprise gave enormous increase to his rental. He also organized the first valid system for obtaining agricul- tural stiitistics through the clergymen of the different parishes in Scotland, thus bringing together a vast ainoimt of valuable information, wliich was gi-'en to the public at intervals between 1790 and 1798. And SINCLAIR AND OTHERS. 267 I notice with interest that the poet Bun £ was a con- tributor to one of these volumes,* over the signature of " A Peasant," in which he gives account of a farm- ers' library established in his neighborhood, and adds, in closing, — "A peasant who can read and enjoy such books is certainly a much superior being to his neigh- bor, who, perhaps, stalks beside his team, very little re- moved, except in shape, from the brutes he di'ives." There is reason to believe that Sir John Sinclair, at one time, — in the heat of the French Revolution, — projected emigration to America ; and I find in one of Washington's letters t to him the following allusion to the scheme : — "To have such a tenant as Sir John Sinclair (however desirable it might be) is an honor I dare not hope for ; and to alienate any part of the fee- simple estate of Mount Vernon is a measure I am not inclined to." Another British cultivator of this period, whose nanle is associated with the Mount Vernon estate, was Rich- ard Parkinson of Doncaster, who wrote " The Ex- perienced Farmer," and who not only proposed at one time to manage one of the Washington farms, but did actually sail for America, occupied a place called Orange-Hill, near Baltimore, for a year or more, trav- elled thi jugh the country, making what sale he could * Third volume SiatiUics, p. 598. t Dated December, 1796. Sparks's Life and Lette-i, Vol. XII. p 268 WET DAYS. of Ms " Experienced Faimer," and, on his return to England, published " A Torn- in America," which is to be met with here and there upon the top-shelves of old libraries, and which is not calculated to encourage immigration. He sets out by saying, — " The great advantages held out by different authors, and men travelling from America with commission to sell land, have deluded persons of all denominations with an idea of becoming land-pwners and independent. They have, however, been most lamentably disappointed, — particularly the farmers, and all those that have purchased land ; for, notwithstanding the low price at which the American lands are sold, the property of the soil is such as to make it not to pay for labor ; therefore the greater part have brought themselves and their families to total ruin.'' He is distressed, too, by the independence of the la- borers, — being " often forced to rise in the morning to milk the cows, when the servants were in bed." Among other animals which he took with him, he mentions " two race-horses, ten blood mares, a bull and cow of the North Devon, a bull and cow of the no- homed York, a cow (with two calves and in calf again) of the Holdemess, five boar- and seven sow-pigs of four different kinds." On arriving at Norfolk, Vir^ia, in November, he inquired for hay, and " was informed that Americaa SINCLAIR AND OTHERS. 269 caittle subsisted on blades and slops, and that no hay was to be had." He found, also, that " American cows eat horse-dung as naturally as an English cow eats hay ; and as America grows no grass, the street is the cheap- est place to keep them in." Tliis would make an ad- mirable item for the scientiiic column of the London " Athenaeum." Again he says, with a delightful point- edness of manner, — " No transaction in America re- flects any discredit on a man, unless he loses money by it^ . . . . I remember an Englishman, after repeating all the things that could fill a stranger's mind with trouble and horror, said, with a very heavy sigh, as he was going out of the house, ' It is the Devil's own country, to be sure ! ' " The " Times " newspaper never said a prettier word than that ! Mr. Robert Brown W3s a worthier man, and, I sus- pect, a better farmer ; he was one of the earlier types of those East-Lothian men who made their neighbor- hood the garden of Scotland. He was also the author of a book on " Rural Aifairs," the editor for fifteen years of the well-known " Edinburgh Farmers' Mag- azine," and (if I am not mistaken) communicated the very valuable article on " Agriculture " to the old " En- cyclopaedia Britannica." At this period, too, I find an Earl of Dundonald (Archibald Cochrane) writing upon the relations of X70 WET DAYS. chemistry to agriculture, — and a little later KicLard Kirwan, F. R. S., indulging in vagaries upon the same broad, and still unsettled, subject. Joseph Cradock, a quiet, cultivated gentleman, who had been on terms of familiarity with Johnson, Gar- rick, and Goldsmith, published in 1775 his " Village Memoirs," in which Lancelot Brown has a little fun pointed at him, under the name of " Layout," the gen- eral "undertaker" for gardens. Sir Uvedale Price, too, a man of somewhat stronger calibre, and of great taste, (fully demonstrated on his own place of Foxley,) made poor Brown the target for some well-turned wit- ticisms, and, what was far better, demonstrated the near relationship which should always exist between the aims of the landscape-painter and those of the land- scape-gardener. I am inclined to think that Brown was a little unfairly used by these new writers, and that he had won a success which provoked a great deal of jealousy. A popiilarity too great is always dangerous. Sir Uvedale was a man of strong conservative tenden- cies, and believed no more in the levelling of men than in the levelling of hills. He found his love for the picturesque sated in many of those hoary old avenues which, under Brown, had been given to the axe. I sus- pect he would have forgiven the presence of a clipped yew in a landscape where it had thriven for centuries , the moss of age could give picturesqueness even to OLD AGE OF FARMERS. 271 formality. He speaks somewhere of the kindly work of his uncle, who had disposed his walks so as to be a convenience to the poor people of an adjoining parish, and adds, with curious ndiveti, — " Such attentive kind- nesses are amply repaid by affectionate regard and rev- erence ; and were they general throughout the king- dom, they would do much more towards guarding us against democratical opinions than ' twenty thousand soldiers armed in proof.'" Eichard Knight (a brother of the dLstingiiished hor- ticulturist) illustrated the picturesque theory of Price in a passably clever poem, called " The Landscape," which had not, however, enough of outside merit to keep it alive. Humphrey Eepton, a professional de- signer of gardens, whose work is to be found in almost every county of England, took issue with Price in respect to his picturesque theory, — as became an in- dependent gardener who would not recognize allegiaiice to the painters. But the antagonism was only one of those petty wars about non-essentials, and significance of terms, into which eager book-makers are so apt to run. Old Age of Farmers. T N the course of one of my earlier Wet Days I took ■*- occasion to allude to the brave old age thdt was reached by the classic veterans, — Xerophpn, Cato^ 272 WET DAYS. and Yarro ; aud now I find among the most eminent British agriculturists and gardeners of the close of the last century a firm grip on life that would have matched the hardihood of Cato. Old Abercrombie of Preston Pans, as we have already seen, reached the age of eighty. "Walpole, though I lay no claim to him as farmer or gardener, yet, thanks to the walks and gar- den-work of Strawberry Hill, lived to the same age. Philip Miller was an octogenarian. Lord Kames was nged eighty-seven at his death (1782). Arthur Young, though struggling with blindness in his later years, had acciunulated such stock of vitality by his out-dooi life as to bridge him well over into the present century : he died in 1820, aged seventy-nine. Parson Trusler notwithstanding his apothecary-schooling, lived to be eighty. In 1826 died Joseph Cradock of the "Vil- lage Memoirs," and a devoted horticulturist, aged eighty-five. Three years after, (1829,) Sir TJvedale Price bade final adieu to his delightful seat of Foxley, at the age of eighty-three. Sir John Sinclair lived fairly into our own time, (1835,) and was eighty-one at his death. William Speechley, whom Johnson calls the best gar- dener of his time, and who established the first effec- tive system of hot-house culture for pines in England, died in 1819, aged eighty-six ; and in the same year, William Marshal, a voluminous agricultural writer and OLD AGE OF FARMERS. 278 active fanner, died at the age of eighty. And I must mention one more, Dr. Andrew Duncan, a Scotch phy- sician, who cultivated his garden with his own hands, — inscribing over the entrance-gate, " Hinc solus, — and who was the founder of the Hoiticultural Society »f Edinburgh. This hale old doctor died in 1828, at the extreme age of eighty-four ; and to the very last year of his life he never omitted going up to the top of Arthur's Seat every May-Day morning, to bathe his forehead in the sxmimer's dew. As a country-liver, I like to contemplate and to boast of the hoary age of these veterans. The inscription of good old Dr. Duncan was not exaggerated. Every man who digs his own garden, and keeps the weeds down thoroughly, may truthfully place the same writing over the gate, — " Hinc solus " (wherever he may place his "■ lEnc pecunia"). Nor is the comparative safety of active gardening or farming pursuits due entirely to the vigorous bodily exercise involved, but quite as much, it seems to me, to that enlivening and freshening influence which must belong to an intimate and loving and intelligent companionship vrith Nature. It may be an animal view of the matter, — but, in estimating the comparative advantages and disadvantages of a coim- try-life, I think we take too little account of that glow and exhilaration of the blood which come of every, day dealings with •the ground and flowers and trees, IS J74 WET DAYS. and which, as age approaches, subside into a cala equanimity that looks Death in the face no more fear> ingly than if it were a frost. I have gray-haired neigh- bors around me who have come to a hardy old age upon their little farms, — buffeting all storms, — petting the. cattle which have come down to them from ten gen- erations of short-lived kine, gone by, — trailing ancient vines, that have seen a quarter of a century of life, over their door-steps, — turning over soil, every cheery season of May, from which they have already gathered fifty harvests ; and I cannot but regard their serene philosophy, and their quiet, thankful, and Christian en- joyment of the bounties of Nature, as something quite as much to be envied as the distinctions of town-craft. I ask myself, — If these old gentlemen had plunged into the whirlpool of a city five-and-fifty years ago, would they have been still adrift upon this tide of time, where we are all serving our apprenticeships ? — and if so, would they have worn the same calm and cheer- ful equanimity amid the harvests of traffic or the blight of a panic ? — and if not adrift;, would they have car- ried a clearer and more justifying record to the hearing of tue Great Court than they will carry hence when our village-bell doles out the funeral march for them ? Ihe rain is beating on my windows; the rain is beating on the plain ; a mist is driving in ft'om the Sound, over which I see only the spines, — thosft Chris OLD AGE OF FARMERS 27S tiaa beacons. And (by these hints, that always fret the horizon) calling to mind that bit of the best of all pray- ers, " Lead us not into temptation" it seems to me that many a country-liver might transmute it without offence, and in all faith, into words like these, — " Lead us not into cities.'' To think for a moment of poor fanner Bums, with the suppers of Edinburgh, and 'the orgie* of the gentlemen of the Caledonian hunt, inflaming his imagination there in the wretched chamber of his low farm-house of Ellisland ! But all this, down my last two pages, relates to the physical and the moral aspects of the matter, — aspects which are, surely, richly worthy of consideration. The question whether country-life and country-pursuits will bring the intellectual faculties to their strongest bent is quite a distinct one. There may be opportunity for culture ; but opportunity counts for nothing, except it occur imder conditions that prompt to its employment The incitement to the largest efforts of which the mind is capable comes ordinarily from mental attrition, — an attrition for which the retirement demanded by rural pursuits ^ves little occasion. Milton would never have come to his stature among pear-trees, — nor Newton, nor Burke. They may have made first-rate farmers or hor- ticulturists ; they may have surpassed all about them 5 but their level of action would have been 1 far lower one than that which they actually occupied. There is » 276 WET DAYS. great deal of balderdash written and talked upon this subject, which oiight to have an end ; it does not help farming, it does not help the world, — simply because it is untrue. Rural life offers charming objects of study ; but to most minds it does not offer the prompt- ings for large intellectual exertion. It ripens health- fully all the receptive faculties ; it disposes to that judi- cial calmness of mind which is essential to clearness and directness of vision ; but it does not kindle the heat of large and ambitious endeavor. Hence we often find that a man who has passed the first half of his life in comparative isolation, cultivating his resources qui- etly, unmoved by the disturbances and the broils of civic life, will, on transfer to public scenes, and stirred by that emulation which comes of contact with the world, feel all his faculties lighted with a new glow, and accomplish results which are as much a wonder to himself as to others. Bums and BhomfieJd. 1" HAVE alluded to the poet-farmer Bums, — a cap. -"- ital ploughman, a poor manager, an intemperata lover, a sad reveller, a stilted letter-writer, a rare good- fellow, and a poet whose poems will live forevei It is no wonder he did not succeed as farmer ; Moss-giel had an ugly wet subsoil, and draining-tiles were as yet not BURNS AND BLOOMFIELD. 277 in vogue ; but from all the accoun'^ I can gather, there was never a truer furrow laid than was laid by Robert Burns in his days of vigor, upon that same damp upland of Moss-giel ; his " fearings " were all true, and his head- lands as clear of draggled sod as if he had used the best " I^'igglcs, Nourse, and Mason " of our time. Alas for the daisies ! he must have turned over perches of them in his day ; and yet only one has caught the glory of his lamentation ! Ellisland, where he went later, and where he hoped to redeem his farm-promise, was not over-fertile ; it had been hardly used by scurvy tenants before him, and was so stony that a rain-storm made a fresh-rolled field of sown barley look like a paved street. He tells us this ; and we farmers know what it means. But it lay in Nithsdale ; and the beauty of Nithsdale shed a regal splendor on his home. It was the poet that had chosen the farm, and not the grain-grower. Then there were the " callants " coming from Edin- burgh, from Dumfries, from London, from all the world, to have their " crack " with the peasant-poet, who had sung the " Lass of Ballochmyle." Can this man, whose tears drip (in verse) for a homeless field-mouse, keep by the plough, when a half-score of good-fellows are up from Dumfries to see him, and when Jot v Barleycorn Btands frothing in the cupboard ? Consider, again, that his means, notwithstanding die 878 WET DAYS. showy and short-lived generosity of his Edinburgh friends, enabled hun only to avail himself of the old Scotch plough; his harrow, very likely, had wooden teeth; he could venture nothing for the clearing of gorse and broom ; he could enter upon no system of drainage, even of the simple kind recommended by Lord Kames ; he had hardly funds to buy the best quality of seed, and none at all for " liming," or for " wrack " from the shore. Even the gift of a pretty heifer he repays with a song. Besides all this, he was exciseman ; and he loved galloping over the hills in search of recreants, and cosy sittings in the tap of the "Jolly Beggars" of Mauchline, better than he loved a sight of the stunted barley of EUisland. No wonder that he left his farm ; no wonder that he went to Dumfries, — shabby as the street might be where he was to live ; no wonder, that, with his mad pride and his impulsive generosity, he died there, leav- ing wife and children almost beggars. But, in all char- ity, let us remember that it is not alone the poor excise- man who is dead, but the rare poet, who has intoned i prayer for ten thousand lips, — " That He, who stills the raven's clamorous nest. And decks the lily fair in floweiy pride. Would, in the way His wisdom ."ees the best, For them and for their little ones provide, Bnt chiefly in their hearts w'th gntce divine preside. " BURNS AND BLOOMFIELD. 279 Let no one fancy that Bums was a poor farmet because he was a poet: he was a poor farmer simply because he gave only his hand to the business, and none of his brain. He had enough of good sense and of clear-sightedness to sweep away every agricultural obstacle in his path, and to make Ellisland " pay well " ; but good-fellowship, and the " Jolly Beggars," and his excise-galloping among the hills by Nithsdale made an end of the farmer, — and, in due time, made an end of the man. Robert Bloomfield was another poet-farmer of these times, but of a much humbler calibre. I could never give any very large portion of a wet day to his reading. There is truthfulness of description in him, and a certain grace of rhythm, but nothing to kindle any glow. The story of Giles, and of the milking, and of the spot- ted heifers, may be true enough ; but every day, in my barn-yard, I find as true and as lively a story. The feet is, that the details of farm-life — the muddy boots, the sweaty workers, the amber-colored pools, the wal- lowing pigs — are not of a kind to warrant or to call out any binning imprint of verse. Theme for this lies in the breezes, the birds, the waving-wooded mo: mtains (N^ptTov avocrit^vKKav), the glorious mornings " Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy," — and for these the poet must soar above the barn- yard and the house-tops. There is more of the spirit 280 WET DAYS of true poesy in that little fragment of Jean Ingelow**, beginning, — " What change has made the pastures sweet. And reached the daisies at my feet, And cloud that wears a golden hem? " than in all the verse of Bloomfield, if all of Bloomfield were compressed into a single song. And yet, if we had lived in those days, we should all have subscribed for the book of the peasant-bard, perhaps have read it, — but, most infallibly, have ^ven it away to som9 country-cousin. Country Stoty- Tellers. T "WILL not leave the close of the last century with- -*- out paying my respects to good Mrs. Barbauld, — not so much for her pleasant " Ode to Spring," about which there is a sweet odor of the fields, as for her part- nership in those " Evenings at Home " which are asso- ciated — I scarce can remember how — with roaring fires and winter nights in the country ; and not less strongly with the first noisy chorus of the frogs in the pools, and the first coy uplift of the crocuses and the sweet violets. There are pots of flowers, and glowiag fruit-trees, and country hill-sides scattered up and down those litUe stories, which, though my eye has not lighted on them these twenty odd years past, are still COUNTRY SrORY-TELLERii. 281 fresh in my mind, and full of a sweet pastoral fragrancei The sketches may be very poor, with few artist^like touches in them ; it maybe only a boyish caprice by which T cling to them ; but what pleasanter or more grateful whim to cherish thiin one which brings back all the aroma of childhood in the country, — floating upon the remnant-patches of a story that is only half recalled ? The cowslips are there ; the pansies are there ; the overhanging chestnuts are there ; the dusty high-road is there ; the toiling wagons are there ; and, betimes, the rain is dripping from the cottage-eaves — as the rain is dripping to-day. And from Mrs. Barbauld I am led away to speak of Miss Austen, — belonging, it is true, to a little later date, and the tender memory of her books to an age that had outgrown " Evenings at Home." Still, the association of her tales is strongest with the country, and with country - firesides. I sometimes take up one of her works upon an odd hour even now ; and how like find- ing old-garret clothes — big bonnets and scant skirts — is the reading of such old-time story ! How the " pro- prieties " our grandmothers taught us come drifting back upon the tide of those buckram conventionalities of the " Dashwoods " ! * Ah, Marianne, how we once loved you ! All, Sir John, how we once thought you a pro« fane swearer ! — as you really were. * Sense and Sensibility. 282 WET DAYS. There are people we know between the covers of Miss Austen : Mrs. Jennings has a splutter of teasQ and crude incivility, and shapeless tenderness, that you and I see every day ; — not so patent and demonstra- tive in our friend Mrs. Jones ; but the difference is only in fashion : Mrs. Jennings was in scant petticoats, and Mrs. Jones wears hoops, thirty springs strong. How fiinny, too, the old love -talk! "My beloved Amanda, the charm of your angelic features enraptures my regard." It is earnest ; but it 's not the way those things are done. And what visions such books recall of the days when they were read, — the girls in pinafores, — the boys in roundabouts, — the elders looking languishingly on, when the reader comes to tender passages ! And was not a certain Mary Jane another Ellinor? And was not Louisa (who lived in the two -story white house on the comer) another Marianne, — gushing, tender? Yes, by George, she was ! (that was the form our boy- ish oaths took). And was not the tall fellow who of- fered his arm to the ^rls so gravely, and saw them home from our evening visits so cavalierly, — was he not another gay deceiver, — a Lothario, a "Wil- loughby ? He could kiss a girl on the least provoca- tioi: ; he took pay out, for his escort, that way. It was wonderful, — the fellow "s effrontery. It never for- sook him I do not know about the romance in bia COUNTRY STORY-TELLERS. 283 family; but he went into the grocery - line, and has become a contractor now, enormously rich. He offers his arm to Columbia, who wishes to get home before dark ; and takes pay in rifling her of golden kissc& Yes, by George, he does! NINTH DAT, British Progress in Agriculture. A S I sit in my library-chair listening to the welcome ■*-^ drip from the eaves, I bethink me of the great host of English farm-teachers who in the last century wrote and wrought so well, and wonder why their pre- cepts and their example should not have made a gar- den of that little British island. To say nothing of the inherited knowledge of such men as Sir Anthony Fitz - herbert, Hugh Piatt, Markham, Lord Bacon, Hartlib, and the rest, there was Tull, who had blazed a new path between the turnip and the wheat-drills — to fortime ; there was Lord Karnes, who illustrated with rare good sense, and the daintiness of a man of letters, all the economies of a thrifty husbandry ; Sir John Sin- clair proved the wisdom of thorough culture upon tracts that almost covered counties ; Bakewell (of Dishley) — that fine old farmer in breeches and top- boots, who received Eussian princes and French mar- quises at his kitchen-fireside — demonstrated how fat BRITISH PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE 285 might be laid on sheep or cattle for the handling of a butcher ; in fact, he succeeded so far, that Dr. Parkin- son once told Paley that the great breeder had " the power of fattening his sheep in whatever part of the body he chose, directing it to shoulder, leg, or neck, as he thought proper, — and this," continued Parkin- son, is the great problem of his art" " It 's a lie. Sir," said Paley, — " and that 's the «o/m- tio-n of it" Besides Bakewell, there was Arthur Toung, as we have seen, giving all England the benefit of agricul- tural comparisons by his admirable " Tours " ; Lord Dundonald had brought his chemical knowledge to the aid of good husbandry; Abercrombie and Speechley and Marshal had written treatises on all that regarded good gardening. The nurseries of Tottenham Court Boad, the parterres of Chelsea, and the stoves of the Kew Gardens were luxuriant witnesses of what the en- terprising gardener might do. Agriculture, too, had a certain dignity ^ven to it by the fact that " Farmer George " (the King) had writ- ten his experiences for a journal of Arthur Toung, the Duke of Bedford was one of the foremost advocates of improved farming, and Lord Townshend took a pride in his sobriquet of " Turnip Townshend." Yet, for all this, at the opening of the present century England was by no means a garden. Over more than 286 WET DAYS. half the kmgdom, turnips, where sown at all, were sow« broadcast In four counties out of five, a bare fallow was deemed essential for the recuperation of cropped lands. Barley and oats were more often grown than wheat Dibbling or drilling of grain, notwithstanding Piatt and Jethro Tull, were stiU rare. The wet clay- lands had, for the most part, no drainage, save the open furrows which were as old as the teachings of Xeno- phon ; indeed, it will hardly be credited, when I state that it is only so late as 1843 that a certain gardener, John Reade by name, at the Derby Show of the Royal Agiiculttural Society, exhibited certain cylindrical pipes, which he had formed by wrapping damp clay around a smooth billet of wood, and with which he " had been in the habit of draining the hot-beds of his master." A sagacious engineer who was present and saw these, examined them closely, and, calling the attention of Earl Spencer (the eminent agriculturist) to them, said, " My Lord, with these I can drain all England." It was not until about 1830 that the subsoil-plough of Mr. Smith of Deanston was first contrived for special work upon the lands of Perthshire. Notwith- standing aU the brilliant successes of Bakewell, long- £gged, raw-boned cattle were admired by the majority of British farmers at the opening of this century, and elephantine monsters of this description were dragged about England in vans for exhibition. It was only in BRITISH PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE. 287 1798 that the « Smithfield Club " was inaugurated for the show of fat cattle, by the Duke of Bedford, Lord Somerville, Arthur Young, and others ; and it was about the same period that young Jonas Webb used to ride upon the Norfolk bucks bred by his grandfather, and, with a quick sense of discomfort from their sharp backs, vowed, that, when he " grew a man, he 'd make better saddles for them " ; and he did, — as every one knows who has ever seen a good type of the Brabaham flock. The Royal Agricultural Society dates from 1838. In 1835 Sir Robert Peel presented a farmers' club at Tamworth with " two iron ploughs of the best construc- tion,'' and when he inquired after them and their work the following year, the report was that the wooden mould-board was better : " We tried 'em, but we be all of one mind, that the iron made the weeds grow." And I can recall a bright morning in January of 1845, when I made two bouts around a field in the middle of the best dairy-district of Devonshire, at the stilts of a plough so cumbrous and ineffective that a thrifty New- England farmer would have discarded it at sight Nor can I omit, in this connection, to revive, so far as I may, the image of a small Devon farmer, who had lived, and I dare say will die, utterly ignorant of the instruc- tions of Tull, or of the agricultural labors of Arthur Young : a short, wheezy, rotund figure of a man, wiib 288 WET DAYS. ruddy face, — fastening the hs in his talk most h. under, ingly, — driving over to the market-town every fair- day, with pretty samples of -wheat or barley in his dog- cart, — believing in the royal family like a gospel, — limiting his reading to glances at the " Times " in the tap-room, — looking with an evil eye upon railways, (which, in that day, had not intruded farther than Exe- ter into his shire,) — distrusting terribly the spread of " eddication " : it " doan't help the work-folk any ; for, d' ye see, they 've to keep a mind on their pleughing and craps ; and as for the b'ys, the big uns must mind the beasts, and the little uns 's got enough to do a-scar- ing the demed rooks. Gads ! what hodds to them, please your Honor, what Darby is a-dooin' up in Lun- nun, or what Lewis-Philup is a-dooin' with the French- ers?" And the ruddy farmer-gentleman stirs his toddy afresh, lays his right leg caressingly over his left leg, admires his white-topped boots, and is the picture of British complacency. I hope he is living ; I hope he stirs his toddy still in the tap-room of the inn by the pretty Erme Eiver ; but I hope that he has grown wiser as he has grown older, and that he has given over his wheezy curses at t'je engine as it hurtles past on the iron way to Plymouth and to Penzance Thus we find that the work was not all done for the Bgriculture and the agriculturist of England in the last century ; it is hardly all done yet ; it is doubtftd if it OPENING OF THE CENTURY. 28S will be done so as to close investigation and ripen method in our time* There was room for a corps of fresh workers at the opening of the present century nor was such a corps lacking. Opening of the Century. A BOUT the year 1808, John Christian Curwen, ■^-^ Member of Parliament, and dating from Cum- berland, wrote " Hints on Agricultural Subjects," a big octavo volume, in which he suggests the steaming of potatoes for horses, as a substitute for hay ; but it does not appear that the suggestion was well received. To his credit, however, it may be said, that, in the same book, he urged the system of " soiling " cattle, — a sys- tem which even now needs its earnest expounders, and which would give full warrant for their loudest exhor- tation. I notice, too, that, at about the same period. Dr. Bed- does, the friend and early patron of Sir Humphry Davy at the Pneumatic Institution of Bristol, wrote a book with the quaint title, " Good Advice to Husbandmen in Harvest, and for all those who labor in Hot Berths, and for others who will take it — in Warm Weather," And with the recollection of Davy's description of the Doctor in my mind, — " uncommonly short and fat,"* • Life of Sir Humphry Davy, London, 1839, p. 46. 19 290 WET DA YS — I have felt a great interest in seeing wbat uich a man should have to say upon harvest-heats ; but his book, so far as I know, is not to be found in An.erica. John Harding, of St. James Street, London, published, in 1809, a tract upon " The Use of Sugar in Feeding Cattle," in which were set forth sundry experiments which went to show how bullocks had been fattened on molasses, and had been rewarded with a premium. I am indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous trac- tate to the " Agricultural Biography " of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Air. Donaldson's language : — " The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes to be used in freedom of the bivden of value that is imposed by monopoly, and restricts the legitimate appropriation." George Adams, in 1810, proposed " A New System of Agriculture and Feeding Stock," of which the nov- elty lay in movable sheds, (upon iron tram-ways,) for the purpose of soiling cattle. The method was cer- tainly original ; nor can it be regarded as wholly vis* ionary in our time, when the iron conduits of Mr. Mechi, under the steam-thrust of the Tip-Tree eiv- i;ines, are showing a percentage of profit. SIR HUMPHRY DAVY. 291 Charles Drury, in the saine year, reconunended, in au elaborate trea.tise, the steaming of straw, roots, and hay, for cattle-food, — a recommendation which, in our time, has been put into most successful practice.* Mowbray, who was for a long time the great autlior- ity upon Domestic Fowls and their Treatment, pub- lished his book in 1803, which he represents as having been complied from the memoranda of forty years' experience. Sir Humphry Davy. "VTEXT, as illustrative of the rural literature of the -*-^ early part of this century, I must introduce the au- gust name of Sir Humphry Davy. This I am warranted in doing on two several counts : first, because he was an accomplished fisherman and the author of " Salmonia," and next, because he was the first scientific man of .my repute who was formally invited by a Board of Agriculture to discuss the relations of Chemistry to the practice of farming. Unfortunately, he was himself ignorant of practical agriculture,! when called upon to illustrate its relations * The success of the method has been most abundantly proved, so fa as relates to the feeding of milch-cows; for beef- or store -c&ttle ■teamed food is of more doubtful policy, while for horses the beat breeders condemn it without reserve. t See letter of Thomas Poole, p. 322, FragmmUxry Remaitu of Bir Bwr^ry Davy. 892 WET DAYS. to chemistry ; but, like an earnest man, he set aboiK informing himself by communication with the best farm- ers of the kingdom. He delivered a very admirable series of lectures, and it was without doubt most agree- able to the country-gentlemen to find the great waste from their fermenting manures made clear by Sir Humphry's retorts ; but Davy was too profound and too honest a man to lay down for farmers any chemi- cal high-road to success. He directed and stimulated inquiry ; he developed many of the principles which underlay their best practice ; but he ofiered them no safety-lamp. I think he brought more zeal to his in- vestigations in the domain of pure science ; he loved well-defined and brilliant results ; and I do not think that he pushed his inquiries in regard to the way in which the forage-plants availed themselves of sulphate of lime with one-half the earnestness or delight with which he conducted his discovery of the integral char- acter of chlorine, or with which he saw for the first time the metallic globules bubbling out from the elec- trified crust of potash. Yet he loved the country with a rare and thorough love, as his descriptions throughout his letters prove ; and he delighted in straying away, in the leafy month of June, to the charming place of his friend Knight, upon the Teme in Herefordshire. His " Salmonia " is, in its way, a pastoral ; not, certainly, to be compared SIR HUMPBRy DAVY. MS with the original of Walton, lacking its simple homeli. ness, for which its superior scientific accuracy can make but poor amends. I cannot sJtogether forget, in read- ing it, that its author is a fine gentleman from London. Neither fish, nor alders, nor eddies, nor purling shal- lows, can drive out of memory the fact that Sir Hum- phry must be back at " The Hall " by half-past six, in season to dress for dinner. Walton, in slouch-hat, bound about with " leaders," sat upon the green turf to listen to a milkmaid's song. Sir Hmnphry (I think he must have carried a camp-stool) recited some verses written by " a noble lady long distinguished at court." * In feet, there was always a great deal of the fine gen- tleman about the great chemist, — almost too fine for the quiet tenor of a working-life. Those first brilliant successes of his professional career at the Royal Insti- tution of London, before he was turned of thirty, and in which his youth, his splendid elocution, his happy dis- coveries, his attractive manner, all made him the mark for distinguished attentions, went very far, I fancy, to carry him to that stage of social intoxication under which he was deluded into marrying a wealthy lady of feshion, and a confirmed blue-stocking, — the brilliant Mrs. Apreece. Little domestic comfort ever came of the marriage Yet he was a chivalrous man, and took the issue calmly * ^almoma, p. 5, London, Murray, 1851. 294 WET DAYS. It is always in bis letters, — " My dear Jane," and " God bless you! Yoiirs affectionately." But these expres- sions bound the tender passages. It was altogether a gentlemanly and a lady-like affair. Only once, as I can find, he forgets himself in an honest repining ; it is in a letter to his brother, under date of October 30, 1823 : * — "To add to my annoyances, I find my house, as usual, after the arrangements made by the mistress of it, without female servants ; but in this world we have to suffer and bear, and from Socrates down to humlle mortals, domestic discomfort seems a sort of philosoph- ical fate." If only Lady Davy could have seen this Xantippe touch, I think Sir Humphry would have taken to angling in some quiet coimtry-place for a month there- after! And even when affairs grow serious with the Baro- net, and when, stricken by the palsy, he is loitering among the mountains of Styria, he writes, — "I am glad to hear of your perfect restoration, and with health and the society of London, which you are so Jitted to ornament and enjoy, your ' viva lafelicita ' is much more secure than any hope belonging to me." And again, " You once taUxd of passing this winter in Italy ; but I hope your plans will be entirely guided by the state of your health and feelings. Your society * Fragmentary Bemaim, p. 242. SIR HUMPHRY DAVSt. 296 would undoubtedly be a very great resource to me, but I am so well aware of my own present unfitness foi society that I would not have you risk the chance of an uncomfortable moment on my account." The dear Lady Jane must have had a penchant for society to leave a poor palsied man to timible into his tomb alone. Yet once again, in the last letter he ever writes, dated Rome, March, 1829, he gallantly asks her to join him ; it begins, — "I am still alive, though expecting every hour to be released." And the Lady Jane, who is washing off her fashiona- ble humors in the fashionable waters of Bath, writes, — •' I have received, my beloved Sir Humphry, the letter signed by your hand, with its precious wish of tender- ness. I start to-morrow, having heen detained here by Doctors Eabington and Clarke till to-day 1 cannot add more " (it is a letter of half a page) " than that your fame is a deposit, and your memory a glory, your life still a hope.'' Sweet Lady Jane ! Yet they say she mourned him duly, and set a proper headstone at his grave. But, for my own part, I have no faith in that affection whicb will splinter a loving heart every day of its life, and yet, when it has ceased to beat, will make atonement with an idle swash of tears. *9« WET DATS. Birkheek, Beatson, and Mnlayaon. rilHERE was a British farmer by the name of Moii -■- ris Birkbeck, who about the year 1814 wrote an account of an agricultural tour in France; and who subsequently established himself somewhere upon our Western prairies, of which he gave account in " Letters from Illinois," and in " Notes on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the Territory of Illinois," with maps, etc. Cobbett once or twice names him as " poor Birkbeck," — but whether in allusion to his hav- ing been drowned in one of our Western rivers, or to the poverty of his agricultural successes, it is hard to determine. In 1820 Major-General Beatson, who had been Aid to the Marquis of Wellesley in India, published an ac- count of a new system of farming, which he claimed to have in successful operation at his place in the County of Sussex. The novelty of the system lay in the fact that he abandoned both manures and the plough, and scarified the surface to the depth of two or three inches, after which he burned it over. The Major-General was called to the governorship of St Helena before his sys- tem had made much progress. I am led to allude to the plan as one of the premonitory hints of that totaxj method which is just now enlisting a large degree of attention in the agricultural world, and which promises WILLIAM COBBETT. 297 to supplant tLe plough on all wid6 stretch ts of land, within the present century. Finlayson, a brawny Scot, bom in the parish of Mauchline, who was known from " Glentuck to the Rutton-Ley " as the best man for " putting the stone," or for a " hop, step, and leap," contrived the self-cleaning ploughs (with circular beam) and harrows which bore his name. He was also — besides being the athlete of Ayrshire — the author of sundry creditable and practi- cal works on agriculture. William Cobbett. "I3UT the most notable man in connection with rural -*-' literature, of this day, was, by all odds, William Cobbett His early history has so large a flavor of romance in it that I am sure my readers will excuse me for detailing it. His grandfather was a day-laborer; he died before Cobbett was born ; but the author says that he used to visit the grandmother at Christmas and Whitsuntide. Her home was " a little thatched cottage, with a garden befoie the door. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple-pudding for dinner, and a piece of bread and cheese for our supper. 'Her fire was made of turf cut from the neighboring heath ; and her evening light was a rush dipped in grease." His father was a «98 WET DAYS. small fanner, and one who did not al.ow his boys to grow up in idleness. " My first occupation," he tells us, " was driving the small birds from the turnip-seed, and the rook from the pease ; when I first trudged a-field, with my wooden bottle and my satcheil swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles ; and at the close of the day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty." * At the age of eleven he speaks of himself as occupied in clipping box-edgings and weeding flower-beds In the garden of the Bishop of Winchester ; and while here he encounters, one day, a workman who has just come from the famous Kew Gardens of the King. Toung Cobbett is fired by the glowing description, and resolves that he must see them, and work upon them too. So he sets oS, one summer's morning, with only the clothes he has upon his back, and with thirteen halfpence in his pocket, for Richmond. And as he trudges through the streets of the town, after a hard day's walk, in his blue smock-frock, and with his red garters tied under his knees, staring about him, he sees in the window of a bookseller's shop the " Tale of a Tub," price threepence ; it piques his curiosity, and, though his money is nearly all spent, he closes a bargain for the book, and throwing himself down upon the shady side of a hay-rick, make; his lust acquaintance with Dean Swift. He reads tiiS * Life and Adctniures of Peter Porcupine. WILLIAM COBBETT. 29> it is dark, without thought of supper or of bixl, — then tumbles down upon the grass under the shadow of the stack, and sleeps till the birds of tlie Kew Gardens wake him. He finds work, as he had determined to do ; but it was not fated that he should pass his life amid the pleasant parterres of Kew. At sixteen, or thereabout, on a visit to a relative, he catches his first sight of the Channel waters, and of the royal fleet riding at anchor at Spithead. And at that sight, the " old Armada,'' and the " brave Eodney," and the " wooden walls," of which he had read, come drifting like a poem into his thought, and he vows that he will become a sailor, — maybe, in time, the Admiral Cobbett. But here, too, the fates are against him: a kind captain to whom he makes application suspects him for a runaway, and advises him to find his way home. He returns once more to the plough ; " but " he says, " I was now spoiled for a farmer." He sighs for the world ; the little horizon of Farnham (his native town) is too narrow for him ; and the very next year he makes his final escapade. » It was on the 6th of May, 1783, that I, like Don Quix- ote, sallied forth to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes, in order to accompany two or three lasses to Guildford fair. They were to assemble at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to 300 WET LAYS. atteud them ; but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London turnpike-road. The stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill, and was rattling down towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered my mind till this very moment ; yet the step was completely determined on before the coach had reached the spot where I stood. Up I got, and was in London about nine o'clock in the evening." His immediate adventure in the metropolis proves to be his instalment as scrivener in an attorney's office. No wonder he chafes at this ; no wonder, that, in his wanderings about town, he is charmed by an advertise- ment which invited all loyal and public-spirited young men to repair to a certain " rendezvous " ; he goes to the rendezvous, and presently finds himself a recruit in one of His Majesty's regiments which is filling up for service in British America. He must have been an apt soldier, so far as drill went ; for I find that he rose rapidly to the grade of corporal, and thence to the position of sergeant-major. He tells us that his early habits, his strict attention to duty, and his native talent were the occasion of his Bwifl promotion. In New Brunswick, upon a certain winter's morning, he falls in with the rosy-faced daughter of a sergeant of artillery, who was scrubbing her pans at sunrise, upon the snow. " I made up my mind," he says, " that she was the very girl for me Thia WILLIAM COBBETT. 801 matter was at unce settled as firmly as if written in the book of fate." To this ena he determines to leave the army as soon as possible. But before he can effect this, the artillery- man is ordered back to England, and his pretty daugh- ter goes with liim. But Cobbett has closed the com- pact with her, and placed in her hands a hundred and fifty pounds of his earnings, — a free gift, and an ear- nest of his troth. The very next season, however, he meets, in a sweet niral solitude of the Province, another charmer, with whom he dallies in a lovelorn way for two years or more. He cannot quite forget the old ; he cannot cease befondling the new. If only the " remotest rumor had come," says he, " of the faithlessness of the brunette in England, I should have been fastened for life in the New-Brunswick valley.'' But no such nmior comes; and in due time he bids a heart-rending adieu, and recrosses the ocean to find his first love maid-of-all-work in a gentleman's family at five pounds a year ; and she puts in his hand, upon their first interview, the whole of the bmdred and fifty pounds, untouched. This rekin- dles his admiration and respect for her judgment, and she becomes his wife, — a wife he never ceases there- after to love and honor. He goes to France, and thence to America. Es- tablishing himself in Philadelphia, he enters upon tho 602 WET DAYS. career of authorship, with a zeal for the King, and • hatred of Dr. Franklin and all Democrats, which give him a world of trouble. His foul bitterness of speech finds its climax at length in a brutal onslaught upon Dr. Rush, for which he is prosecuted, convicted, and mulcted in a sum that breaks down his bookselling and interrupts the profits of his authorship. He retires to England, opens shop in Pall-Mall, and edits thfi " Porcupine," which bristles with envenomed arrows discharged against all Liberals and Democrats. Again he is prosecuted, convicted, imprisoned. His boys, well taught in all manner of farm-work, send him, from his home in the country, hampers of fresh fruits, to relieve the tedium of Newgate. Discharged at length, and continuing his ribaldry in the columns of the " Reg- ister," he flies before an Act of Parliament, and takes new refuge in America. He is now upon Long Island, earnest as in his youth in agricultural pursuits. His political opinions had undergone modification ; there was not so much declamation against democracy, — not EO much angry zeal for royalty and the state-church. Nay, he committed the stupendous absurdity of carry- ing back with him to England the bones of Tom Paine, as the grandest ^ft he could bestow upon his mother- land. No great ovations greeted this strange luggage of his ; I think he was ashamed of it afterwards, — if C!obbett was ever ashamed of anything. He became WILLIAM COBBETT. SOfl candidate for Parliament in the liberal interest ; he un- dertook those famous " Rural Eides " which are a rare jumble of sweet rural scenes and crazy political objur- gation. Now he hammers the " parsons," — now he tears the paper-money to rags, — and anon he is bitter upon Malthus, liicardo, and the Scotch " Feelosofers," — and closes his anathema with the charming picture of a wooded " hanger," up which he toils (with curses on the road) only to rejoice in the view of a sweet Hamp- shire valley, over which sleek flocks are feeding, and down which some white stream goes winding, and cheat- ing him into a rare memory of his innocent boyhood. He gains at length his election to Parliament ; but he is not a man to figure well there, with his impetuosity and lack of self-control. He can talk by the hour to those who feel with him ; but to be challenged, to have his fierce invective submitted to the severe test of an inexorable logic, — this limits his audacity ; and his au- dacity once limited, his power is gone. His energy, his promptitude, his habits of thrift, would have made him one of the best of farmers. His book on gardening is even now one of the most instructii e that can be placed in the hands of a beginner. He ignores physiology and botany, indeed; he makes crude errors on this score ; but he had an intuitive sense of the right method of teaching. He is plain and clear, to a comma He knows what needs to be told ; 304 WET DAYS. and he tells it straightforwardlyi There is no bettei model for agricultural writers than " Cobbett on Gar- dening." His " Cottage Economy," too, is a book which every small landholder in America should own ; there is a sterling merit in it which will not be outlived. He made a great mistake, it is true, in insisting that Indian- corn could be grown successfully in England. But be- ing a man who did not yield to influences of climate himself, he did not mean that his crops should ; and if he had been rich enough, I believe that he would have covered his ferm with a glass roof, rather than yield his conclusion that Indian-corn could be grown successfully under a British sky. A great, impracticable, earnest, headstrong man, the like of whom does not appear a half-dozen times in a century. Being self-educated, he was possessed, like nearly all self-educated men, of a complacency and a self-sufficiency which stood always in his way. Affect- ing to teach grammar, he was ignorant of all the ety- mology of the language ; knowing no word of botany, he classified plants by the " fearings " of his turnip-field. He was vain to the last degree ; he thought his books were the best books in the world, and that everybody should read them.* He was industrious, restless, cap- • On the fly-leaf to his Woodlands he wrote, — " When lam asked irhat books a young man or young woman should read, I alnays au^ (wer, ' Let him or her read all the books that I hare written ' ' GRABAME AND t'RABBE. 30* dous, and, although humane at heart, vras the most ma- lignant slanderer of his time. He called a political antagonist a " pimp," and thought a crushing argument lay in the word ; he called parsons scoundrels, and bade his boys be regular at church. In June, 1835, while the Parliament was in session, he grew ill, — talked feebly about politics and fanning, (to his household,) " wished for ' four days' rain ' for the Cobbett corn," and on Wednesday, (1 6th June,) de- sired to be carried around the farm, and criticised the work that had been done, — grew feeble as evening drew on, and an hour after midnight leaned back heav- ily in his chair, and died. Grdhame and Crabhe. X MUST give a paragraph, at least, to the Rev. James -*- Grahame, the good Scotch parson, were it only because he wrote a poem called "British Georgics." They are not so good as Virgil's ; nor did he ever think it himself. In fact, he published his best poem anony- mously, and so furtively that even his wife took up an early copy, which she found one day upon her table, and, charmed with its pleasant description of Scottish braes and bum-sides, said, "Ah! Jemmy, if ye could only mak' a book like this ! " And I will venture to say tliat " Jcnmy " never had rarer or pleasanter praise. 20 806 WET DAYS. I suspect good Mistress Grahame was n<.)t a very strong-minded woman. Crabbe, who was as keen an observer of rural scenes as the Scotchman, had a much better faculty of verse ; indeed, he had a faculty of language so large that it carried him beyond the real drift of his stories. I do not know the fact, indeed ; but I think, that, notwith- standing the Duke of Eutland's patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is strange how many good men do, — losing point and force and efficiency in a welter of words ! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need be with the ferule,) it is this, — Be short. George Crabbe wrote charming rural tales ; but he wrote long ones. There is minute observation, dra- matic force, tender pathos, but there is much of tedious and coarse description. If by some subtile alchemy the better qualities could be thrown down from the tur- bid and watery flux of his verse, we should have an admirable pocket-volume for the country ; as it is, his books rest mostly on the shelves, and it requires a strong breath to puff away the dust that has gathered on the topmost edges. I think of the Eeverend Mr. Crabbe as an amiable, absent-minded old gentleman, driving about on week- days in a hea^y, square-topped gig, (his wife holding CBARLES LAMB. 307 the reins,) in search of way-side gypsies, and on Sun- day pushing a discourse — which was good up to the " fourthly " — into the " seventhly." Charles Lamb. CHARLES LAMB, if he had been clerically dis- posed, would, I am sure, have written short ser- mons ; and I think that his hearers would have carried away the gist of them clean and clear. He never wrote anything that could be called strictly pastoral ; he was a creature of streets and crowding houses ; no man could have been more ignorant of the every-day oflSces of rural life ; I doubt if he ever knew from which side a horse was to be mounted or a cow to be milked, and a sprouting bean was a source of the greatest wonderment to him. Yet, in spite of all this, what a book those Essays of his make, to lie down with under trees ! It is the honest, lovable simplicity of his nature that makes the keeping good. He is the Izaak Walton of London streets, — of print-shops, of pastry- shops, of mouldy book-stalls ; the chime of Bow-bells strikes upon his ear like the chorus of a milkmaid's song at Ware. There is not a bit of rodomontade in him about the charms of the country, from beginning to end ; if there were, we should despise him. He can find nothing to 808 WET DAYS. say of Skiddaw but that he is " a great creatwre " ; and he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,_, on Ambleside, " I return you condolence for your decaying sight, — not for anything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London newspaper." And again to his friend Manning, (about the date of 1800,) — "I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation, — if they can talk sensibly, and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass, (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase,) nor his five-shilling print, over the mantel-piece, of old Nabbs, the carrier. Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world, — eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seam- stresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters ying, authors in the street with spectacles, lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of meehanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home drunk, — if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of ' Fire ! ' and ' Stop thief! ' — inns c ' court with their CHARLES LAMB. 900 learned air, and halls, and butteries, just liice Cambriidge colleges, — old book-stalls, ' Jeremy Taylors,' ' Burtons on Melancholj',' and ' Eeligio Medicis,' on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London-with-the-many-sins ! — for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!" ■ Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this hon- esty of speech ? Surely not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith ; but, the rather, by such token of un- bounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his heart, for aye. There is never a hill-side imder whose oaks or chestnuts I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket "Walton, or a White of Selbome. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the thin, bent old gentleman — Charles Lamb — to sit over against me, and I watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering voice, — between the whiffs of his pipe, — over and over, those always new stories of " Christ's Hospital," and the cherished " Blakesmoor," and Mack- ery End." (No, you need not put back the book, my boy ; 't is always in place.) 310 WET DATS. The Ettnch Sliepherd. T NEVER admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettricit *- Sl.epherd ; yet he belongs of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd, he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if we may believe contemporary evidence) was by no means so good as his verse. The Ettrick Shepherd of the " Noctes Ambrosianae " is, I fancy, as much becol- ored by the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua changed into a nymph. I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing re- bellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading of the Border minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his fellows were with " mountain-dew,") and wreaking his vitality on Scottish rhymes, — which, it is true, have a certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which never reached the excellence that he fondly imagined belonged to them. I fancy, that, when he sat at the laird's table, (Sir Walter's,) and called the laird's lady by her baptismal name, and — not abashed in any pres- ence — uttered his Scotch gibes foi the wonderment of London guests, — that he thought far more of himself than the world has ever been inclined to think of him. It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick Shepherd was an agricultural autlior, and wrote " Hogg on Sheep," for which, as he tells as, he received the suit LOVDON. 81 J of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and relates to the care, managemisnt, and diseases of the black-faced mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant It had never a great reputation ; and I think the sheep- farmers of the Cheviots were disposed to look with dis- trust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with " lords " at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse was in " The Queen's Wake." A British agricultural author, speaking of him in a pitiful way, says, — " He passed years of busy authorship, and encountered the usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life." * Tliis is good ; it is as good as anything of Hogg's. Loudon. T APPROACH the name of Mr. Loudon, the author -■- of the Encyclopaedias of Gardening and Agriculture, with far more of respect If nothing else in him laid claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his in- defatigable labor in aid of all that belonged to the prog- ress of British gardening or farming, would demand it I take a pride, too, in saying, that, notwithstanding his literary labors, he was successful as a farmer, during the short period of his farm-holding. Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated • AgriatUwai Biography, etc Lcodon, 1864. Printed for tSt Author. 812 WET DAYS. {n Edinburgh, aad was for a time under the tutelage of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of Leith-Walk. Early in the present century he made his first appear- ance in London, — contributed to the journals certain papers on the laying-out of the public squares of tlie metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl of Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gar- dens at Scone. In 1806 he published a work upon the management of country-residences, and at about the same period entered upon the business of farming, which he followed with great success until 1813. In this and the succeeding year he travelled on the Conti- nent very widely, making the gardens of most repute the special objects of his study ; and in 1822 he gave to the world his " Encyclopaedia of Gardening " ; that on Agriculture followed shortly after, and his book of Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors, enor- mous as they were, had interludes of other periodical work, and were crowned at last by his magnum opttt, the " Arboretum.'' " For months," says Mrs. Loudon, speaking of the preparation of the Encyclopsedias, " he and T used to sit up the greater part of every night, never having more than four hours' sleep, and drinking strong coffee to keep ourselves awake." And this persislency of labor was the more extraordinary from the fact that he was a man of naturally feeble constitHlsoD. and as earlj LOUDON. 318 u the date of his first considerable woric was broke:, b; disease. In the year 180& a night's exposure upon a coach-box in travelling brought upon him a rheumatic fever which resulted in a permanent anchylosis of the left knee. Subsequently his right arm became affected, and he submitted to shampoomg. In this process it was broken so near to the shoulder that it could not be set in the usual manner ; somewhat later it was again broken, and finally amputated in 1826. Meantime his left hand became so afiected (rheumatically) that he could use only the third and little finger. But though after this time always obliged to employ an amanuensis and draughtsman, he wrought on bravely and constantly until the year 1843, when he was attacked with infla- mation of the lungs. To this, however, he did not yield himself a willing prey ; but with his right arm gone, his left side paralyzed, his sight miserably defec- tive, and his lungs one mass of disease, he kept by his desk and his work, up to the very day of his death. This veteran author massed together an amount of information upon the subjects of which he treated that is quite immatched in the whole annals of agricultural hterature. Columella, Heresbach, Worlidge, and even the writers of the " Geoponica," dwindle into insignifi- cance in the comparison. He is not, indeed, always absolutely accurate on historical points;* but in all * I ought, perhapa, to make definite exception in the cose of a mritef JJ14 WET DATS essentials Iiis books are so complete as to have mad* them standard works up to a time long subsequent to their issue. No notice of the agricultural literature of the early part of this century would be at all complete without mention of the Magazines and Society " Transactions," in which alone some of the best and most scientific cultivators communicated their experience or sugges- tions to the public. Loudon was himself the editor of the " Gardener's Magazine " ; and the earlier Transac- tions of the Horticultural Society are enriched by the papers of such men as Knight, Van Mons, Sir Joseph Banks, Rev. William Herbert, Messrs. Dickson, Ha- worth, Wedgwood, and others. The works of indi- vidual authors lost ground in comparison with such an array of reports from scientific observers, and from that time forth periodical literature has become the standard teacher in what relates to good culture. I do not know what extent of good the newly instituted Agri- Bo uniTunauy accredited. In his Encychpcedia of Gardening, he speaks of the Geoponica as the work of " modem Greeks," written after the transfer of the seat of empire to Constantinople ; whereas the bulk of those treatises were written long before that date. He speaks cf Varro as first in order of time of Roman authors on agriculture; yet Varro was bom 116 B. c, and Cato died as early as 149 b. c. Crescenzi he names as an author of the fifteenth century; he should be credited to ihe fonrteenth. He also commits the very common error in writers on gardening, of confounding the Tuscan villa of Pliny with that at Tus- cujum. These two places of the Koman Consul were entirely distinct. In his EpisU 6 [AptlUnari) Pliny says, " Huba causai cur ego TiacM meoi Tuiailanu, Tyburti7dt, PratieaUmaque meU prapmam." A BEVY OF POETS. 815 cultural Colleges of this country may effect ; but I feel quite safe in saying that our agricultural journals will prove always the most effective teachers of the great mass of the farming-population. The London Horti- cultural Society at an early day established the Chiswick Gardens, and these, managed under the advice of the Society's Directors, have not only afforded an accurate gauge of British progress in horticulture, but they have furnished to the humblest cultivator who has strolled tlirough their enclosures practical lessons in the craft of gardening. It is to be hoped that the American Agri- cultural Colleges will adopt some similar plan, and illustrate the methods they teach upon lands which shall be open to public inspection, and upon whose culture and its successes systematic reports shall be annually made. A Bevy of Poets. TTTEITING thus, during these in-door hours, of • ' counti-y-pursuits, and of those who have illus- trated them, or who have in any way quickened the edge with which we farmers rasp away the weeds or carve out our pastoral entertainment, I come upon the names of a great bevy of poets, belonging to the earlier quarter of this century, that I find it hard to pass by. Much as 1 love to bring to mind, over and over again. «I6 WET DAYS. » Ivanhoe " and " Waverley," I love quite as miich ta Eummon to my view Walter Scott, the woodsman of Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, aad the hound Maida in attendance. I see him thinning out the sap- lings that he has planted upon the Tweed banks. I can fancy how the master would have lopped away the boughs for a little looplet through which a burst of the blue Eildon Hills should come. His favorite seat, overshadowed by an arbor-vitae, (of which a leaf lies pressed in the " Scotch Tourist " yonder,) was so near to the Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over its pebbly bottom must have made a delightful lullaby for the toil-worn old man. But beyond wood-craft, I could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong agricultural inclination ; indeed, in one of his letters, dated about the time of his commercial involvement, (1826,) he says, — after enumerating other prospective retrenchments, — " then I give up an expensive farm, which I always hated, and turn all my odds and ends into cash." * Again, (and I count this a surer indica- tion,) he puts in the mouth of Cromwell (" Woodstock ") a mixed metaphor of which no apt farmer could have been guilty. The Puritan general is speaking of the arch - loyalist Dr. BochecliSe, and says, "I know his gdfibeckedness of old, tliough I have made him plough Id m^ furrow, when he thought he was turning up his • Lockhart'a lift, Vol. IT. ch. L A BEVY OF POETS. Sit wwn gwathe." Nor do I think that the old gentleman had much eye for the picturesque ; no landscape-gar- dener of any reputation would have decided upon such a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford : * the spot is low ; the views are not extended or varied ; the very trees are all of Scott's planting ; but the master loved the murmur of the Tweed, — loved the nearness of Melrose, and in every old bit of sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited horizon. Christopher North carried his Scotch love of moun- tains to his home among the English lakes. I think he coimted Skiddaw something more than " a great creature." In all respects — saving the pipes and the ale — he was the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And yet do we love him more? A stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country fishers, — redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, acd with such exu- • This is the more remarkable as Scott wrote most appreciatively on Ihe subject of landscape-gardening. I allude particularly to that charming essay of his in the Quarterly Review for March, 1823, based npon Sir Henry Steuart's scheme for the safe removal of large forest- trees, ^a scheme which imfortunately promised more than it has pei>' foimed. 818 WET DAYS. beraiice in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow as at the reading of Spenser's " Faery Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome sense of mental indi- gestion. Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of plethora, due less to the frothiness of the condiments than to a certain fulness of blood and brawn. The broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) strides away along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch Lochy with such a tearing pace, and greets every lassie with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and amazes us with such stupendous " strikes " and such a whizzing of his reel, that we fairly lose our breath. Not so of the " White Doe of Rylstone " ; nay, we more incline to doze over it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe, with its shaggy savagery of shore, from- the Sunday quie- tude and beauty of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Words- worth was bounded by the slaty banks of the " Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments, Was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Words- worth loved intensely all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No angler and no gardener, indeed, — too severely and proudly medita- tive for any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight A BEVY OF POKTS. 319 which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one which ha carried with him always, — the immense dignity of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundjngs were fairly typical of his tastes : a cottage, (so called,) of homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks ; a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher ; a mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy ones ; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and Rydal- Water. We have to credit him with some rare and tender de- scription, and fragments of great poems ; but I cannot help thinking that he fancied a profounder meaning lay in them than the world has yet detected. John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and was most essentially a poet of the fields. His father was a pauper and a cripple ; not even young Cobbett was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He wrote verses upon the lining of his hat-band. Ele hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's "Seasons," and walked seven miles before sunrise to make the pur- chase. The hardest field-toil could not repress the poetic aspirations of such a boy. By dint of new hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own 920 WET DAYS. but nobody read them. He wrote other verses, whidi at length made him known. The world flattered the peasant • bard of Northamptonshire. A few distin- guished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a farm of his own. The heroine of his love-tales became its mistress ; a shelf or two of books made him rich ; but in an evil hour he entered upon some farm-specu- lation which broke down ; a new poem was sharply criticised or neglected; the novelty of his peasant's song was over. Disheartened and gloomy, he was over- whelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of a mad - house, where for forty years he has staggered idiotically toward the rest which did not come. But even as I write I see in the British papers that he is free at last Poor Clare is dead. With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest which perhaps its merit alone would not provoke his little sonnet of "The Thrush's Nest": — " Within a thick and spreading hawthorn-bosh. That overhang a mole-hill large and round, I heard firom mom to mom a meny thrush Sing hymns of rapture, while I drank the sound With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest, I watched her secret toils from day to day, — How true she warped the moss to form her neat, And modelled it within with wood and clay. And hy-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew. There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowen. A BEVY OF POETS. 381 Iiik-«potted over, shells of green and bine; And there I witnessed, in the summer hours, A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly, Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky." There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in Hunf s poem of " Rimini," where " sky, earth, and sea Breathe like i bright-eyed face that laughs out openly. 'T is Nature fiill of spirits, waked and springing: The birds to the delicions tune are singing, Darting with freaks and snatches up and down, Where the light woods go seaward from the town; While happy faces striking through the green Of leafy roads at every turn are seen ; And the far ships, lifting their sails of white Like joyfiil hands, come up with scattery light. Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day. And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay." This does not sound as if it came from the prince of cockneys ; and I have always felt a certain regard foi Leigh Hunt, too, by reason of the tender story which he gives of the little garden, " mio picciol orto" that he established during his two years of prisonhood.* But, after all, there was no robustness in his rural spirit, — nothing that makes the cheek tingle, as if a smart wind had smitten it. He was bom fo handle roses without thorns ; I think that with a pretty boudoir • Lord Byron and hit Conten^raria, Vol. 11. p. 3S8. 31 S22 WET DAYS. on whose table every morning a pretty maid should arrange a pretty nosegay, and with a pretty canary tc sing songs in a gilded cage, and pretty gold-fish to dis- port in a crystal vase, and basted partridges for dinner, his love for the country would have been satisfied. He loved Nature as a sentimental boy loves a fine woman of twice his years, — sighing himself away in pretty phrases that flatter, but do not touch her ; there is noth- ing to remind, even, of the fiill, abounding, fiery, all- conquering love with which a full-grown man meets and marries a yielding maiden. In poor John Keats, however, there is something of this ; and tmder its heats he consumed away. For ripe, joyous outburst of all rural fancies, — for keen apprehension of what most takes hold of the suscepti- bilides of a man who loves the country, — for his coin- age of all sweet sounds of birds, all murmur of leaves, all riot and blossoming of flowers, into fragrant verse, — he was without a peer in his day. It is not that he is so true to natural phases in his descriptive epithets, not that he sees all, not that he has heard all ; but his heart has drunk the incense of it, and his ima^nation refined it, and his fancy set it aflow in those jocund lines which bound and writhe and exult with a passion ftte love for the things of field and, air. L'ENVOl 829 L' Envoi. I CLOSE these papers, with ray eye resting upon the same stretch of fields, — the wooded border of a river, — the twinkling roofs and spires flanked by hills and sea, — where my eye rested when I began this story of the old masters with Hesiod and the bean-patches of Ithaca. And I take a pleasure in feeling that the £inn-practice over all the fields below me rests upon the cumulated authorship of so long a line of teachers. Ton open furrow, over which the herbage has closed, carries trace of the ridging in the " "Works and Days " ; the brown field of half-broken clods is the fallow (Neos) of Xenophon ; the drills belong to Worlidge ; their culture with the horse-hoe is at the order of Master Tull. Young and Cobbett are full of their suggestions ; Lancelot Brown has ordered away a great stragglhig hedge-row ; and Sir Uvedale Price has urged me to spare a hoary maple which lords it over a half-acre of flat land. Cato gives orders for the asparagus, and Switzer for the hot-beds. Crescenzi directs the wall- ing, and Smith of Deanston the ploughing. Bums em- balms all my field-mice, and Cowper drapes an urn for me in a tangled wilderness. Knight names my cher- ries, and "Walton, the kind master, goes with me over the hill to a wee brook that bounds down under hem- locks and soft maples, for " a contemplative man's reo- 824 WET DAYS. reation." Davy long ago caught all the feimentatioii of my manure-heap in his retort, and Thomson painted for me the scene which is imder my window to-day. Mowbray cures the pip in my poultry, and all the songs of all the birds are caught and repeated to the echo in the pages of the poets which lie here under my hand ; through the prism of their verse, Patrick the cattle-ten- der changes to a lithe milkmaid, agsdnst whose ankles the buttercups nod rejoicingly, and Bosamund (which is the nuise) wakes all Arden (which is Edgewood) with a rich burst of laughter. THE END.