t This is averred of the translation of the (Economia of Xen>
phon, before cited in these papers, and published under Profesv3F
Bradlu3''s name.
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EARLY ENGLISH GARDENERS. 19S
Ic^cope. The latter book is the sol(^ representative
of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the
Astor collection; and, strange to say, there are only
two (if we may believe Mr. 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 boas); in that time.
The quiet country - squires — such as Sir Roger 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 wer^ 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,
* Joseph Andrews^ Bk. HI. en. 4, where Fielding, thief that bt waf
Appropriates the story that Xenophon tells of Cyrus.
13
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194 WET DAYS.
vrhich used to be limited to a single month, now reached
over a term of six months.
Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730,
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 m 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 luxurious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress
Armida spread her nets.
Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison ;
but his 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 unsuccesflk
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JEIHRO TULL, 13«
All 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
Birthday gowns for them :-—♦* The one he dressed in
a petticoat decorated with columns of the 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 Pent, 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 TuU.
AND now let us leave gardens for a while, to dis-
cuss Mr. J#thro TuU, 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. TuU, — 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
oflf his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture.
And he fought back bravely ; I really do not think t\iat
• Works of Earl of Orford Vol. HI. p. 490.
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190 WET DAYS.
aa editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upai
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 thobough
Tn.LAGE.
Sir Hugh Flatt, as we have seen, had before sug-
gested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill;
but Tull gave force and point and practical efEcacy to
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JETURO TULL. lOT
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 accoimt 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 stoutiy denies, and says, "I propose no
more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate be-
hind me better than I foxmd 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 ?t
would have been more profitable to me." Farmers la
other parts of England, with lands better adapted to
the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves cf it,
198 WET DAYS.
very muca to their advantage. Tull, like a great manj
earnest reformers, was almost always in difficulty with
those immediately dependent on him ; over and o\er he
insists upon the ^^ inconvenicucy 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,)
" Meester Tull, it 's not the loikes o' me '11 be leestening
to insoolting worrds. 1 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 that
his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him
utterly contemptuous of all old-fashioned methods of
procedure. In this respect he was not alone among
* Sec Chap. VII. p. 104, Cobbett's edition.
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JETHRO TULL. 199
reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would supply
the lack of mamire, 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 pfFer 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, disputative way, and to magnify the im-
portance of his own special doctrine, Tull affirms that
the ancients, and Virgil particularly, urged tillage for the
simple purpose of destroying weeds.* In this it seems
to me that he does great injustice to our old friend
Maro. Will the reader excuse a moment's dalliance
with the Georgics again ?
^ Multum adeo, rastris glebcu (^mfrangit %ntrte$^
Yimineasque trahit crates, juvat arva; ....
£t qui proscisso qusB suscitat sequore terga
Rursiis in obliqaum verso perrumpit aratro,
Exercetque firequens tellorem, atque imperat arvis." f
That ^'imperat" looks like something more than
* Chap. IX. p. 136, Cobbett's edition.
t *' He does his land great service who breaks the sluggish clods wilh
harrows, and drags over them the willow hurdles; .... who teaii
up the ridges of his fUrrowed plain, and ploughs crosswise, and ovot
and :>ver again stirs his field, and with masterly hand subdues it.**
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20C WET DAYS.
weed-killing ; it looks like subjugation ; it looks like
pulverization at the hands of an imperious master.
But behind all of TulFs 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 still reckoned sound ; and though a hoed crop
of wheat is somewhat exceptional, the drill is now al-
most universal in the 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
advocates in these last days ; and the energetic 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
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JETHRO TULL. 201
the soil.* And Mr. Way, the distinguished chemist of
the Royal Societ) , 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-
ings 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 tte Rev. Mr. Smith, (fioniei
of Lois-Weedon,) by the distribution of hif crop, avails himself virta*
ally of a clean fallow, every alternate year.
t TrtmacUofu^ V >!. XXX. p. 140.
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202 . WET DAYS.
Havbury and Lancelot Brown.
ABOUT 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 God 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 different copies of writs upon
him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives de-
tailed account in his curious history of the " Charitable
Foundations at Church-Langton." He tells us that the
' venomous rage " of these old ladies (who died shortly
after, worth a million of dollars) did not even spare his
dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were
cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrail&
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HANBURY AND LANCELOT BROWN. 203
Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs aliv€^
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 day^ after
they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a dis-
tance, inquired what dogs they were. ^They are some
dogs that are lost, Sir,* said they ; * they 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
them 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 wiU find them, if I dig aU 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
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204 WET DAYS.
of innocents showed ^^ a dying blaze of goodness ^ bj
bequeathing twelve thousand pounds 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
mt first sight recognized the ^< capabilities " o^ a place,
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WILLIAM SHENSTONE, 205
and which leaped to the recognition of its matared
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 Shenatone.
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-
ished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a
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206 WET DAYS.
time when people were reading the " Elegy " of Gray
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 I^eas-
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 plaintive
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 tamid ynrt^
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in ike rural cave. *'
Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poetSy
was unfortunate 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
• Mrs. Piozzi says, " He [Dr. Johnson] hated to hear about proB-
pecsts 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 loTed the sight of fine forest-
trees, however, ani 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 wonll b«
difficult to find a tree on which to fasten the ro'>e.* '• — Croker's Bo^
%neU, Vol. U p. 209.
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WILLIAM SHENSTONE 207
ude of his head, wore a crunson waistcoat, and warbled
in anapaestics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only
fancy the great, snu%, 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, with 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 stif! and unreadable poem a«
Agnculture "
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208 WET DAYS.
distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of
Leasowes ; 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 hia
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. Tull'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.*
• Repton is somewhat severe in his condemnation of Leasowes and
of Shenstone^s tast^, not, that I can perceive, hecaose he objects to
errors of detail, but because he ignores in toto the practicability of
uniting fium-^ulture with any tastefid management of landscape* I
hMV9 no doubt that Leasowes was a wretchedly managed farm eco
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WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 209
I think that the poet, irnlike 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 channing
walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. With this
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 svn and rain.
And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cul-
tivated person in England, but, before the 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
bad wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the