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 conjnrstioia-.
nnder proper hands, of a great deal of landscape-beauty wit\ a profit*
ably conducted grazing-farm.
14
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210 WET DATS.
— dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet
dwells on the first public mention of his poem. Id
his " Egotisms/' (well named,) he writes, — " Why re-
pine ? I have seen mansions on the verge of Walea
that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court And
where they speak of a glazed window as a great ]^eca
of magnificence. All things figure by comparison,"
And this refiection, 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 th«
"Reader" book of the High School !
" I have found oat a gift for my fair ;
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed:
But let me that plunder forbear;
* Dtiached Tlioughts on Men and Manners : Wm. Shen8ton«.
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WILLIAM SEENSrONE. 211
She will say *t was a baroarous 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 Uie sister of love.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I 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
world than he ever did in this.
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SEVENTH DAT.
John AbercrowMe.
1 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 afler-year,
over his pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle
which surged wrathfuUy around his father's kale-garden
by Preston Pans.
But he did not stay long in Scotland ; he became gar-
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JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 218
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 doubtl^ 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*
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214 WET DAYS.
carts streamed every morning into London, and to tlic
Doctor, mindful of his farm-retirement at the six-mile
stone on the Edgeware Boad; 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 pf 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 Groldsmith.
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 transparent
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 exuded from tlie
flowers !
But the scheme proved abortive. Goldsmith said, " 1
tliink our friend Abercrombie can write better about
plants than I can." And so doubtless he could, so far af
♦ Published 1770-71.
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JOHN ABERCROMBIE. 21$
knoifvledge of their habits went Eight yt.ars 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 Abercrom-
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 imder
his own name ; * among these was " The Gardener's
Pocket Jomnal," 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 aft;er, as his quaint biographers
* Johnson enumerates fifteen.
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216 WET DAYS.
tell us, ^ he expired, just as the clock upon St PaidVi
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 whicie
* Most of the bibliographers have omitted mention of this treatkn^
It may bo found in the collected edition of Locke's works, London
1823, Vol. X.
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A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS 21i*
the author of " An Essay concerning 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 shoidd
acquit myself but unworthily." 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
Gfirden," * 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 Royal Chaplain. I
will remember this longer than I remember his " English
Garden," — longer than I remember his best couplet
of verse : —
'* While through 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 m 1772. This author is to
be distinguished from George Mason, who in 1768 published An £tsaj
OR Desiffn in Gardening
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5il8 WET DAYS.
natured things, (Horace Walpole among them,) that U
the later years of his life he forgot his first love of Lib«
nralism 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 in Mason's didactic poem to quote.
There are tasteful suggestions scattered through it,'l>et-
ter every way than his poetry. The grounds of his vic-
arage at Aston must have offered charming loitering-
places. I will leave him idling there, — perhaps con-
ning over some letter of his friend the poet Gray ; per-
haps lounging 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 build and warble here,
And little footsteps lightly print tie ground.'*
If, indeed, he had known how to strew such gems
tlirough his " English Garden," we should have had a
poem that would have outshone " The Seasons."
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A PHILOSOPHER AND TWO POETS. 219
And this mention reminds me, that, although I have
slipped past his period, I have said no word as yet of
the Roxhargh poet ; but he shall be neglected no longer*
(The big book, my boy, upon the third shel^ with a
worn back, labelled Thomson.)
This poet is not upon the gardeners' or the agricul-
tural lists. One can find no feirm-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 Eousseau's in the letter
of St Preux.* And yet, as we read, how the country,
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. He 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 coluni-
bine nodding in a meadow. If the leaves shimmer, you
may be sure the sun is shining; if a piimrose light-
ens on the view, you may be siu-e there is some covert
• Lettre XI. Liv. IV. NouveUe ffeloise.
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«20 WET DAYS,
which the primroses love ; and never by any license
does a white flower come blushing into his poem.
I 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 autunm brooding with golden wings;
and winter howls and screams in gusts, and tosses ievor
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 coimtry : it is from "The Castle of Indo»
lence": —
" I care not, Fortune, 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 fiiee*
You cannot bar my constant feet to trace
The woods and lawns, by living stream at eve :
Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace,
And I their toys to the great children leave ;
Of &ncy, 1 3ason, virtue, nought can me bereairc.**
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LORD KAMES. 22i
Lord Karnes.
ANOTHEll Scotchman, Lord Kames (Htiiry Home
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, practical 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 Eames recommends no waste of money, no ex-
travagant architecture, 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 Boman husbandry as fettered by superstitions, and
gives a piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verbos*
* First published in 1766.
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222 WET DAY6.
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 TuU theojy 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 TuU 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, — " iVtmc dUcun
agri quibus rebut colantuvy" etc.
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LORD KAMES'. 223
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
liorses 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 droUy it sounds to hear the author of " Letters on
a Regicide 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
age : 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 provid
• Pp. 177-179, edition of 1802, Edinburgh.
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224 W£:r 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
out 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 Yarro, packing his luggage for his last voy-
age.
One great value of Lord Karnes'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 thatch; he tells how mown grass
should be raked, and how many hoiu^ spread;* and
his directions for the making of clover-hay could not
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 smaU
cocks. The third day put two cocks into one, enlarg
• Pp. 166, 167.
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LORD KAMES. tth
ing eveiy day the cocks till they are ready for the
tramp rick [temporary field-stack]." The reader wiU
not fail to remark how 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 I He deplores the ig
norance of Tull in asserting that plants feed on earth ;
air and water alone, in his opinion, furnish 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 bidl-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 declme to be " managed."
He gave the best proof of his practical tact, in the
conduct of his estate of Blair-Drummond, — uniting
15
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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 refijied
pleasures, cannot fail to promote every good affection.
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 himianity
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 " Grentleman Farmer" of Lord
Kames, 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
laud light-house, called Dunston Colimm, 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 wer«
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CLARIDGE, MILLS, AND MILLER. 227
Rent 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-wooUed sheep cropped
the luxuriant pasturage, and the Dunston column was
but an idle mommient of a waste that existed no
longer.
Claridge^ Mills^ and Miller,
A I50UT the time of Lord Kames's establishment
-^^ at Blair-Drummond, or perhaps a little earlier,
a certain Master Claridge published "The Coimtry
Calendar ; or, The Shepherd of Banbur/s Rules to
know of the Change of the Weather." It professed