Part 37

They are inscribed under an ancient portrait, done in 1555, which Mr. Dibdin has preserved in his account of Caen, and which he thus introduces: "As we love to be made acquainted with the persons of those from whom we have received instruction and pleasure, so take, gentle reader, a representation of Bourgueville."

"Mr. John Parkinson, an apothecary of this city, (yet living, and labouring for the common good,) in the year 1629, set forth a work by the name of Paradisus Terrestris, wherein he gives the figures of all such plants as are preserved in gardens, for the beauty of their flowers, in use in meats or sauces; and also an orchard for all trees bearing fruit, and such shrubs as for their beauty are kept in orchards and gardens, with the ordering, planting, and preserving of all these. In this work he hath not superficially handled these things, but accurately descended to the very varieties in each species, wherefore I have now and then referred my reader, addicted to these delights, to this work, especially in flowers and fruits, wherein I was loth to spend too much time, especially seeing I could adde nothing to what he had done upon that subject before."

"Mr. Hartlib (says Worlidge) tells you of the benefits of orchard fruits, that they afford curious walks for pleasure, food for cattle in the spring, summer, and winter, (meaning under their shadow,) fewel for the fire, shade for the heat, physick for the sick, refreshment for the sound, plenty of food for man, and that not of the worst, and drink also of the best."

Milton also in the above Tractate thus speaks:--"In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature, not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth."

In the above tract of Dr. Beale's, he thus breaks out in praise of the Orchards of this deep and rich county:--"From the greatest person to the poorest cottager, all habitations are encompassed with orchards, and gardens, and in most places our hedges are enriched with rows of fruit trees, pears or apples. All our villages, and generally all our highways, (all our vales being thick set with rows of villages), are in the spring time sweetened and beautified with the blossomed trees, which continue their changeable varieties of ornament, till (in the end of autumn), they fill our garners with pleasant fruit, and our cellars with rich and winy liquors. Orchards, being the pride of our county, do not only sweeten, but also purify the ambient air, which I conceive to conduce very much to the constant health and long lives for which our county hath always been famous. We do commonly devise a shadowy walk from our gardens, through our orchards (which is the richest, sweetest, and most embellished grove) into our coppice woods, or timber woods." Dr. Beale does not praise the whole of their land. He describes some as "starvy, chapt, and cheany, as the basest land upon the Welch mountains." He makes amends, however, for this, for he describes the nags bred on their high grounds, as very different from our present hackney-coach horses; they "are airey and sinewy, full of spirits and vigour, in shape like the barbe, they rid ground, and gather courage and delight in their own speed."

A Lady Gerard is mentioned in two letters of Mr. Pope, to W. Fortescue, Esq. They have no date to them. They appear in Polwhele's History of Devonshire. "I have just received a note from Mrs. Blount, that she and Lady Gerard will dine here to-day." And "Lady Gerard was to see Chiswick Gardens (as I imagined) and therefore forced to go from hence by five; it was a mortification to Mrs. Blount to go, when there was a hope of seeing you and Mr. Fortescue." There are three more letters, without date, to Martha Blount, written from the Wells at Bristol, and from Stowe, in which Pope says, "I have no more room but to give Lady Gerard my hearty services." And "once more my services to Lady Gerard." "I desire you will write a post-letter to my man John, at what time you would have the pine apples, to send to Lady Gerard." Probably Martha Blount's Lady Gerard was a descendant of Rea's.

A most curious account of the Tulipomania, or rage for tulips, formerly in Holland, may be seen in Phillips's Flora Historica.

Perhaps no one more truly painted rich pastoral scenes than Isaac Walton. This occurs in many, many pages of his delightful Angler. The late ardently gifted, and most justly lamented Sir Humphry Davy too, in his Salmonia, has fondly caught the charms of Walton's pages. His pen riots in the wild, the beautiful, the sweet, delicious scenery of nature:--"how delightful in the early spring, to wander forth by some clear stream, to see the leaf bursting from the purple bud, to scent the odours of the bank, perfumed by the violet, and enamelled as it were with the primrose, and the daisy; to wander upon the fresh turf below the shade of trees, whose bright blossoms are filled with the music of the bee." Mr. Worlidge, in his Systema Agriculturæ, says, that the delights in angling "rouzes up the ingenious early in the spring mornings, that they have the benefit of the sweet and pleasant morning air, which many through sluggishness enjoy not; so that health (the greatest treasure that mortals enjoy) and pleasure, go hand in hand in this exercise. What can be more said of it, than that the most ingenious, most use it." Mr. Whately, in his usual charming style, thus paints the spring:--"Whatever tends to animate the scene, accords with the season, which is full of youth and vigour, fresh and sprightly, brightened by the verdure of the herbage, and the woods, gay with blossoms, and flowers, and enlivened by the songs of the birds in all their variety, from the rude joy of the skylark, to the delicacy of the nightingale."

Tusser seems somewhat of Meager's opinion:--

Sow peason and beans, in the wane of the moon, Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soon; That they with the planet may rest and arise, And flourish, with bearing most plentifull wise.

The celebrated Quintinye says, "I solemnly declare, that after a diligent observation of the moon's changes for thirty years together, and an enquiry whether they had any influence in gardening, the affirmative of which has been so long established among us, I perceive it was no weightier than old wives' tales."

The moon (says Mr. Mavor) having an influence on the tides and the weather, she was formerly supposed to extend her power over all nature.

There is a treatise, by Claude Gadrois, on the Influences des Astres. Surely this merits perusal, when the Nouv. Dict. Hist. thus speaks of him:--"Il étoit ami du célebre Arnauld et méritoit de l'etre par la justesse de son esprit et la puretè de ses moeurs, par la bonté de son caractere et par la droiture de son coeur."

The following wise experiment occurs in an ancient book on husbandry; but if the two parties there mentioned had lived with Leonard Meager, one must not do him the injustice of supposing he would have been a convert to their opinion:--"Archibius is said to have written (or sent word most likely) to Antiochus, king of Syria, that if you bury a speckled toad inclosed in an earthen pot, in the middle of your garden, the same will be defended from all hurtful weather and tempests." Meager, however, is kept in countenance by Mr. Worlidge, who, in his chapter of Prognostics, at the end of his interesting Systemæ Agriculturæ, actually states that

If dog's guts rumble and make a noise, it presageth rain or snow.

The cat, by washing her face, and putting her foot over her ear, foreshews rain.

The squeaking and skipping up and down of mice and rats, portend rain.

Leonard Meager thus notices a nurseryman of his day:--"Here follows a catalogue of divers sorts of fruits, which I had of my very loving friend, Captain Garrle, dwelling at the great nursery between Spittlefields and Whitechapel; a very eminent and ingenious nurseryman." Perhaps this is the same nurseryman that Rea, in his Pomona, mentions. He says (after naming some excellent pear-trees) "they may be had out of the nurseries about London, especially those of Mr. Daniel Stepping, and Mr. Leonard Girle, who will faithfully furnish such as desire these, or any other kinds of rare fruit-trees, of whose fidelity in the delivery of right kinds, I have had long experience in divers particulars, a virtue not common to men of that profession." At this period, the space between Spittlefields and Whitechapel, must have consisted of gardens, and perhaps superb country houses. The Earl of Devonshire had a fine house and garden near Petticoat-lane. Sir W. Raleigh had one near Mile-end. Some one (I forget the author) says, "On both sides of this lane (Petticoat-lane) were anciently hedges and rows of elm trees, and the pleasantness of the neighbouring fields induced several gentlemen to build their houses here; among whom was the Spanish Ambassador, whom Strype supposes was Gondamour." Gondamour was the person to please whom (or rather that James might the more easily marry his son Charles to one of the daughters of Spain, with her immense fortune) this weak monarch was urged to sacrifice the life of Raleigh.

Within one's own memory, it is painful to reflect, on the many pleasant fields, neat paddocks, rural walks, and gardens, (breathing pure air) that surrounded this metropolis for miles, and miles, and which are now ill exchanged for an immense number of new streets, many of them the receptacles only of smoke and unhealthiness.

These lines are from him, at whose death (says Sir W. Scott in his generous and glowing eulogy) we were stunned "by one of those death-notes which are peeled at intervals, as from an archangel's trumpet"--they are from "that mighty genius which walked amongst men as something superior to ordinary mortality, and whose powers were beheld with wonder, and something approaching to terror, as if we knew not whether they were of good or evil"--they are from "that noble tree which will never more bear fruit, or blossom! which has been cut down in its strength, and the past is all that remains to us of Byron: whose excellences will now be universally acknowledged, and his faults (let us hope and believe) not remembered in his epitaph." His "deep transported mind" (to apply Milton's words to him) thus continues his moralization:--

What are the hopes of man? old Egypt's king CHEOPS, erected the first pyramid, And largest; thinking it was just the thing To keep his memory whole, and mummy hid;

But somebody or other rummaging, Burglariously broke his coffin's lid: Let not a monument give you, or me, hopes, Since not a pinch of dust remains of CHEOPS.

The Quarterly Review, in reviewing Light's Travels, observes, that "Cheops employed three hundred and sixty thousand of his subjects for twenty years in raising this pyramid, or pile of stones, equal in weight to six millions of tons; and to render his precious dust more secure, the narrow chamber was made accessible only by small intricate passages, obstructed by stones of an enormous weight, and so carefully closed, externally, as not to be perceptible. Yet how vain are all the precautions of man! Not a bone was left of Cheops, either in the stone coffin, or in the vault, when Shaw entered the gloomy chamber." Sir Walter Scott himself, has justly received many eulogies. Perhaps none more heart-felt, than the effusion delivered at a late Celtic meeting, by that eloquent and honest lawyer, the present Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Exchequer, in Scotland, which was received by long, loud, and continued applause.

John Bauhine wrote a Treatise in 1591, De Plantis à Divis sanctisve nomen habentibus.

Their Preface to the above Vol. ii. has this observation: "Plants, when taken from the places whence they derive their extraction, and planted in others of different qualities, betray such fondness for their native earth, that with great difficulty they are brought to thrive in another; and in this it is that the florist's art consists; for to humour each plant with the soil, the sun, the shade, the degrees of dryness or moisture, and the neighbourhood it delights in, (for there is a natural antipathy between some plants, insomuch that they will not thrive near one another) are things not easily attainable, but by a length of study and application."

What these ruffles and lashes were, I know not. Perhaps the words of Johnson may apply to them:--

Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart. This mournful truth is every where confess'd, Slow rises worth, by poverty oppress'd.

Barnaby Gooche, in his Chapter on Gardens, calls the sun "the captaine and authour of the other lights, the very soule of the world."