Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 by Various

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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.

James I., that conceited old pedant, whose "Counterblast to Tobacco" has
worked the poorest of 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 choicest melon-seeds of all
kinds, which His Majesty doth expect, as I had order both from ray Lord
Holderness 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-gardener 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
Holderness "a double-flowering yellow rose, of no ordinary nature";[3]
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 soldiers of
Cromwell found fine foraging-ground in it, when they 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 capacity
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 experiments 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 picture of a "Milke-Mayde,"
is severe, and, I dare say, truthful, upon the country-gentleman. "His
conversation," 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, he 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 _sub-poena_ can draw him to
_London_: and when he is there, he sticks fast upon every object, casts
his eyes away upon gazing, and becomes the prey of every cut-purse. 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 unfilled. 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
meditations. He expostulates with his oxen very understandingly, 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, wilt
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 his
grand-sires time, and is yet to make rashers for posterity. He
apprehends Gods blessings only in a good 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, notwithstanding 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 presume 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, under
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 disappoint in the figures;
but I suspect there might be in the rabbits.

Gentleman Speed speaks of turnips, clover, and potatoes; 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 measure of "Paradise Lost." This is its
taste:--

"Each soyl hath no liking of every grain,
Nor barley nor wheat is for every vein;
Yet know I no country so barren of soyl
But some kind of come may be gotten with toyl.
Though husband at home be to count the cost what,
Yet thus huswife within is as needful as that:
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 measure the extent of his contribution to the growth of good
husbandry. But the more thorough methods of investigation which he
instituted and encouraged 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
the same upon his fellow-landholders, in a "Discourse of Husbandrie."

The book was published under the name 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 sent 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 himself engaged for a time in commercial transactions, and came to
England about the year 1640. He wrote several theological tracts, edited
sundry agricultural works, including, among others, those of Sir Richard
Weston, and published his own observations upon the shortcomings 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 mystery." The work published under his name entitled "The
Legacy," besides notices of the Brabant husbandry, embraces epistles
from various farmers, who may be supposed to represent the progressive
agriculture of England. Among these letters I note one upon "Snaggreet,"
(shelly earth from river-beds); another upon "Seaweeds"; a third upon
"Sea-sand"; and a fourth upon "Woollen-rags."

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
Restoration. But he was not in favor with the people about Charles II.;
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 sensible old gentlemen
of his date, spoke of the art of husbandry 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 corn yonder upon the flat, which I have watched
since the day when it first shot up its little dainty spears of green,
until now it spindles has been faithfully ploughed and fed and tilled;
but how gross appliances all these, to the fine fibrous feeders that
have 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 deposits 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 laboratory 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
belongs to our day. And when I find one who fancies he has resolved all
the conditions which contribute to 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 sweating is not over yet.

If we are confronted with mystery, it is not blank, hopeless, fathomless
mystery. Our plummet-lines are only too short; but they are growing
longer. It is a lively mystery, that piques and tempts and rewards
endeavor. It unfolds with an appetizing delay. 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.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the progress in husbandry, without
being at any one period very brilliant, was decided and constant. If
there was anything like a relapse, and neglect of good culture, it was
most marked shortly after the Restoration. The country-gentlemen, who
had entertained a wholesome horror of Cromwell and his troopers, had,
during the Commonwealth, devoted themselves to a quiet life upon their
estates, repairing the damages which the Civil War had wrought in their
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 _novi homines_ of the
Commonwealth. With the return of Charles they abandoned their estates
once more to the bailiffs, and made a rush for the town and for their
share of the "leeks and onions."

But the earnest men were at work. Sainfoin and turnips were growing
every year into credit. The potato was becoming a crop of value; and in
the year 1664 a certain John Foster devoted a treatise to it, entitled,
"England's Happiness increased, or a Sure Remedy against all Succeeding
Dear Years, 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 below
ground. But Foster anticipates the full value of what had before been
counted a novelty and a curiosity. He advises how custards, paste,
puddings, and even bread, may be made from the flour of potatoes.

John Worlidge (1669) gives a full system of husbandry, advising green
fallows, and even recommending and describing a drill for the putting 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 treatises having been recited before the
Royal Society. The "Terra" is something muddy,[4] and is by no means
exhaustive; but the "Sylva" for more than a century was the British
planter's hand-book, being a judicious, sensible, and eloquent treatise
upon a subject as wide and as beautiful as its title. Even Walter
Scott,--himself a capital woodsman,--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
Rupert's famous troop. He married the daughter of the British ambassador
in Paris, through whom he came into possession 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 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 reverence
for a parterre of flowers as for any other of the tenderer graces of
life.

The British monarchs have always been more regardful 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 reply to the [Greek: EIKON BASIAIKE], "the licentious remissness
of his Sunday's theatre, accompanied with that reverend statute for
dominical jigs and May-poles, published 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 limited 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 snuffed their fragrance 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 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 the 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 remember that the tender
poet, whose rhythm 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, would be hard to say. I suspect that the hop was the
Protector's favorite among flowering plants, and that his admiration of
trees was measured by their capacity for timber. Yet that rare masculine
energy, which he and his men carried with them in their tread all over
England, was a very wakeful stimulus to productive agriculture.

Charles II. loved tulips, and befriended Evelyn. In his long residence
at Paris he had grown into a great fondness for the French gardens. He
afterward sent for Le Notre--who had laid out Versailles at an expense
of twenty millions of dollars--to superintend the planting of Greenwich
and St. James. Fortunately, no strict imitation 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 conservatory 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 sprung 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 incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a
population out of one of Watteau's pictures,--clean 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-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. And the stiff parterres,
terraces, and alleys of Le Notre are equally out of place in such a
scene. If, 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 distant 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 Charles's court.

This brings us upon our line of march again. Charles II. loved stiff
gardens; James II. loved stiff gardens; and William, with his
Low-Country tastes, out-stiffened both, with his

"topiary 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,--whose moneys, if he were like most poets, could
not be thrown away idly,--spent a large sum in levelling the hills
about his rural home at Beaconsfields. (We shall find a different poet
and treatment by-and-by in Shenstone.)

Only Milton, speaking from the very arcana of the Puritan rigidities,
breaks in upon these geometric formalities 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 Nature 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.

And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth
century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that
Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, 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 will not dress more
than seven hundred a head; and the cows, if killed, would not overrun
five hundred weight. 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 moorland, which
has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance 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 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
Wise, or of Parkinson, have their espaliers,--their plums, their
pears,[5] 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."

The lesser country-gentlemen, who have no establishments in town, rarely
venture up, for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of
the black-guard Cockneys. Their wives are staid dames, learned at the
brew-tub and in the buttery,--but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops
or patches. A great many of the older exotic plants have become
domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,--but
not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme. She may
read King James's Bible, or, if a Non-Conformist, Baxter's "Saint's
Rest"; while the husband 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."

Poetic feeling was more lacking in the country-life than in the
illustrative literature of the century. To say nothing of Milton's
brilliant little poems, "L'Allegro" and "Il 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
alluringly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys of
Hawthornden. 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 "Flower and the Leaf."

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