On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening Part 24

[19] One almost fancies one perceives Lord Bacon's attachment to gardens, or to rural affairs, even in the speech he made before the n.o.bility, when first taking his seat in the High Court of Chancery; he hoped "that these same _brambles_ that _grow_ about justice, of needless charge and expence, and all manner of exactions, might be rooted out;"

adding also, that immediate and "_fresh_ justice was the _sweetest_."

Mr. Mason, in a note to his English Garden, after paying a high compliment to Lord Bacon's picturesque idea of a garden, thus concludes that note:--"Such, when he descended to matters of more elegance (for, when we speak of Lord Bacon, to treat of these was to descend,) were the amazing powers of this universal genius."

[20] Mr. Pope's delight in gardens, is visible even in the condensed allusion he makes to them, in a letter to Mr. Digby; "I have been above a month strolling about in Buckinghams.h.i.+re and Oxfords.h.i.+re, from garden to garden, but still returning to Lord Cobham's, with fresh satisfaction. I should be sorry to see my Lady Scudamore's, till it has had the full advantage of Lord Bathurst's improvements."

[21] A biographer thus speaks of the Prince de Ligne: "Quand les rois se reunirent a Vienne en 1814, ils se firent tous un devoir de l'accuellier avec distinction, et furent enchante de la vivacite de son esprit, et de son intarissable gaiete, qui malgre ses infirmites et son grand age, ne l'avoit pasencore abandonne. Ses saillies, et ses bon mots etoient comme autrefois repetes pour tous." His generous heart thus speaks of the abused and unfortunate Marie Antoinette:--"The breath of calumny has not even respected the memory of the loveliest and best of women, of whose spotless heart and irreproachable conduct, no one can bear stronger evidence than I. Her soul was as pure as her face was fair; yet neither virtue nor beauty could save the victim of sanguinary liberty." In relating this (says his biographer), his voice faultered, and his eyes were suffused with tears. He thus briefly states, with his usual humour and vivacity, his conversation with Voltaire as to the garden at Ferney:

_P. de L._--Monsieur, Monsieur, cela doit vous coupe beaucoup, quel charmant jardin!

_Volt._--Oh! mon jardinier est un bete: c'est moi meme qui ait fait tout.

_P. de L._--Je le croi.

[22] Monsieur Thomas, in his eulogy of Descartes says, it should have been p.r.o.nounced at the foot of Newton's statue: or rather, Newton himself should have been his panegyrist. Of this eulogy, Voltaire, in a most handsome letter to Mons. Thomas, thus speaks:--"votre ouvrage m'enchante d'un bout a l'autre, et Je vais le relire des que J'aurai dicte ma lettre." The sleep and expanding of flowers are most interestingly reviewed by Mr. Loudon in p. 187 of his Encyclop., and by M. V. H. de Thury, in the above discourse, a few pages preceding his seducing description of the magnificent garden of M. de Boursault.

So late ago as the year 1804 it was proposed at Avignon, to erect an obelisk in memory of Petrarch, at Vaucluse: "il a ete decide, qu'on l'elevera, vis-avis _l'ancien jardin_ de Petrache, lieu ou le lit de sorgue forme un angle."

[23] This garden (as Mr. Walpole observes) was planted by the poet, enriched by him with the fairy gift of eternal summer.

[24] Mr. Pope thus mentions the vines round this cave:--

Depending vines the shelving cavern skreen, With purple cl.u.s.ters blus.h.i.+ng through the green.

[25] Nearly eight pages of Mr. Loudon's Encyclop. are devoted to a very interesting research on the gardens of the Romans. Sir Joseph Banks has a paper on the Forcing Houses of the Romans, with a list of Fruits cultivated by them, now in our gardens, in vol. 1 of the _Hort. Trans._

[26] Dr. Pulteney gives a list of several ma.n.u.scripts in the Bodleian Library, the writers of which are unknown, and the dates not precisely determined, but supposed to have been written, if not prior to the invention of printing, at least before the introduction of that art into England. I select the two following.--

No. 2543. De Arboribus, Aromatis, et _Floribus_.

No. 2562. Glossarium Latino-anglic.u.m Arborum, _Fructuum_, Frugam, &c.

And he states the following from Bib. S. Petri Cant:--

No. 1695. Notabilia de Vegetabilibus, et Plantis.

Dr. Pulteney observes, that the above list might have been considerably extended, but that it would have unnecessarily swelled the article he was then writing.

The Nouv. Dict. Hist. mentions a personage whose attachment to his garden, and one of whose motives for cultivating that garden, does not deserve a notice:--"Attale III. Roi de Pergame, fils de Stratonice, soulla la throne en repandant le sang de ses amis et de sea parens. Il abandonna ensuite le son de ses affaires _pour s'occuper entirement de son jardin_. Il y cultivoit des poisons, tels que l'aconit et la cigue, qu'il envoyoit quelque fois en present a ses amis. Il mourut 133 ans avant Jesus Christ."

[27] To have completed the various contrasting vicissitudes of this poor _Suffolk_ farmer's life, he should have added to his other employments, those of another _Suffolk_ man, the late W. Lomax, who had been _grave-digger_ at the pleasant town of Bury St. Edmund's, for thirty-six years, and who, also, for a longer period than thirty-six years, had been a _morrice-dancer_ at all the elections for that borough.

[28] Gerarde, speaking of good sorts of apples and pears, thus mentions the above named _Pointer_:--"Master Richard Pointer has them all growing in his ground at Twickenham, near London, who is a most cunning and curious grafter and planter of all manner of rare fruits; and also in the ground of an excellent grafter and painful planter, Master Henry Bunbury, of Touthil-street, near unto Westminster; and likewise in the ground of a diligent and most affectionate lover of plants, Master Warner, neere Horsely Down, by London; and in divers other grounds about London."

[29] The fate of this poor man reminds one of what is related of Corregio:--"He received from the mean canons of Parma, for his a.s.sumption of the Virgin, the small pittance of two hundred livres, and it was paid him in copper. He hastened with the money to his starving family; but as he had six or eight miles to travel from Parma, the weight of his burden, and the heat of the climate, added to the oppression of his breaking heart, a pleurisy attacked him, which, in three days, terminated his existence and his sorrows in his fortieth year."

If one could discover a portrait of either of the authors mentioned in the foregoing list, one might, I think, inscribe under each of such portraits, these verses:

Ce pourtrait et maint liure Par le peintre et l'escrit, Feront reuoir et viure Ta face et ton esprit.

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."

[30] "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."

[31] "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."

[32] 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 encompa.s.sed 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."

[33] 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 Devons.h.i.+re. "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.

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

[35] 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 Agriculturae, 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."

[36] 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 etoit ami du celebre Arnauld et meritoit de l'etre par _la justesse de son esprit_ et la purete de ses moeurs, par la bonte 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 Systemae Agriculturae, actually states that

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

The cat, by was.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce between Spittlefields and Whitechapel, must have consisted of gardens, and perhaps superb country houses. The Earl of Devons.h.i.+re 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 Amba.s.sador, 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.