was half dead with fear, cold, and exhaustion, and seemed to look as in a dream. Suddenly a new object appeared on the scene, a vessel, pitching about fearfully in the rough sea, rounded the headland and ran in close under the lee of the shore. There was a rush backwards among the wreckers, then a bright flash from the vessel's side, and a dull roar, as the revenue cutter-for I soon recognized her-fired upon the men on shore. Then a boat put off. The crew with some difficulty effected a landing, and there followed a scene of wild confusion-shouts, blows, pistol shots, then darkness. I was lying nearly insensible in the "Monk's Chair," when a loud shout from above, borne by the wind, reached my ears; a glimmer ing light appeared, which I saw was a lantern let down the cliff: this I received and held up as a signal. In about half-an-hour a rope with a slip-noose was lowered, and fastening this round my waist I was at length drawn up to the top, and found myself in the presence of Lieutenant Barton, of the revenue cutter, and a small crowd, among whom I recognized young Dick Burley, who was handcuffed, and watched by two of the custom-house officers. It appears that he, when captured at the bottom of the cliff, reported my dangerous position, and acted as guide to my deliverers. Of the wreckers several had been badly wounded and two killed : one escaped, and the rest were tried and convicted: black Allan Woodruffe was killed by the first shot. WET-WEATHER WORK. I 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-people and Sir John Hope, or merely looked over from the kale-beds at the victorious fighters for Prince Charley, I cannot learn. It is certain only that before Culloden, and the final discomfiture of the Pretender, he avowed himself a good King's-man, and in many an after-year, over his pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle which surged wrathfully around his father's kale-garden by Preston Pans. But he did not stay long in Scotland: he became gardener for Sir James Douglas, into whose family (below-stairs) he eventually married. Afterwards he had experience in the royal gardens at Kew, and in Leicester Fields. Finally he became proprietor of a patch of ground in the neighbourhood 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. Davis, 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. Davis 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. Davis was a little doubtful of Abercrombie's style, but not at all doubtful 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. Davis 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 daresay, a good one: the scheme looked promising to a man whose vegetable-carts streamed every morning into London, and to the Doctor, mindful of his farm-retirement at the six-milestone on the Edgeware-road; 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 Parnell"; or perhaps his appointment as Professor of History to the Royal Society put him too much upon his dignity. At any rate the world has to regret a gardeningbook in which the shrewd practical knowledge of Abercrombie would have been refined by the grace and the always alluring limpidity of the style of Goldsmith. I know 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 laboured; but if the transparent simplicity of Goldsmith had once been thoroughly infused 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 Published 1770-71. perfume would have exuded from the flowers! But the scheme proved abortive. Goldsmith said, "I think our friend Abercrombie can write better about plants than I can." And so, doubtless, he could, so far as knowledge of their habits went. Eight years after, Abercrombie prepared a book called "Every Man his own Gardener"; but so doubtful was he of his own reputation, that he paid £20 to Mr. Thomas Mawe (the fashionable gardener of the Duke of Leeds) to allow him to place his name upon the title-page. I am sorry to record such a scurvy bit of hypocrisy in so competent a man. The book sold, however, and sold so well, that, a few years after, the elegant Mr. Mawe begged a visit from the nurseryman of Tottenham Court, whom he had never seen; so Abercrombie goes down to the seat of the Duke of Leeds, and finds his gardener so bedizened with powder, and wearing such a grand air, that he mistakes him for his lordship; but it is a mistake, we may readily believe, which the elegant Mr. Mawe forgives, and the two gardeners become capital friends. book.* 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 should 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 Garden,† for there is sweeter garden perfume in many another poem of the day that does not pique our curiosity 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." Abercrombie afterward published many works under his own name;* among these was "The Gardener's Pocket Journal," which maintained an unflagging popularity as a standard book for It was alleged, indeed, by those who loved to a period of half a century. This hardy Scotch-say ill-natured things, (Horace Walpole among man 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 after, as his quaint biographers tell us, "he expired, just as St. Paul's struck twelve-between April and May" as if the ripe old gardener could not tell which of these twin garden-months he loved the best; and so, with a foot planted in each, he made the leap into the realm of eternal spring. A noticeable fact in regard to this out-of-door old gentleman is, that he never took "doctor'sstuff" 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. In the year 1766 was published for the first time the posthumous work by John Locke, the great philosopher 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. I should love to give the reader a sample of the way in which the author of "An Essay concerning Human Understanding" wrote regarding horticultural matters. But, after some persistent search and inquiry, I have not been able to see or even to hear of a copy of the *Johnson enumerates fifteen, them,) that in the later years of his life he forgot his first love of Liberalism 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 reformers 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,-better every way than his poetry the grounds of his vicarage at Aston must have offered charming loitering-places. I will leave him idling there,-perhaps conning over some letter of his friend the poet Gray; had inscribed this verse of the "Elegy,"perhaps lounging in the very alcove where he "Here scattered oft, the loveliest of the year, If, indeed, he had known how to strew such should have had a poem that would have outshone "The Seasons." And this mention reminds me, that, although I have slipped past his period, I have said no word as yet of the Roxburgh poet; but he shall be neglected no longer. (The big book, my boy, upon the third shelf, with a worn back, labelled THOMSON.) Another Scotchman, Lord Kames, (Henry 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 Equity;" 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 Gentleman Farmer;"* but we must not judge it by our experience of the class who wear that title nowadays. Lord Kames recommends no waste of money, no extravagant 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 agri This poet is not upon the gardeners' or the agricultural lists. One can find no farm-method in him, indeed, 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 Rousseau'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 toiling cattle, comes swooping to our vision! The leaves rustle, the birds warble, the rivers roar a song. The sun beats on the plain; the winds carry waves into the grain; the clouds plant shadows on the mountains. The minute-culture, he found them involved in obscurity; ness and the accuracy of his observation are he went to the book of Nature for instruction, something wonderful; if farmers should not and commenced, like Descartes, with doubting study him, our young poets may. He never everything. He condemns the Roman husputs a song in the throat of a jay or a wood-bandry as fettered by superstitions, and gives a dove; he never makes a mother-bird break out piquant sneer at the absurd rhetoric and verin bravuras; he never puts a sickle into green bosity of Varro. Nor is he any more tolerant grain, or a trout in a slimy brook; he could of Scotch superstitions. Ile declares against picture no orchis growing on a hill-side,t or wasteful and careless farming. columbine nodding in a meadow. If the leaves shimmer, you may be sure the sun is shining; if a primrose lightens on the view, you may be sure there is some covert which the primroses love; and never by any licence does a white flower come blushing into his poem. I will not quote, where so much depends upon the atmosphere 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 autumn brooding with golden wings; and winter howls and screams in gusts, and tosses tempests 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 poet's passion for the country: it is from "The Castle of Indolence": He urges good ploughing as a primal necessity, and insists upon the use of the roller for rendering the surface of wheat-lands compact, and so retaining the moisture; nor does he attempt to reconcile this declaration with the Tull theory 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-tiles, dislikes open ditches, by reason of their interference 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 Tull system of their culture. Of clover he thinks as highly as the great English farmer, but does not believe in his notion of economizing seed: "Idealists," he says, “talk of four pounds to the acre; but when sown for cutting green, I would advise twenty-four 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 horses for all farm-labour; they cost less, keep for less, and sell for more; and he enters into arithmetical calculations to establish his propositions. He instances Mr. Burke, who ploughs with four oxen at Beaconsfield. How | not native: white clover never deteriorates in drolly it sounds to hear the author of "Letters England, nor bull-dogs. on a Regicide Peace" cited as an authority in But I will not linger on his theories. He is practical farming! He still further urges his represented to have been a kind and humane ox-working scheme on grounds of public man; but this did not forbid a hearty relish economy: it will cheapen food, forbid importa- (appearing often in his book) for any scheme tion of oats, and reduce wages. Again, he re- which promised to cheapen labour. "The commends soiling, by all the arguments which people on landed estates," he says, * 66 are trusted are used, and vainly used, with us. He shows by Providence to the owner's care, and the the worthlessness of manure dropped upon a proprietor is accountable for the management parched field, compared with the same duly of them to the Great God, who is the Creator cared for in court or stable; he proposes move- of both." It does not seem to have occurred able sheds for feeding, and enters into a compu- to the old gentleman that some day people tation of the weight of green clover which will might decline to be "managed." 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 twenty-eight stone per day," -involving constant cartage: still he is convinced of the profit of the method. His views on feeding ordinary store cattle, or accustoming them to change of food, are eminently practical. After speaking of the desirableness of providing 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 ninety-seven years ago, by one of the most accomplished Scotch judges, and in his eightieth year-another Varro, packing his luggage for his last voyage. One great value of Lord Kames's talk lies in the particularity of his directions: he does not despise mention of those minutiæ, 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 hours 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 small cocks. The third day put two cocks into one, enlarging every day the cocks till they are ready for the tramp rick [temporary field-stack]." A small portion of his book is given up to the discussion of the theory of agriculture; but he fairly warns his readers that he is wandering in the dark. If all theorists were as honest! He deplores the ignorance 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 *Pp. 177-179, edition of 1802, Edinburgh. + Pp. 166, 167. He gave the best proof of his practical tact in the conduct of his estate of Blair-Drummond, uniting 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 of gardening in the Elements of Criticism:"-"Other fine arts may be perverted to excite irregular, and even vicious emotions; but gardening, which inspires the purest and most refined pleasures, cannot fail to promote every good affection. The gaiety and harmony of mind it produceth inclineth 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 humanity 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 "Gentleman Farmer" of Lord Kames, written in the middle of the last century, and the countypaper, and the aged directors, in clean shirtcollars 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 land light-house, called Dunston Column, 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 Bloxholme, wished to visit Lincoln, a groom or two were sent out the morning before to explore a good path, and families were not unfrequently lost for days* together in crossing the heath. And this same heath, made up of a light fawn-coloured sand, lying on "dry, thirsty stone," was, twenty years since at least, blooming 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; thousands upon thousands of long-woolled sheep cropped the luxuriant pasturage, and the Dunston column was down. About the time of Lord Kames's establishment at Blair-Drummond, or perhaps a little earlier, a certain Master Claridge published "The Country Calendar: or, The Shepherd of *See Article of Philip Pusey, M.P., in “Transac tions of Royal Society," Vol. XIV. Banbury's Rules to know of the Change of the Weather." It professed to be based upon forty years' experience, and is said to have met with great favour. I name it only because it embodies these old couplets, which st ll lead a vagabond life up and down the pages of country almanacks : "If the grass grows in Janiveer, It grows the worst for 't all the year." "The Welshman had rather see his dam on the bier Than to see a fair Februeer." "When April blows his horn, It's good both for hay and corn." "A cold May and a windy Makes a full barn and a findy." "A swarm of bees in May Will any couplets of Tennyson reap so large a fame ? About the same period, John Mills, a fellow of the Royal Society, published a work of a totally different character-being very methodic, very full, very clear. It was distributed through five volumes. He enforces the teachings of Evelyn and Duhamel, and is commendatory of the views of Tull. The Rotherham plough is figured in his work, as well as thirteen of the natural grasses. He speaks of potatoes and turnips as established crops, and enlarges upon their importance. He clings to the Virgilian theory of small farms, and to the better theory of thorough tillage. In 1759 was issued the seventh edition of Miller's "Gardener's Dictionary," in which was for the first time adopted (in English) the classical system of Linnæus. If I have not before alluded to Philip Miller, it is not because he is undeserving. He was a correspondent of the chiefs in science over the Continent of Europe, and united to his knowledge a rare practical skill. He was superintendent of the famous Chelsea Gardens of the Apothecaries Company. He lies buried in the Chelsea churchyard, where the fellows of the Linnæan and Horticultural Societies of London have erected a monument to his memory. Has the reader ever sailed up the Thames, beyond Westminster? And does he remember a little spot of garden-ground, walled in by dingy houses, that lies upon the right bank of the river near to Chelsea Hospital? If he can recall two gaunt, flat-topped cedars which sentinel the walk leading to the river-gate, he will have the spot in his mind, where, nearly two hundred years ago, and a full century before the Kew parterres were laid down, the Chelsea Garden of the Apothecaries Company was established. It was in the open country then; and even *First published in 1724. Philip Miller, in 1722, walked to his work between hedge-rows, where sparrows chirped in spring, and in winter the fieldfare chattered: but the town has swallowed it; the city smoke has starved it; even the marble image of Sir Hans Sloane in its centre is but the mummy of a statue. Yet in the Physic Garden there are trees struggling still which Philip Miller planted; and I can readily believe that, when the old man, at seventy-eight (through some quarrel with the apothecaries), took his last walk to the river-bank, he did it with a sinking at the heart which kept by him till he died. I come now to speak of Thomas Whately, to whom I have already alluded, and of whom, from the scantiness of all record of his life, it is possible to say only very little. He lived at Nonsuch Park, in Surrey, not many miles from London, on the road to Epsom. He was engaged in public affairs, being at one time secretary to the Earl of Suffolk, and also a member of Parliament. But I enroll him in my wet-day service simply as the author of the most appreciative and most tasteful treatise upon landscape-gardening which has ever been written, not excepting either Price or Repton. It is entitled, Observations on Modern Gardening," and was first published in 1770. It was the same year translated into French by Latapie, and was to the Continental gardeners the first revelation of the graces which belonged to English cultivated landscape. In the course of the book he gives vivid descriptions of Blenheim, Hagley, Leasows, Claremont, and several other wellknown British places. He treats separately of Parks, Water, Farms, Gardens, Ridings, &c., illustrating each with delicate and tender transcripts of natural scenes. Now he takes us to the cliffs of Matlock, and again to the farm-flats of Woburn. His criticisms upon the places reviewed are piquant, full of rare apprehension of the most delicate natural beauties, and based on principles which every man of taste must accept at sight. As you read him he does not seem so much a theorizer or expounder as he does the simple interpreter of graces which had escaped your notice. His suggestions come upon you with such a momentum of truthfulness, that you cannot stay to challenge them. There is no argumentation, and no occasion for it. On such a bluff he tells us wood should be planted, and we wonder that a hundred people had not said the same thing before; on such a river meadow the grassy level should lie open to the sun, and we wonder who could ever have doubted it. Nor is it in matters of taste alone, I think, that the best things we hear seem always to have a smack of oldness in them, as if we remembered their virtue. "Capital!" we say; "but hasn't it been said before?" or, 'Precisely! I wonder I didn't do or say the same thing myself." Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any performance, you may be sure that it has been directed by a sound instinct. It is not a sort of criticism any one is apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash gardening. |