world?); whereas it is in commendation of those who live and die so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them. This Horace calls deceiving the world; and in another place uses the same phrase", Secretum iter & fallentis semita vitæ. The secret tracts of the deceiving life. It is very elegant in Latin, but our English word will hardly bear up to that sense; and therefore Mr. Broom translates it very well Or from a life led, as it were, by stealth. Yet we say in our language, a thing deceives our sight, when it passes before us unperceived; and we may say well enough, out of the same authors, that time, with his friend Metrodorus: after Sometimes with sleep, sometimes with wine, than the best doctor, and the hangman more we strive The cares of life and troubles to deceive. But that is not to deceive the world, but to deceive ourselves, as Quintilian says 9, vitam fallere, to draw on still, and amuse, and deceive, our life, till it be advanced insensibly to the fatal period, and fall into that pit which nature hath prepared for it. The meaning of all this is no more than that most vulgar saying, Bene qui latuit, bene vixit, He has lived well, who has lain well hidden; which, if it be a truth, the world (I will swear) is sufficiently deceived for my part, I think it is, and that the pleasantest condition of life is, in incognito. What a brave privilege is it, to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envyed, from receiving and from paying all kind of ceremonies! It is, in my mind, a very delightful pastime, for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together, in places where they are by nobody known, nor know any body. It was the case of Æneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage. Venus herself, A vail of thicken'd air around them cast, The common story of Demosthenes' confession, than the lord chief justice of a city. Every or, I love and commend a true good-fame, because it is the shadow of virtue: not that it doth any good to the body which it accompanies, but it is an efficacious shadow, and, like that of St. Peter, cures the diseases of others. The best kind of glory, no doubt, is that which is reflected from honesty, such as was the glory of Cato and Aristides; but it was harmful to them both, and is seldom beneficial to any man, whilst he lives; what it is to him after his death, I cannot say,' because I love not philosophy merely notionaland conjectural, and no man who has made the experiment has been so kind as to come back to inform us. Upon the whole matter, I account a person who has a moderate mind and fortune, and lives in the conversation of two or three agreeable friends, with little commerce in the world besides, who is esteemed well enough by his few neighbours that know him, and is truly irreproachable by any body; and so, after a healthful quiet life, before the great inconveniencies of old-age, goes more silently out of it than he came in (for I would not have him so much as cry in the exit): this innocent deceiver of the world, as Horace calls him, this muta persona, I take to have been more happy in his part, than the greatest actors that fill the stage with show and noise, nay, even than Augustus himself, who asked, with his last breath, whether he had not played his farce very well. SENICA, EX THYESTE, ACT II, CuoR, Let others proudly stand, and, for a while The giddy danger to beguile, That I no fall to earth may fear, From the long ruins of the great. As time, that measures it, does glide, To him, alas, to him, 1 fear, IV. OF AGRICULTURE. THE first wish of Virgil (as you will find anon by his verses) was to be a good philosopher; the second, a good husbandman: and God (whom he seemed to understand better than most of the most learned heathens) dealt with him, just as he did with Solomon; because he prayed for wisdom in the first place, he added all things else, which were subordinately to be desired. He made him one of the best philosophers, and best husbandmen; and, to adorn and communicate both those faculties, the best poet: he made him, besides all this, a rich man, and a man who desired to be no richer O fortunatus nimium, & bona qui sua novit ! or To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; rather, a retreat from the world, as it is man's, into the world, as it is God's. very nigh to those of a philosopher. There is no other sort of life that affords so many branches of praise to a panegyrist: The utility of it to a man's self; the usefulness, or rather necessity, of it to all the rest of mankind; the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the dignity. The utility (I mean plainly the lucre of it) is not so great, now in our nation, as arises from merchandise and the trading of the city, from whence many of the best estates and chief honours of the kingdom are derived: we have no men now fetched from the plough to be made lords, as they were in Rome to be made consuls and dictators; the reason of which I conceive to be from an evil custoin, now grown as strong among us as if it were a law, which is, that no men put their children to be bred-up apprentices in agriculture, as in other trades, but such who are so poor, that when they come to be men, they have not wherewithal to set up in it, and so can only farm some small parcel of ground, the rent of which devours all but the bare subsistence of the tenant: whilst they who are proprietors of the land are either too proud, or, for want of that kind of education, too ignorant, to improve their estates, though the means of doing it be as easy and certain in this, as in any other track of commerce. If there were always two or three thousand youths, for seven or eight years, bound to this profession, that they might learn the whole art of it, and afterwards be enabled to be masters in it, by a moderate stock; I cannot doubt but that we should see as many aldermen's estates made in the country, as now we do out of all kind of merchandizing in the city. There are as many ways to be rich, and, which is better, there is no possibility to be poor, without such negligence as can neither have excuse nor pity: for a little ground will without question feed a little family, and the superfluities of life (which are now in some cases by custom made almost necessary) must be supplied out of the superabundance of art and industry, or contemned by as great a degree of philosophy. As for the necessity of this art, it is evident enough, since this can live without all others, and no one other without this. This is like speech, without which the society of men cannot be preserved: the others like figures and tropes of speech, which serve only to adorn it. Many nations have lived, and some do still, without any art but this: not so elegantly, Í confess, but still they live; and almost all the other arts, which are here practised, are beholden to this for most of their materials. But, since nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and fortune allows but to a very few the opportunities or possibility, of applying themselves wholly to philosophy, the best mixture of human affairs that we can make, are the employments of a country life. It is, as Columella 2 calls it, Res sine dubitatione The innocence of this life is the next thing proxima, & quasi consanguinea sapientiæ, the for which I commend it; and if husbandmen nearest neighbour, or rather next in kindred, to philosophy. Varro says, the principles of it are preserve not that, they are much to blame, for the same which Ennius made to be the principles no men are so free from the temptations of iniof all nature, Earth, Water, Air, and the Sun. It quity. They live by what they can get by indoes certainly comprehend more parts of phi-dustry from the earth; and others, by what losophy, than any one profession, art, or science, in the world besides: and therefore Cicero says3, the pleasures of a husbandman, mihi ad sapientis vitam proxime videntur accedere, come 3 De Sencet. 2 Lib. I. c. i. they can catch by craft from men. They live upon an estate given them by their mother; and others, upon an estate cheated from their brethren. They live, like sheep and kine, by the allowances of nature: and others, like wolves And and foxes, by the acquisitions of rapine. I hope, I may affirm (without any offence to the great) that sheep and kine are very useful, and that wolves and foxes are pernicious creatures. They are, without dispute, of all men the most quiet, and least apt to be inflamed to the disturbance of the commonwealth; their manner of life inclines them, and interest binds them, to love peace; in our late mad and miserable civil wars, all other trades, even to the meanest, set forth whole troops, and raised up some great commanders, who became famous and mighty for the mischiefs they had done: but I do not remember the name of any one husbandman, who had so considerable a share in the twenty years ruin of his country, as to deserve the curses of his countrymen. And if great delights be joined with so much innocence, I think it is ill done of men, not to take them here, where they are so tame, and ready at hand, rather than hunt for them in courts and cities, where they are so wild, and the chase so troublesome and dangerous. We are here among the vast and noble scenes of nature; we are there among the pitiful shifts of policy; we walk here in the light and open ways of the divine bounty; we grope there in the dark and confused labyrinths of human malice our senses are here feasted with the clear and genuine taste of their objects; which are all sophisticated there, and for the most part overwhelmed with their contraries. Here pleasure looks, methinks, like a beautiful, constant, and modest wife; it is there an impudent, fickle, and painted harlot. Here is harmless and cheap plenty; there guilty and expenceful lux ury. I shall only instance in one delight more, the most natural and best-natured of all others, a perpetual companion of the husbandman; and that is, the satisfaction of looking round about him, and seeing nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art and diligence; to be always gathering of some fruits of it, and at the same time to behold others ripening, and others budding to see all his fields and gardens covered with the beauteous creatures of his own. industry; and to see, like God, that all his works are good: -Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; ipsi Agricolæ tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus 4. The antiquity of his art is certainly not to be contested by any other. The three first men in the world, were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grazier; and if any man object that the second of these was a murtherer, I desire he would consider, that as soon as he was so, he quited our profession, and turned builder. It is for this reason, I suppose, that Ecclesiasticus 5 forbids us to hate husbandry; "because," says he, the Most High has created it." We are all born to this art, and taught by nature to nourish our bodies by the same earth out of which 4 Virg. Æn. i. 504, &c, 5 Chap. vii. 15. they were made, and to which they must return, and pay at last for their sustenance. Behold the original and primitive nobility of all those great persons, who are too proud now, not only to till the ground, but almost to tread upon it. We may talk what we please of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent; but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms. All these considerations make me fall into the wonder and complaint of Columella, how it should come to pass that all arts or sciences (for the dispute, which is an art, and which a science, does not belong to the curiosity of us husbandmen) metaphysic, physic, morality, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, &c. which are all, I grant, good and useful faculties, (except only metaphysic, which I do not know whether it be any thing or no) but even vaulting, fencing, dancing, attiring, cookery, carving, and such-like vanities, should all have public schools and masters; and yet that we should never see or hear of any man, who took upon him the profession of teaching this so pleasant, so virtuous, so profitable, so honourable, so necessary art. A man would think, when he is in serious humour, that it were but a vain, irrational, and ridiculous thing for a great company of men and women to run up and down in a room together, in a hundred several postures and figures, to no purpose, and with no design; and therefore dancing was invented first, and only pra tised anciently, in the ceremonies of the heathen religion, which consisted all in mommery and madness: the latter being the chief glory of the worship, and accounted divine inspiration: this, I say, a severe man would think; though I dare not determine so far against so customary a part, now, of good-breeding. And yet, who is there among our gentry, that does not entertain a dancing-master for his children, as soon as they are able to walk? But, did ever any father provide a tutor for his son, to instruct him betimes in the nature and improvements of that land which he intended to leave him? That is at least a superfluity, and this a defect, in our manner of education: and therefore I could wish (but cannot in these times much hope to see it) that one college in each university were erected, and appropriated to this study, as well as there are to medicine and the civil law there would be no need of making a body of scholars and fellos, with certain endowments, as in other colleges; it would suffice, if, after the manner of halls in Cxford, there were only four professors constituted (for it would be too much work for only one master, or principal, as they call him there) to teach these four parts of it: First, Aration, and all things relating to it. Secondly, Pasturage. Thirdly, Gardens, Orchards, Vineyards, and Woods. Fourthly, all parts of Rural Oeconomy; which would contain the government of Bees, Swine, Poultry, Decoys, Ponds, &c. and all that which Varro calls villaticas pastiones, together with the sports of the field (which ought to be looked upon not only as pleasures, but as parts of house-keeping), and the domestical conservation and uses of all that is brought in by industry abroad. The business of these professors should not be, as is commonly practised in other arts, only to read pompous and superficial lectures, out of Virgil's Georgics, Pliny, Varro, or Columella; but to instruct their pupils in the whole method and course of this study, which might be run through perhaps with diligence in a year or two; and the continual succession of scholars, upon a moderate taxation for their diet, lodging, and learning, would be a sufficient constant revenue for maintenance of the house and the professors, who should be men not chosen for the ostentation of critical literature, but for solid and experimental knowledge of the things they teach; such men, so industrious and public-spirited, as I conceive Mr. Hartlib to be, if the gentleman be yet alive but it is needless to speak further of my thoughts of this design, unless the present disposition of the age allowed more probability of bringing it into execution. What I have further to say of the country life, shall be borrowed from the poets, who were always the most faithful and affectionate friends to it. Poetry was born among the shepherds. extant (if Homer, as some think, preceded him, but I rather believe they were contemporaries); and he is the first writer too of the art of husbandry: "he has contributed (says Columella) not a little to our profession;" I suppose, he means not a little honour, for the matter of his instructions is not very important; his great antiquity is visible through the gravity and simplicity of his stile. The most acute of all his sayings concerns our purpose very much, and is couched in the reverend obscurity of an oracle mér hou walès, The half is more than the whole. The occasion of the speech is this; his brother Perseus had, by corrupting some great men, (Bacinéas dagopayas, great bribe-eaters he calls them) gotten from him the half of his estate. It is no matter (says he); they have not done me so much prejudice as they imagine: Νήπιοι, ἐδ ̓ ἴσασιν, κ. τ. λ. Unhappy they, to whom God has not reveal'd, By a strong light which must their sense controle, That half a great estate's more than the whole : Unhappy, from whom still conceal'd does lie Of roots and herbs the wholesome luxury. This I conceive to have been honest Hesiod's meaning. From Homer we must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and could neither work in the country, nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest places; he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars, and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his goodwill a little. For, though he could do us no honour in the person of his hero Ulysses (much less of Achilles), because his whole time was consumed in wars and voyages; yet he makes his father Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting and even dunging his own grounds. Ye see he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumæus, who kept the hogs, with wonderful respect, dv içógov, the divine swineherd: he could have done no more for Menelaus or Agamemnon. And Theocritus (a very ancient poet, but he was one of our own tribe, for he wrote nothing but pastorals) gave the same epithet to an husbandman, ἀμείβελο δῖος ἀγρώτης 9, the divine husbandman replied to Hercules, who was but do himself. These were civil Greeks, and who understood the dignity of our calling; Among the Romans we have, in the first place, our truly-divine Virgil, who, though by the favour of Mæcenas and Augustus he might have been one of the chief men of Rome, yet chose rather to employ much of his time in the exercise, and much of his immortal wit in the praise and instructions, of a rustic life; who, though he Idyll. xxv. ver. 31. had written before whole books of pastorals and georgics, could not abstain in his great and imperial poem from describing Evander, one of his best princes, as living just after the homely manner of an ordinary countryman. He seats him in a throne of maple, and lays him but upon a bear's-skin; the kine and oxen ate lowing in his court-yard; the birds under the eves of his window call him up in the morning; and when he goes abroad, only two dogs go along with him for his guard at last, when he brings Eneas into his royal cottage, he makes him say this memorable compliment, greater than ever yet was spoken at the Escurial, the Louvre, or our Whitehall: Hæc (inquit) limina victor Finge Deo rcbúsque veni non asper egenis. This humble roof, this rustic court (said he) The next man, whom we are much obliged to, both for his doctrine and example, is the next best poet in the world to Virgil, his dear friend. Horace; who, when Augustus had desired Mæcenas to persuade him to come and live domestically and at the same table with him, and to be secretary of state of the whole world under him, or rather jointly with him, for he says, ut nos in epistolis scribendis adjuvet, could not be tempted to forsake his Sabin, or Tiburtin manor, for so rich and so glorious a trouble. There was never, I think, such an example as this in the world, that he should have so much moderation and courage as to refuse an offer of such greatness, and the emperor so much generosity and goodnature as not to be at all offended with his refusal, but to retain still the same kindness, and express it often to him in most friendly and familiar letters, part of which are still extant. If I should produce all the passages of this excellent author upon the several subjects which I treat of in this book, I must be obliged to translate half his works; of which I may say more truly than in my opinion he did of Homer, Qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non, Planiùs & meliùs Chrysippo & Crantore dicit. I shall content myself upon this particular theme with three only, one out of his Odes, the other out of his Satires, the third out of his Epistles; and shall forbear to collect the suffrages of all other poets, which may be found scattered up and down through all their writings, and especially in Martial's. But I must not omit to make some excuse for the bold undertaking of my own unskilful pencil upon the beauties of a face that has been drawn before by so many great masters; especially, that I should dare to do it in 'Virg. Æn. viii. 365. 21Ep. ii. 3. Latin verses (though of another kind), and have the confidence to translate them. I can only say, that I love the matter, and that ought to cover many faults; and that I run not to contend with those before me, but follow to applaud them. A Translation out of VIRGIL. Georg. Lib. II. 458. On happy (if his happiness he knows) The country swain, on whom kind Heaven bestows. At home all riches, that wise nature needs; Whom the just earth with easy plenty feeds. 'Tis true, no morning tide of clients comes, And fills the painted channels of his rooms, Adoring the rich figures, as they pass, In tapestry wrought, or cut in living brass; Nor is his wool superfluously dy'd With the dear poison of Assyrian pride: Nor do Arabian perfumes vainly spoil The native use and sweetness of his oil. Instead of these, his calm and harmless life, Free from th' alarms of fear, and storms of strife, Does with substantial blessedness abound, And the soft wings of Peace cover him round: Through artless grots the murmuring waters glide; Thick trees both against heat and cold provide, From whence the birds salute him ; and his ground With lowing herds and bleating sheep does sound; And all the rivers and the forests nigh, Both food and game, and exercise, supply. Here a well-harden'd, active youth we see, Taught the great art of cheerful poverty. Here, in this place alone, there still do shine Some streaks of love, both human and divine; From hence Astræa took her flight, and here Still her last footsteps upon Earth appear. 'Tis true, the first desire, which does control All the inferior wheels that move my soul, Is, that the Muse me her high-priest would make, Into her holiest scenes of mystery take, And open there, to my mind's purged eye, Those wonders, which to sense the gods deny: How in the Moon such change of shapes is found, The Moon, the changing world's eternal bound; What shakes the solid Earth, what strong disease Dares trouble the firm centre's ancient ease; What makes the sea retreat, and what advance (Varieties too regular for chance);" What drives the chariot on of winter's light, And stops the lazy waggon of the night. But, if my dull and frozen blood deny To send forth spirits, that raise a soul so high, In the next place, let woods and rivers be My quiet, though inglorious, destiny. In life's cool vale let my low scene be laid; Cover me, gods, with Tempe's thickest shade. Happy the man, I grant, thrice happy, he, Who can through gross effects their causes see: Whose courage from the deeps of knowledge springs, Nor vainly fears inevitable things; |