[Footnote 3: To the list of ancient authors, as Cato, Columella, Varro,
Palladius, Virgil, Theocritus, Tibullus, selections might be added from
Cowley, Marlowe, Browne, Spenser, Tusser, Dyer, Phillips, Shenstone,
Cowper, Thomson, and others less known. Evelyn's works are of great
value, his Kalendarium Hortense particularly. And for showing the state
of agriculture and of the language in his time, Tusser's Five Hundred
Points of Husbandry is full of information, while his quaint humor
adds to his rugged rhymes a primitive charm. Then of the old herbals,
Gerard's is best known. He was the father of English herbalists, and
had a garden attached to his house in Holbern. Coles published his
Adam in Eden, the Paradise of Plants, in 1659; Austin his Treatise on
Fruit Trees ten years earlier. Dr. Holland's translation of the School
of Salerne, or the Regiment of Health, appeared in 1649. Thos. Tryon
wrote on the virtues of plants, and on health, about the same time, and
his works are very suggestive and valuable. Miller, gardener to the
Chelsea Gardens, gave the first edition of his Gardener's Dictionary
to the press in 1731. Sir William Temple also wrote sensibly on
herbs. Cowley's Six Books of Plants was published in English in 1708.
Phillips' History of Cultivated Plants, etc., published in 1822, is a
book of great merit. So is Culpepper's Herbal.]
Cowley and Evelyn are of rural authors the most attractive. Cowley's
Essays are delightful reading. Nor shall I forgive his biographer
for destroying the letters of a man of whom King Charles said at his
interment in Westminster Abbey, "Mr. Cowley has not left a better in
England." The friend and correspondent of the most distinguished poets,
statesmen, and gentlemen of his time, himself the first poet of his
day, his letters must have been most interesting and important, and but
for the unsettled temper of affairs, would doubtless have been added to
our polite literature.
Had King Charles remembered Cowley's friend Evelyn, the compliment both
to the living and dead would have been just. Evelyn was the best of
citizens and most loyal of subjects. A complete list of his writings
shows to what excellent uses he gave himself. The planter of forests in
his time, he might be profitably consulted as regards the replanting of
New England now.
Respecting his planting, and the origin of his Sylva, he writes to his
friend, Lady Sunderland, August, 1690:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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