To a keen enjoyment of the pleasures of collectorship, the King added, in 1787, a passing taste of those of authorship. As a Collector, the bibliomania did not engross him. He had a delight in amassing fine plants as well as fine books. The _Hortus Kewensis_ (in both applications of the term) was largely indebted to his liberality of expenditure and to his far-spread research. He sent botanic missionaries to the remotest parts of Asia, as well as to Africa. He took the most cordial interest in those varied voyages of discovery which—as I have observed in a former chapter—cast so distinctive a lustre on his reign, and in consequence of which such large additions were made to our natural history collections, public and private. And he did much to promote scientific agriculture, both by precept and by example. It was as a practical agriculturist that the King (under a slight veil of pseudonymity[16]) made his bow to the reading public by the publication of seven articles in Arthur YOUNG’S useful and then well-known periodical, the _Annals of Agriculture_. Those articles have a threefold aim. They inculcate the wisdom, for certain soils, of an intermediate system of treatment and of cropping, midway between the old routine and the drill-husbandry, then of recent introduction; they describe several new implements, introduced by DUCKET of Esher and of Petersham; and they advocate an almost entire rejection of fallows. They further describe a method, also introduced by Farmer DUCKET, and then peculiar, of destroying that farmer’s pest, couch-grass (_triticum repens_), by trench-ploughing it deep into the ground, and contain many other practical suggestions, some of which seem to have been empirical, and others so good that they have become trite. But the best service rendered by GEORGE THE THIRD to the agricultural pursuits, of which he was so fond, was his introduction of the Merino flocks, which became conspicuous ornaments to the great and little parks at Windsor. Part of the success which, for a time, attended the importation of those choice Merino breeds was due to the zealous co-operation of Lord SOMERVILLE and of Sir Joseph BANKS [see the next chapter], but the King himself took a real initiative in the matter; acquired real knowledge about it; and deserved, by his personal efforts, the cognomen given him (by some of those worthy farmers who used to attend the annual sales at Windsor) of ‘the Royal Shepherd.’ [Sidenote: ILLNESS OF GEORGE III;] The recreative pursuits, alike of the book-collector and of the agriculturist, as well as the labours of the conscientious monarch, were at length to be arrested by that great calamity which, after clouding over some months of the years of vigour, was destined to veil in thick gloom all the [Sidenote: 1810.] years of decline—the years when great public triumphs and crushing family afflictions passed equally unnoted by the recluse of Windsor.