I will not pass wholly from the classic period, without allusion to the recent book of Professor Daubeny on Roman husbandry. It is charming, and yet disappointing,--not for failure, on his part, to trace the traditions to their sources, not for lack of learning or skill, but for lack of that _afflatus_ which should pour over and fill both subject and talker, where the talker is lover as well as master. Daubeny's husbandry lacks the odor of fresh-turned ground,--lacks the imprint of loving familiarity. He is clearly no farmer: every man who has put his hand to the plough (_aratori crede_) sees it. Your blood does not tingle at his story of Boreas, nor a dreamy languor creep over you when he talks of sunny south-winds. Had he written exclusively of bees, or trees, or flowers, there would have been a charming murmur, like the _susurrus_ of the poets,--and a fragrance as of crushed heaps of lilies and jonquils. But Daubeny approaches fanning as a good surgeon approaches a _cadaver_. He disarticulates the joints superbly; but there is no tremulous intensity. The bystanders do not feel the thrill with which they see a man bare his arm for a capital operation upon a live and palpitating body. * * * * * From the time of Palladius to the time of Pietro Crescenzi is a period of a thousand years, a period as dreary and impenetrable as the snow-cloud through which I see faintly a few spires staggering: so along the pages of Muratori's interminable annals gaunt figures come and go; but they are not the figures of farmers. Goths, wars, famines, and plague succeed each other in ghastly procession. Boëthius lifts, indeed, a little rural plaint from out of the gloom,-- "Felix nimium prior ætas, Contenta fidelibus arvis,"[18]-- but the dungeon closes over him; and there are outstanding orders of Charlemagne which look as if he had an eye to the crops of Italy, and to a good vegetable stew with his Transalpine dinners,--but for the most part the land is waste. I see some such monster as Eccelino reaping a harvest of blood. I see Lombards pouring down from the mountain-gates, with falcons on their thumbs, ready to pounce upon the purple _columbæ_ that trace back their lineage to the doves Virgil may have fed in the streets of Mantua. I see torrents of people, the third of them women, driven mad by some fanatical outcry, sweeping over the whole breadth of Italy, and consuming all green things as a fire consumes stubble. Think of what the fine villa of Pliny would have been, with its boxwood bowers and floating dishes, under the press of such crusaders! It was a precarious time for agricultural investments: I know nothing that could match it, unless it may have been last summer's harvests in the valley of the Shenandoah.