PART II. - CHAPTER VIII.
THE DOWNES.
WE now make our ascent to the second elevation or the hill countrey, known by the name of the Downes, or Salisbury Plaines; and they are the most spacious plaines in Europe, and the greatest remaines that I can heare of of the smooth primitive world when it lay all under water.
These downes runne into Hampshire, Berkshire, and Dorsetshire; but as to its extent in this county, it is from Red-hone, the hill above Urshfont, to Salisbury, north and south, and from Mere to Lurgershall, east and west. The turfe is of a short sweet grasse, good for the sheep, and delightfull to the eye, for its smoothnesse like a bowling green, and pleasant to the traveller; who wants here only variety of objects to make his journey lesse tedious: for here is "nil nisi campus et aer", not a tree, or rarely a bush to shelter one from a shower.
The soile of the downes I take generally to be a white earth or mawme. More south, sc. about Wilton and Chalke, the downes are intermixt with boscages that nothing can be more pleasant, and in the summer time doe excell Arcadia in verdant and rich turfe and moderate aire, but in winter indeed our air is cold and rawe. The innocent lives here of the shepherds doe give us a resemblance of the golden age. Jacob and Esau were shepherds; and Amos, one of the royall family, asserts the same of himself, for he was among the shepherds of Tecua [Tekoa] following that employment. The like, by God's own appointment, prepared Moses for a scepter, as Philo intimates in his life, when he tells us that a shepherd's art is a suitable preparation to a kingdome. The same he mentions in his Life of Joseph, affirming that the care a shepherd has over his cattle very much resembles that which a King hath over his subjects. The same St. Basil, in his Homily de St. Mamme Martyre has, concerning David, who was taken from following the ewes great with young ones to feed Israel. The Romans, the worthiest and greatest nation in the world, sprang from shepherds. The augury of the twelve vultures plac't a scepter in Romulus's hand, which held a crook before; and as Ovid sayes:-
"His own small flock each senator did keep."
Lucretius mentions an extraordinary happinesse, and as it were divinity in a shepherd's life: -
"Thro' shepherds' care, and their divine retreats."
And, to speake from the very bottome of my heart, not to mention the integrity and innocence of shepherds, upon which so many have insisted and copiously declaimed, methinkes he is much more happy in a wood that at ease contemplates the universe as his own, and in it the sunn and starrs, the pleasing meadows, shades, groves, green banks, stately trees, flowing springs, and the wanton windings of a river, fit objects for quiet innocence, than he that with fire and sword disturbs the world, and measures his possessions by the wast that lies about him.
These plaines doe abound with hares, fallow deer, partridges, and bustards. [The fallow deer and bustards have long since disappeared from these plains; but hares and partridges abound in the vicinity of gentlemen's seats, particularly around Everleigh, Tidworth, Amesbury, Wilbury, Wilton, Earl-Stoke, Clarendon, &c. - Vide ante, p.64. - J. B.] In this tract is ye Earle of Pembroke's noble seat at Wilton; but the Arcadia and the Daphne is about Vernditch and Wilton; and these romancy plaines and boscages did no doubt conduce to the hightening of Sir Philip Sydney's phansie. He lived much in these parts, and his most masterly touches of his pastoralls he wrote here upon the spott, where they were conceived. 'Twas about these purlieus that the muses were wont to appeare to Sir Philip Sydney, and where he wrote down their dictates in his table book, though on horseback.* For those nimble fugitives, except they be presently registred, fly away, and perhaps can never be caught again. But they were never so kind to appeare to me, though I am the usufructuary:† it seemes they reserve that grace only for the proprietors, to whom they have continued a constant kindnesse for a succession of generations of the no lesse ingenious than honorable family of the Herberts. These were the places where our Kings and Queens used to divert themselves in the hunting season. Cranbourn Chase, which reaches from Harnham Bridge, at Salisbury, near to Blandford, was belonging to Roger Mortimer, Earle of March: his seate was at his castle at Cranbourne. If these oakes here were vocall as Dodona's, some of the old dotards (old stagge- headed oakes, so called) could give us an account of the amours and secret whispers between this great Earle and the faire Queen Isabell.