When Mr. Allison settled at Thaxted Grange, English gardens were beginning generally to profit by the benevolent and happy endeavours of Peter Collinson to improve them. That singularly good man availed himself of his mercantile connections, and of the opportunities afforded him by the Royal Society, of which he was one of the most diligent and useful members, to procure seeds and plants from all parts of the world, and these he liberally communicated to his friends. So they found their way first into the gardens of the curious, then of the rich, and lastly, when their beauty recommended them, spread themselves into those of ordinary persons. He divided his time between his counting-house in Gracechurch street, and his country house and garden at Mill Hill, near Hendon: it might have grieved him could he have foreseen that his grounds there would pass after his death into the hands of a purchaser who in mere ignorance rooted out the rarest plants, and cut down trees which were scarcely to be found in perfection anywhere else in the kingdom at that time.
Mr. Collinson was a man of whom it was truly said that not having any public station, he was the means of procuring national advantages for his country, and possessed an influence in it which wealth cannot purchase, and which will be honoured when titles are forgotten. For thirty years he executed gratuitously the commissions of the Philadelphian Subscription Library, the first which was established in America; he assisted the directors in their choice of books, took the whole care of collecting and shipping them, and transmitted to the directors the earliest accounts of every improvement in agriculture and the arts, and of every philosophical discovery.
Franklin, who was the founder of that library, made his first electrical experiments with an apparatus that had been sent to it as a present by Peter Collinson. He deemed it therefore a proper mark of acknowledgement to inform him of the success with which it had been used, and his first Essays on Electricity were originally communicated in letters to this good man. They were read in the Royal Society, “where they were not thought worth so much notice as to be printed in their Transactions;” and his paper in which the sameness of lightning with electricity was first asserted, was laughed at by the connoisseurs. Peter Collinson however gave the letters to Cave for the Gentleman's Magazine; Cave forming a better judgment than the Royal Society had done, printed them separately in a pamphlet, for which Dr. Fothergill wrote a preface; the pamphlet by successive additions swelled to a volume in quarto which went through five editions, and as Franklin observes, “cost Cave nothing for copy money.”
What a contrast between this English Quaker and Monsieur Le Cour, (observe, reader, I call him Monsieur, lest you should mistake him for a Dutchman, seeing that he lived at Leyden,) who having raised a double tuberose from the seed, and propagated it by the roots, till he had as many as he could find room to plant, destroyed the rest as fast as they were produced, that he might boast of being the only person in Europe who possessed it. Another French florist of the same stamp, M. Bachelier was his name, kept in like manner some beautiful species of the anemone to himself, which he had procured from the East Indies, and succeeded in withholding them for ten years from all who wished to possess them likewise. A counseller of the Parliament however one day paid him a visit when they were in seed, and in walking with him round the garden, contrived to let his gown fall upon them; by this means he swept off a good number of the seeds, and his servant who was apprized of the scheme, dexterously wrapt up the gown and secured them. Any one must have been a sour moralist who should have considered this to be a breach of the eighth commandment.
Mr. Allison was well acquainted with Peter Collinson; he and his sister sometimes visited him at Mill Hill, and upon their removal into Yorkshire they were supplied from thence with choice fruit trees, and fine varieties of the narcissus and polyanthus, which were the good Quaker's favourite tribes. The wall fruits were under Mr. Allison's especial care; he called himself indeed First Lord of the Fruit Department; and if the first lords of certain other departments had taken as much pains to understand their business and to perform it, the affairs of the state would have been better managed than they were in his days, and than they are in ours. Some part also he took in directing the business of the kitchen garden; but the flowers were left entirely to Betsey and her aunt.
The old poet who called himself Shepherd Tonie, and whom Sir Egerton with much likelihood supposes to have been Anthony Munday, gives in his Woodman's Walk an unfavourable representation of provincial morals, when after forsaking the court and the city because he had found nothing but selfishness and deceit in both, he tried the country.
There did appear no subtle shows,
But yea and nay went smoothly:
But Lord! how country folks can glose
When they speak most untruly!
More craft was in a buttoned cap
And in the old wives' rail,
Than in my life it was my hap
To see on down or dale.
There was no open forgery,
But underhanded gleaning,
Which they call country policy
But hath a worser meaning.
Some good bold face bears out the wrong,
Because he gains thereby;
The poor mans back is crackt ere long,
Yet there he lets him lie:
And no degree among them all
But had such close intending,
That I upon my knees did fall
And prayed for their amending.
If the author of these verses, or any one who entertained the same opinion, had been a guest of Mr. Allison's at Thaxted Grange, and had remained under his roof long enough to see the way of life there, and the condition of the hamlet, he would have gone away with a very different persuasion. It was a remark of Bishop Percy's that you may discern in a country parish whether there is a resident clergyman or not, by the civil or savage manners of the people. The influence of the clergyman, however exemplary he may be, is materially impaired if his benefice is so poor and his means so straitened that his own necessities leave him little or nothing to spare; but when such a parish priest as Mr. Bacon has for his neighbour such a resident landholder as his friend at the Grange, happy are—not the cottagers only, but all who live within their sphere.
There was no alehouse in the hamlet, and as the fashion of preserves had not yet been introduced, there were no poachers, the inhabitants being thus happily exempted from two of the great temptations with which in our days men of that class are continually beset. If a newspaper ever found its way among them, newspapers were at that time harmless; and when a hawker came he had no pestiferous tracts either seditious or sectarian for sale, or for gratuitous distribution: a scurvy jest-book was the worst article in his assortment. Mr. Bacon had nothing to counteract his pastoral labours except the pravity of human nature. Of this there must every where be but too much; but fortunate indeed is the parish priest who finds himself in like manner stationed where there are no external circumstances to aggravate and excite it.
Wherever more than ordinary pains were bestowed upon a cottager's or farmer's garden, Mr. Allison supplied the housewife with seed of a better kind than she might otherwise have been able to procure, and with grafts from his most serviceable fruit trees. No one who behaved well in his employ was ever left in want of employment; he had always some work going on, the cost of which was allowed for as charity, in his accounts: and when he observed in a boy the diligence and the disposition which made it likely that an opportunity of bettering his condition would not be thrown away upon him, he advised, or if need were, enabled the parents to educate him for trade, and at a proper age provided a situation for him in London. If any of their daughters desired to acquire those useful arts which might qualify them for domestic service, they came to assist and learn from Miss Allison when she distilled her waters, made her cowslip, elder, and gooseberry wines, prepared her pickles and preserves, dried her medicinal plants, or constructed the great goose-pye, which in the Christmas week was always dispatched by the York coach to Bishopsgate Street, for the honour of Yorkshire, and the astonishment of the Londoners. They came also when preparations were making for a holiday, for old observances of this kind were maintained as duly there as by the Romans when the Laws of the Twelve Tables were in use, and every man constantly observed his family festivals as thereby enjoined.