No. 1695. Notabilia de Vegetabilibus, et Plantis.
Dr. Pulteney observes, that the above list might have been considerably extended, but that it would have unnecessarily swelled the article he was then writing.
The Nouv. Dict. Hist. mentions a personage whose attachment to his garden, and one of whose motives for cultivating that garden, does not deserve a notice:—"Attale III. Roi de Pergame, fils de Stratonice, soùlla la thrône en répandant le sang de ses amis et de sea parens. Il abandonna ensuite le soìn de ses affaires pour s'occuper entirement de son jardin. Il y cultivoit des poisons, tels que l'aconit et la ciguë, qu'il envoyoit quelque fois en présent a ses amis. Il mourut 133 ans avant Jesus Christ."
[27] To have completed the various contrasting vicissitudes of this poor Suffolk farmer's life, he should have added to his other employments, those of another Suffolk man, the late W. Lomax, who had been grave-digger at the pleasant town of Bury St. Edmund's, for thirty-six years, and who, also, for a longer period than thirty-six years, had been a morrice-dancer at all the elections for that borough.
[28] Gerarde, speaking of good sorts of apples and pears, thus mentions the above named Pointer:—"Master Richard Pointer has them all growing in his ground at Twickenham, near London, who is a most cunning and curious grafter and planter of all manner of rare fruits; and also in the ground of an excellent grafter and painful planter, Master Henry Bunbury, of Touthil-street, near unto Westminster; and likewise in the ground of a diligent and most affectionate lover of plants, Master Warner, neere Horsely Down, by London; and in divers other grounds about London."
[29] The fate of this poor man reminds one of what is related of Corregio:—"He received from the mean canons of Parma, for his Assumption of the Virgin, the small pittance of two hundred livres, and it was paid him in copper. He hastened with the money to his starving family; but as he had six or eight miles to travel from Parma, the weight of his burden, and the heat of the climate, added to the oppression of his breaking heart, a pleurisy attacked him, which, in three days, terminated his existence and his sorrows in his fortieth year."
If one could discover a portrait of either of the authors mentioned in the foregoing list, one might, I think, inscribe under each of such portraits, these verses:
Ce pourtrait et maint liure
Par le peintre et l'escrit,
Feront reuoir et viure
Ta face et ton esprit.
They are inscribed under an ancient portrait, done in 1555, which Mr. Dibdin has preserved in his account of Caen, and which he thus introduces: "As we love to be made acquainted with the persons of those from whom we have received instruction and pleasure, so take, gentle reader, a representation of Bourgueville."
[30] "Mr. John Parkinson, an apothecary of this city, (yet living, and labouring for the common good,) in the year 1629, set forth a work by the name of Paradisus Terrestris, wherein he gives the figures of all such plants as are preserved in gardens, for the beauty of their flowers, in use in meats or sauces; and also an orchard for all trees bearing fruit, and such shrubs as for their beauty are kept in orchards and gardens, with the ordering, planting, and preserving of all these. In this work he hath not superficially handled these things, but accurately descended to the very varieties in each species, wherefore I have now and then referred my reader, addicted to these delights, to this work, especially in flowers and fruits, wherein I was loth to spend too much time, especially seeing I could adde nothing to what he had done upon that subject before."