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.
Upon a parchment (strumento) of Ferrara, bearing date a. d. 1113, (Annals of Muratori,) I find a memorandum or contract which looks like reviving civilization. "Terram autem illam quam roncabo, frui debeo per annos tres; postea reddam serraticum." The Latin is stiff, but the sense is sound. "If I grub up wild land, I shall hold it three years for pay."