"the crisped brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold
With mazy error under pendent shades,
Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed
Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice Art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain."
Going far behind all conventionalities, he credited to Paradise—the ideal of man's happiest estate—variety, irregularity, profusion, luxuriance; and to the fallen estate, precision, formality, and an inexorable Art, which, in place of concealing, glorified itself. In the next century, when Milton comes to be illustrated by Addison and the rest, we shall find gardens of a different style from those of Waller and of Hampton Court.
And now from some look-out point near to the close of the seventeenth century, when John Evelyn, in his age, is repairing the damages that Peter the Great has wrought in his pretty Deptford home, let us take a bird's-eye glance at rural England.
It is raining; and the clumsy Bedford coach, drawn by stout Flemish mares,—for thorough-breds are as yet unknown,—is covered with a sail-cloth to keep the wet away from the six "insides." The grass, wherever the land is stocked with grass, is as velvety as now. The wheat in the near county of Herts is fair, and will turn twenty bushels to the acre; here and there an enterprising landholder has a small field of dibbled grain, which will yield a third more. John Worlidge's drill is not in request, and is only talked of by a few wiseacres who prophesy its ultimate adoption. The fat bullocks of Bedford will not dress more than seven hundred a head; and the cows, if killed, would not overrun five hundred weight. There are occasional fields of sainfoin and of turnips; but these latter are small, and no ridging or hurdling is yet practised. From time to time appears a patch of barren moorland, which has been planted with forest-trees, in accordance with the suggestions of Mr. Evelyn, and under the wet sky the trees are thriving. Wide reaches of fen, measured by hundreds of miles, (which now bear great crops of barley,) are saturated with moisture, and tenanted only by ghost-like companies of cranes.
The gardens attached to noble houses, under the care of some pupil of Wise, or of Parkinson, have their espaliers,—their plums, their pears,[5] and their grapes. These last are rare, however, (Parkinson says sour, too,) and bear a great price in the London market. One or two horticulturists of extraordinary enterprise have built greenhouses, warmed, Evelyn says, "in a most ingenious way, by passing a brick flue underneath the beds."
The lesser country-gentlemen, who have no establishments in town, rarely venture up, for fear of the footpads on the heath, and the insolence of the black-guard Cockneys. Their wives are staid dames, learned at the brew-tub and in the buttery,—but not speaking French, nor wearing hoops or patches. A great many of the older exotic plants have become domesticated; and the goodwife has a flaming parterre at her door,—but not valued one half so much as her bed of marjoram and thyme. She may read King James's Bible, or, if a Non-Conformist, Baxter's "Saint's Rest"; while the husband regales himself with a thumb-worn copy of "Sir Fopling Flutter," or, if he live well into the closing years of the century, with De Foe's "True-born Englishman."
Poetic feeling was more lacking in the country-life than in the illustrative literature of the century. To say nothing of Milton's brilliant little poems, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," which flash all over with the dews, there are the charming "Characters" of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the graceful discourse of Sir William Temple. The poet Drummond wrought a music out of the woods and waters which lingers alluringly even now around the delightful cliffs and valleys of Hawthornden. John Dryden, though a thorough cit, and a man who would have preferred his arm-chair at Will's Coffee-House to Chatsworth and the fee of all its lands, has yet touched most tenderly the "daisies white" and the spring, in his "Flower and the Leaf."
But we skip a score of the poets, and bring our wet day to a close with the naming of two honored pastorals. The first, in sober prose, is nothing more nor less than Walton's "Angler." Its homeliness, its calm, sweet pictures of fields and brooks, its dainty perfume of flowers, its delicate shadowing-forth of the Christian sentiment which lived by old English firesides, its simple, artless songs, (not always of the highest style, but of a hearty naturalness that is infinitely better,)—these make the "Angler" a book that stands among the thumb-worn. There is good marrowy English in it; I know very few fine writers of our times who could make a better book on such a subject to-day,—with all the added information, and all the practice of the newspaper-columns. What Walton wants to say he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen; he has some pleasant matters to tell of, and he tells of them—straight.
Another great charm about Walton is his childlike truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher I ever knew (unless Sir Humphrey Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends—capital fishermen—whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be confided in. I excuse it; I take off twenty per cent. from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance.
I do not think I should have trusted in such a matter Charles Cotton, although he was agricultural as well as piscatory,—having published a "Planter's Manual." I think he could, and did, draw a long bow. I suspect innocent milkmaids were not in the habit of singing Kit Marlowe's songs to the worshipful Mr. Cotton.