Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his day,—a man of general scientific acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for attachment to other men's wares,[6] and, finally, only escaping the indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in 1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum," etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnæus, and his account of British cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his "New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel "invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope. The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there are only two in the library of the British Museum.
I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Catawbas blighted,) a rather ill-natured pleasure in reading how the Duke of Rutland, in the beginning of the last century, was compelled to "keep up fires from Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the ripening of his grapes; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great boast in that time. The quiet country squires—such as Sir Roger de Coverley—had to content themselves with those old-fashioned fruits which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with filbert-bushes.[7]
In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers, which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March. Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at the end of April; and the season of cauliflowers, which used to be limited to a single month, now reached over a term of six months.
Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730, says,—"I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, describing her entertainment at the table of the Elector of Hanover, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit she had never seen before.
Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its complexion. Dutch William was dead and buried. Addison had written in praise of the natural disposition of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place near Rugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the suggestions of those papers to which I have already alluded. Milton was in better odor than he had been, and people had begun to realize that an arch-Puritan might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated landholders had seen that charming garden-picture where the luxurious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress Armida spread her nets.
Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison; but his Twickenham garden was a very stiff affair. Bridgman was the first practical landscape-gardener who ventured to ignore old rules; and he was followed closely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsuccessful landscape-painter, who came into such vogue as a man of taste, that he was employed to fashion the furniture of scores of country-villas; and Walpole[8] tells us that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to design Birthday gowns for them:—"The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in a copper-colored satin, with ornaments of gold."
Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orléans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" is mentioned as an educator.
And now let us leave gardens for a while, to discuss Mr. Jethro Tull, the great English cultivator of the early half of the eighteenth century. I suspect that most of the gentry of his time, and cultivated people, ignored Mr. Tull, he was so rash and so headstrong and so noisy. It is certain, too, that the educated farmers, or, more strictly, the writing farmers, opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward off his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture. And he fought back bravely; I really do not think that an editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upon him,—in vigor, in personality, or in coarseness.
Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopædists who followed upon his period have treated his name with a neglect that leaves but scanty gleanings for his personal history. His father owned landed property in Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man; he studied for the law, (which will account for his address in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour of Europe, returned to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal homestead, and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he had gained in his Southern travels. Ill health drove him to France a second time, from which he returned once more, to occupy the famous "Prosperous Farm" in Berkshire; and here he opened his batteries afresh upon the existing methods of farming. The gist of his proposed reform is expressed in the title of his book, "The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He believed in the thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all field-crops, from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling was, of course, essential; and to make it economical, horse labor was requisite: the drill and the horse-hoe were only subsidiary to the main end of thorough tillage.
Sir Hugh Platt, as we have seen, had before suggested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill; but Tull gave force and point and practical efficacy to their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to these old gentlemen; and it is quite possible that his theory may have been worked out from his own observations. He certainly gives a clear account of the growth of his belief, and sustains it by a great many droll notions about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be admissible in the botanies of to-day.