Classic Poem

The first wish of Virgil (as you will find anon by his verses), was
to be a good philosopher; the second, a good husbandman; and God
(whom he seemed to understand better than most of the most learned
heathens) dealt with him just as he did with Solomon: because he
prayed for wisdom in the first place, he added all things else which
were subordinately to be desired. He made him one of the best
philosophers, and best husbandmen, and to adorn and communicate both
those faculties, the best poet. He made him, besides all this, a
rich man, and a man who desired to be no richer, O fortunatas nimium
et bona qui sua novit. To be a husbandman, is but a retreat from
the city; to be a philosopher, from the world; or rather, a retreat
from the world, as it is Man's--into the world, as it is God's. But
since Nature denies to most men the capacity or appetite, and
Fortune allows but to a very few the opportunities or possibility,
of applying themselves wholly to philosophy, the best mixture of
human affairs that we can make are the employments of a country
life. It is, as Columella calls it, Res sine dubitatione proxima et
quasi consanguinea sapientiae, the nearest neighbour, or rather next
in kindred to Philosophy. Varro says the principles of it are the
same which Ennius made to be the principles of all nature; earth,
water, air, and the sun. It does certainly comprehend more parts of
philosophy than any one profession, art, or science in the world
besides; and, therefore, Cicero says, the pleasures of a husbandman,
Mihi ad sapientis vitam proxime videntur aecedere, come very nigh to
those of a philosopher. There is no other sort of life that affords
so many branches of praise to a panegyrist: The utility of it to a
man's self; the usefulness, or, rather, necessity of it to all the
rest of mankind; the innocence, the pleasure, the antiquity, the
dignity. The utility (I mean plainly the lucre of it) is not so
great now in our nation as arises from merchandise and the trading
of the city, from whence many of the best estates and chief honours
of the kingdom are derived; we have no men now fetched from the
plough to be made lords, as they were in Rome to be made consuls and
dictators, the reason of which I conceive to be from an evil custom
now grown as strong among us as if it were a law, which is, that no
men put their children to be bred up apprentices in agriculture, as
in other trades, but such who are so poor, that when they come to be
men they have not wherewithal to set up in it, and so can only farm
some small parcel of ground, the rent of which devours all but the
bare subsistence of the tenant; whilst they who are proprietors of
the land are either too proud or, for want of that kind of
education, too ignorant to improve their estates, though the means
of doing it be as easy and certain in this as in any other track of
commerce. If there were always two or three thousand youths, for
seven or eight years bound to this profession, that they might learn
the whole art of it, and afterwards be enabled to be masters in it,
by a moderate stock, I cannot doubt but that we should see as many
aldermen's estates made in the country as now we do out of all kind
of merchandising in the city. There are as many ways to be rich;
and, which is better, there is no possibility to be poor, without
such negligence as can neither have excuse nor pity; for a little
ground will, without question, feed a little family, and the
superfluities of life (which are now in some cases by custom made
almost necessary) must be supplied out of the superabundance of art
and industry, or contemned by as great a degree of philosophy. As
for the necessity of this art, it is evident enough, since this can
live without all others, and no one other without this. This is
like speech, without which the society of men cannot be preserved;
the others like figures and tropes of speech which serve only to
adorn it. Many nations have lived, and some do still, without any
art but this; not so elegantly, I confess, but still they have; and
almost all the other arts which are here practised are beholding to
them for most of their materials. The innocence of this life is in
the next thing for which I commend it, and if husbandmen preserve
not that, they are much to blame, for no men are so free from the
temptations of iniquity. They live by what they can get by industry
from the earth, and others by what they can catch by craft from men.
They live upon an estate given them by their mother, and others upon
an estate cheated from their brethren. They live like sheep and
kine, by the allowances of Nature, and others like wolves and foxes
by the acquisitions of rapine; and, I hope, I may affirm (without
any offence to the great) that sheep and kine are very useful, and
that wolves and foxes are pernicious creatures. They are, without
dispute, of all men the most quiet and least apt to be inflamed to
the disturbance of the commonwealth; their manner of life inclines
them, and interest binds them, to love peace. In our late mad and
miserable civil wars, all other trades, even to the meanest, set
forth whole troops, and raised up some great commanders, who became
famous and mighty for the mischiefs they had done. But I do not
remember the name of any one husbandman who had so considerable a
share in the twenty years' ruin of his country, as to deserve the
curses of his countrymen; and if great delights be joined with so
much innocence, I think it is ill done of men not to take them here
where they are so tame and ready at hand, rather than hunt for them
in courts and cities, where they are so wild and the chase so
troublesome and dangerous.

We are here among the vast and noble scenes of Nature; we are there
among the pitiful shifts of policy. We walk here in the light and
open ways of the divine bounty; we grope there in the dark and
confused labyrinths of human malice. Our senses are here feasted
with the clear and genuine taste of their objects, which are all
sophisticated there, and for the most part overwhelmed with their
contraries. Here Pleasure looks, methinks, like a beautiful,
constant, and modest wife; it is there an impudent, fickle, and
painted harlot. Here is harmless and cheap plenty, there guilty and
expenseful luxury.

I shall only instance in one delight more, the most natural and best
natured of all others, a perpetual companion of the husbandman: and
that is, the satisfaction of looking round about him, and seeing
nothing but the effects and improvements of his own art and
diligence; to be always gathering of some fruits of it, and at the
same time to behold others ripening, and others budding; to see all
his fields and gardens covered with the beauteous creatures of his
own industry; and to see, like God, that all his works are good.


Hinc atque hinc glomerantur Oreades; ipsi
Agricolae tacitum pertentant gaudia pectus.

On his heart-strings a secret joy does strike.


The antiquity of his art is certainly not to be contested by any
other. The three first men in the world were a gardener, a
ploughman, and a grazier; and if any man object that the second of
these was a murderer, I desire he would consider, that as soon as he
was so, he quitted our profession and turned builder. It is for
this reason, I suppose, that Ecclesiasticus forbids us to hate
husbandry; because, says he, the Most High has created it. We were
all born to this art, and taught by nature to nourish our bodies by
the same earth out of which they were made, and to which they must
return and pay at last for their sustenance.

Behold the original and primitive nobility of all those great
persons who are too proud now not only to till the ground, but
almost to tread upon it. We may talk what we please of lilies and
lions rampant, and spread eagles in fields d'or or d'argent; but if
heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be
the most noble and ancient arms.

All these considerations make me fall into the wonder and complaint
of Columella, how it should come to pass that all arts or Sciences
(for the dispute, which is an art and which is a science, does not
belong to the curiosity of us husbandmen), metaphysic, physic,
morality, mathematics, logic, rhetoric, etc., which are all, I
grant, good and useful faculties, except only metaphysic, which I do
not know whether it be anything or no, but even vaulting, fencing,
dancing, attiring, cookery, carving, and such like vanities, should
all have public schools and masters; and yet that we should never
see or hear of any man who took upon him the profession of teaching
this so pleasant, so virtuous, so profitable, so honourable, so
necessary art.

A man would think, when he's in serious humour, that it were but a
vain, irrational, and ridiculous thing for a great company of men
and women to run up and down in a room together, in a hundred
several postures and figures, to no purpose, and with no design; and
therefore dancing was invented first, and only practised anciently,
in the ceremonies of the heathen religion, which consisted all in
mummery and madness; the latter being the chief glory of the
worship, and accounted divine inspiration. This, I say, a severe
man would think, though I dare not determine so far against so
customary a part now of good breeding. And yet, who is there among
our gentry that does not entertain a dancing master for his children
as soon as they are able to walk? But did ever any father provide a
tutor for his son to instruct him betimes in the nature and
improvements of that land which he intended to leave him? That is
at least a superfluity, and this a defect in our manner of
education; and therefore I could wish, but cannot in these times
much hope to see it, that one college in each university were
erected, and appropriated to this study, as well as there are to
medicine and the civil law. There would be no need of making a body
of scholars and fellows, with certain endowments, as in other
colleges; it would suffice if, after the manner of Halls in Oxford,
there were only four professors constituted (for it would be too
much work for only one master, or Principal, as they call him there)
to teach these four parts of it. First, aration, and all things
relating to it. Secondly, pasturage; thirdly, gardens, orchards,
vineyards, and woods; fourthly, all parts of rural economy, which
would contain the government of bees, swine, poultry, decoys, ponds,
etc., and all that which Varro calls Villaticas Pastiones, together
with the sports of the field, which ought not to be looked upon only
as pleasures, but as parts of housekeeping, and the domestical
conservation and uses of all that is brought in by industry abroad.
The business of these professors should not be, as is commonly
practised in other arts, only to read pompous and superficial
lectures out of Virgil's Georgics, Pliny, Varro, or Columella, but
to instruct their pupils in the whole method and course of this
study, which might be run through perhaps with diligence in a year
or two; and the continual succession of scholars upon a moderate
taxation for their diet, lodging, and learning, would be a
sufficient constant revenue for maintenance of the house and the
professors, who should be men not chosen for the ostentation of
critical literature, but for solid and experimental knowledge of the
things they teach such men; so industrious and public spirited as I
conceive Mr. Hartlib to be, if the gentleman be yet alive. But it
is needless to speak further of my thoughts of this design, unless
the present disposition of the age allowed more probability of
bringing it into execution. What I have further to say of the
country life shall be borrowed from the poets, who were always the
most faithful and affectionate friends to it. Poetry was born among
the shepherds.


Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine musas
Ducit, et immemores non sinit esse sui.

The Muses still love their own native place,
'T has secret charms which nothing can deface.


The truth is, no other place is proper for their work. One might as
well undertake to dance in a crowd, as to make good verses in the
midst of noise and tumult.


As well might corn as verse in cities grow;
In vain the thankless glebe we plough and sow,
Against th' unnatural soil in vain we strive,
'Tis not a ground in which these plants will thrive.


It will bear nothing but the nettles or thorns of satire, which grow
most naturally in the worst earth; and therefore almost all poets,
except those who were not able to eat bread without the bounty of
great men, that is, without what they could get by flattering of
them, have not only withdrawn themselves from the vices and vanities
of the grand world (pariter vitiisque jocisque altius humanis
exeruere caput) into the innocent happiness of a retired life; but
have commended and adorned nothing so much by their ever-living
poems. Hesiod was the first or second poet in the world that
remains yet extant (if Homer, as some think, preceded him, but I
rather believe they were contemporaries), and he is the first
writer, too, of the art of husbandry. He has contributed, says
Columella, not a little to our profession; I suppose he means not a
little honour, for the matter of his instructions is not very
important. His great antiquity is visible through the gravity and
simplicity of his style. The most acute of all his sayings concerns
our purpose very much, and is couched in the reverend obscurity of
an oracle. {Greek text which cannot be reproduced}. The half is
more than the whole. The occasion of the speech is this: his
brother Perses had by corrupting some great men ({Greek text which
cannot be reproduced}, great bribe-eaters he calls them) gotten from
him the half of his estate. It is no matter, says he, they have not
done me so much prejudice as they imagine.


{Greek text which cannot be reproduced--translation below}

Unhappy they to whom God has not revealed
By a strong light which must their sense control,
That half a great estate's more than the whole.
Unhappy, from whom still concealed does lie
Of roots and herbs the wholesome luxury.


This I conceive to have been honest Hesiod's meaning. From Homer we
must not expect much concerning our affairs. He was blind, and
could neither work in the country nor enjoy the pleasures of it; his
helpless poverty was likeliest to be sustained in the richest
places, he was to delight the Grecians with fine tales of the wars
and adventures of their ancestors; his subject removed him from all
commerce with us, and yet, methinks, he made a shift to show his
goodwill a little. For though he could do us no honour in the
person of his hero Ulysses (much less of Achilles), because his
whole time was consumed in wars and voyages, yet he makes his father
Laertes a gardener all that while, and seeking his consolation for
the absence of his son in the pleasure of planting and even dunging
his own grounds. Yet, see, he did not contemn us peasants; nay, so
far was he from that insolence, that he always styles Eumaeus, who
kept the hogs with wonderful respect, {Greek text which cannot be
reproduced}, the divine swine-herd; he could have done no more for
Menelaus or Agamemnon. And Theocritus (a very ancient poet, but he
was one of our own tribe, for he wrote nothing but pastorals) gave
the same epithet to a husbandman {Greek text which cannot be
reproduced}. The divine husbandman replied to Hercules, who was but
{Greek text} himself. These were civil Greeks, and who understood
the dignity of our calling. Among the Romans, we have in the first
place our truly divine Virgil, who, though by the favour of Maecenas
and Augustus he might have been one of the chief men of Rome, yet
chose rather to employ much of his time in the exercise, and much of
his immortal wit in the praise and instructions of a rustic life;
who, though he had written before whole books of Pastorals and
Georgics, could not abstain in his great and imperial poem from
describing Evander, one of his best princ