Now,

affections are tied to things without himself?
In the second place, he must learn the art, and
get the habit of thinking; for this, too, no less
than well speaking, depends upon much practice;
and cogitation is the thing which distinguishes
the solitude of a god from a wild beast.
because the soul of man is not, by its own nature
or observation, furnished with sufficient materials
to work upon, it is necessary for it to have con-
tinual recourse to learning and books for fresh
supplies, so that the solitary life will grow in-
digent, and be ready to starve, without them;
but if once we be thoroughly engaged in the love
of letters, instead of being wearied with the
length of any day, we shall only complain of the
shortness of our whole life.

"O vita, stulto longa, sapienti brevis !"*
O life, long to the fool, short to the wise!

I

The first minister of state has not so much business in public, as a wise man has in private: if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature, under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, "That a man does not know how to pass his time." It would have been but ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred and sixty-ninth year of his life; so far it is from us, who have not time enough to attain to the utmost perfection of any part of any science, to have cause to complain that we are forced to be idle for want of work. But this, you will say, is work only for the learned; others are not capable either of the employments or divertisements that arrive from letters. know they are not; and, therefore, cannot much recommend solitude to a man totally illiterate. But, if any man be so unlearned, as to want entertainment of the little intervals of accidental solitude, which frequently occur in almost all conditions (except the very meanest of the people, who have business enough in the necessary provisions for life), it is truly a great shame both to his parents and himself; for a very small portion of any ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our time: either music, or painting, or designing, or chemistry, or history, or gardening, or twenty other things, will do it usefully and pleasantly; and, if he happen to set his affections upon poetry (which I do not advise him too immoderately), that will over-do it; do wood will be thick enough to hide him from the importunities of company or business, which would abstract him from his beloved.

"O qui me gelidis in vallibus Hæmi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra?”

*"O vita, misero longa, felici brevis !" (O life, long to the unhappy, to the happy brief).—Publius Syrus.

11.

Whilst this hard truth I teach, methinks I see The monster London laugh at me;

I should at thee too, foolish city,

If it were fit to laugh at misery;
But thy estate I pity.

12.

Let the wicked men from out thee go,
And all the fools that crowd thee so,
Even thou, who dost thy millions boast,
A village less than Islington wilt grow,
A solitude almost.

OF AGRICULTURE

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 fortunatus 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 sapientiæ," 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 accedere," 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

"London has a great belly, but no palate."Hobbes' Hist. Civil War, p. 169, quoted by Hurd.

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 agri. culture, 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 masters of it, by a moderate stock; I cannot whole art of it, and afterwards be enabled to be doubt but that we should see as many aldermen's estates made in the country, as now we do out of all kinds 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 live; and almost all the other arts, which are here practised, are beholden to this for most of their materials.

The innocence of this life is 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 Orcades, Ipsi Agricole 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 to pay at last for their sustenance,

Behold the original and primitive nobility of all those great persons, who are too proud now,

* Ecclus. vii. 15: "Hate not laborious work, neither husbandry, which the Most High has ordained.",

not only to till the ground, but also 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 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 an art.

A man would think, when he was 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 betinies 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 to be looked upon not only as plea.