INCIDENTAL MENTION OF HAMMOND, SIR EDMUND KING, JOANNA BAILLIE, SIR
WILLIAM TEMPLE, AND MR. THOMAS PEREGRINE COURTENAY. PETER COLLINSON AN
ACQUAINTANCE OF MR. ALLISON'S. HOLIDAYS AT THAXTED GRANGE.
And sure there seem of human kind
Some born to shun the solemn strife;
Some for amusive tasks design'd
To soothe the certain ills of life,
Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose,
New founts of bliss disclose,
Call forth refreshing shades and decorate repose.
SHENSTONE.
Dr. Hammond says he had “heard say of a man who, upon his death-bed,
being to take his farewell of his son, and considering what course of
life to recommend that might secure his innocence, at last enjoined
him to spend his time in making verses, and in dressing a garden; the
old man thinking no temptation could creep into either of these
employments.” As to the former part of this counsel, a certain Sir
Edmund King was of a different opinion; for meeting with Watts in his
youth, he said to him, “Young man, I hear that you make verses! Let me
advise you never to do it but when you can't help it.” If there were
ever a person who could not help it, Joanna Baillie would have said
nothing more than what was strictly true, when she observed that
“surely writing verses must have some power of intoxication in it, and
can turn a sensible man into a fool by some process of mental
alchemy.”
“Gardening,” says Mr. Courtenay, in his Life of Sir William Temple,
“is a pursuit peculiarly adapted for reconciling and combining the
tastes of the two sexes, and indeed of all ages. It is therefore of
all amusements the most retentive of domestic affection. It is perhaps
most warmly pursued by the very young, and by those who are far
advanced in life,—before the mind is occupied with worldly business,
and after it has become disgusted with it. There is nothing in it to
remind of the bustle of political life; and it requires neither a
sanguine disposition nor the prospect of a long life, to justify the
expectation of a beautiful result from the slight and easy care which
it exacts. Is it too much to say that the mind which can with genuine
taste occupy itself in gardening, must have preserved some portion of
youthful purity; that it must have escaped, during its passage through
the active world its deeper contaminations; and that no shame nor
remorse can have found a seat in it.”
Certainly it is not too much to say this of Sir William Temple; nor
would it be too much to say it of his biographer, whether he occupy
himself, or not, in gardening as well as in literature, after many
laborious years honourably passed in political and official life.
Peter Collinson, whose pious memory ought to be a standing toast at
the meetings of the Horticultural Society, used to say that he never
knew an instance in which the pursuit of such pleasure as the culture
of a garden affords, did not either find men temperate and virtuous,
or make them so. And this may be affirmed as an undeniable and not
unimportant fact relating to the lower classes of society, that
wherever the garden of a cottage or other humble dwelling, is
carefully and neatly kept, neatness and thrift and domestic comfort
will be found within doors.
When Mr. Allison settled at Thaxted Grange, English gardens were
beginning generally to profit by the benevolent and happy endeavours
of Peter Collinson to improve them. That singularly good man availed
himself of his mercantile connections, and of the opportunities
afforded him by the Royal Society, of which he was one of the most
diligent and useful members, to procure seeds and plants from all
parts of the world, and these he liberally communicated to his
friends. So they found their way first into the gardens of the
curious, then of the rich, and lastly, when their beauty recommended
them, spread themselves into those of ordinary persons. He divided his
time between his counting-house in Gracechurch street, and his country
house and garden at Mill Hill, near Hendon: it might have grieved him
could he have foreseen that his grounds there would pass after his
death into the hands of a purchaser who in mere ignorance rooted out
the rarest plants, and cut down trees which were scarcely to be found
in perfection anywhere else in the kingdom at that time.
Mr. Collinson was a man of whom it was truly said that not having any
public station, he was the means of procuring national advantages for
his country, and possessed an influence in it which wealth cannot
purchase, and which will be honoured when titles are forgotten. For
thirty years he executed gratuitously the commissions of the
Philadelphian Subscription Library, the first which was established in
America; he assisted the directors in their choice of books, took the
whole care of collecting and shipping them, and transmitted to the
directors the earliest accounts of every improvement in agriculture
and the arts, and of every philosophical discovery.
Franklin, who was the founder of that library, made his first
electrical experiments with an apparatus that had been sent to it as a
present by Peter Collinson. He deemed it therefore a proper mark of
acknowledgement to inform him of the success with which it had been
used, and his first Essays on Electricity were originally communicated
in letters to this good man. They were read in the Royal Society,
“where they were not thought worth so much notice as to be printed in
their Transactions;” and his paper in which the sameness of lightning
with electricity was first asserted, was laughed at by the
connoisseurs. Peter Collinson however gave the letters to Cave for the
Gentleman's Magazine; Cave forming a better judgment than the Royal
Society had done, printed them separately in a pamphlet, for which Dr.
Fothergill wrote a preface; the pamphlet by successive additions
swelled to a volume in quarto which went through five editions, and as
Franklin observes, “cost Cave nothing for copy money.”
What a contrast between this English Quaker and Monsieur Le Cour,
(observe, reader, I call him Monsieur, lest you should mistake him for
a Dutchman, seeing that he lived at Leyden,) who having raised a
double tuberose from the seed, and propagated it by the roots, till he
had as many as he could find room to plant, destroyed the rest as fast
as they were produced, that he might boast of being the only person in
Europe who possessed it. Another French florist of the same stamp, M.
Bachelier was his name, kept in like manner some beautiful species of
the anemone to himself, which he had procured from the East Indies,
and succeeded in withholding them for ten years from all who wished to
possess them likewise. A counseller of the Parliament however one day
paid him a visit when they were in seed, and in walking with him round
the garden, contrived to let his gown fall upon them; by this means he
swept off a good number of the seeds, and his servant who was apprized
of the scheme, dexterously wrapt up the gown and secured them. Any one
must have been a sour moralist who should have considered this to be a
breach of the eighth commandment.
Mr. Allison was well acquainted with Peter Collinson; he and his
sister sometimes visited him at Mill Hill, and upon their removal into
Yorkshire they were supplied from thence with choice fruit trees, and
fine varieties of the narcissus and polyanthus, which were the good
Quaker's favourite tribes. The wall fruits were under Mr. Allison's
especial care; he called himself indeed First Lord of the Fruit
Department; and if the first lords of certain other departments had
taken as much pains to understand their business and to perform it,
the affairs of the state would have been better managed than they were
in his days, and than they are in ours. Some part also he took in
directing the business of the kitchen garden; but the flowers were
left entirely to Betsey and her aunt.
The old poet who called himself Shepherd Tonie, and whom Sir Egerton
with much likelihood supposes to have been Anthony Munday, gives in
his Woodman's Walk an unfavourable representation of provincial
morals, when after forsaking the court and the city because he had
found nothing but selfishness and deceit in both, he tried the
country.
There did appear no subtle shows,
But yea and nay went smoothly:
But Lord! how country folks can glose
When they speak most untruly!
More craft was in a buttoned cap
And in the old wives' rail,
Than in my life it was my hap
To see on down or dale.
There was no open forgery,
But underhanded gleaning,
Which they call country policy
But hath a worser meaning.
Some good bold face bears out the wrong,
Because he gains thereby;
The poor mans back is crackt ere long,
Yet there he lets him lie:
And no degree among them all
But had such close intending,
That I upon my knees did fall
And prayed for their amending.
If the author of these verses, or any one who entertained the same
opinion, had been a guest of Mr. Allison's at Thaxted Grange, and had
remained under his roof long enough to see the way of life there, and
the condition of the hamlet, he would have gone away with a very
different persuasion. It was a remark of Bishop Percy's that you may
discern in a country parish whether there is a resident clergyman or
not, by the civil or savage manners of the people. The influence of
the clergyman, however exemplary he may be, is materially impaired if
his benefice is so poor and his means so straitened that his own
necessities leave him little or nothing to spare; but when such a
parish priest as Mr. Bacon has for his neighbour such a resident
landholder as his friend at the Grange, happy are—not the cottagers
only, but all who live within their sphere.
There was no alehouse in the hamlet, and as the fashion of preserves
had not yet been introduced, there were no poachers, the inhabitants
being thus happily exempted from two of the great temptations with
which in our days men of that class are continually beset. If a
newspaper ever found its way among them, newspapers were at that time
harmless; and when a hawker came he had no pestiferous tracts either
seditious or sectarian for sale, or for gratuitous distribution: a
scurvy jest-book was the worst article in his assortment. Mr. Bacon
had nothing to counteract his pastoral labours except the pravity of
human nature. Of this there must every where be but too much; but
fortunate indeed is the parish priest who finds himself in like manner
stationed where there are no external circumstances to aggravate and
excite it.
Wherever more than ordinary pains were bestowed upon a cottager's or
farmer's garden, Mr. Allison supplied the housewife with seed of a
better kind than she might otherwise have been able to procure, and
with grafts from his most serviceable fruit trees. No one who behaved
well in his employ was ever left in want of employment; he had always
some work going on, the cost of which was allowed for as charity, in
his accounts: and when he observed in a boy the diligence and the
disposition which made it likely that an opportunity of bettering his
condition would not be thrown away upon him, he advised, or if need
were, enabled the parents to educate him for trade, and at a proper
age provided a situation for him in London. If any of their daughters
desired to acquire those useful arts which might qualify them for
domestic service, they came to assist and learn from Miss Allison when
she distilled her waters, made her cowslip, elder, and gooseberry
wines, prepared her pickles and preserves, dried her medicinal plants,
or constructed the great goose-pye, which in the Christmas week was
always dispatched by the York coach to Bishopsgate Street, for the
honour of Yorkshire, and the astonishment of the Londoners. They came
also when preparations were making for a holiday, for old observances
of this kind were maintained as duly there as by the Romans when the
Laws of the Twelve Tables were in use, and every man constantly
observed his family festivals as thereby enjoined.
Pancakes on Shrove Tuesday are still in general usage; indeed I do not
know that it was ever deemed malignant and idolatrous to eat them on
that day even under the tyranny of the Puritans. But in Mr. Allison's
days Mid-lent Sunday was not allowed to pass without a wholesome and
savoury bowl of furmity on the social board: and Easter day brought
with it not only those coloured eggs which are the friendly offering
of that season throughout the whole north of Europe, but the tansy
pudding also,—originally perhaps introduced, (and possibly by some
compulsory converts from Judaism,) as a representative of the bitter
herbs with which the Paschal Lamb was to be eaten.
Both Christmas-days were kept at the Grange. There were people in
those times who refused to keep what they called Parliament Christmas.
But whether the old computation or the new were right, was a point on
which neither the master nor mistress of this house pretended to form
an opinion. On which day the Glastonbury Thorn blossomed they never
thought it necessary to enquire, nor did they go into the byre or the
fields to see upon which midnight the oxen were to be found on their
knees. They agreed with Mr. Bacon that in other respects it was a
matter of indifference, but not so that Christmas should be celebrated
on the same day throughout Christendom: and he agreed with them that
as the ritual ought to be performed at the time appointed by
authority, so the convivial observances might be regulated by the old
kalendar, or still more fitly, repeated according to the old
reckoning, in deference to old feelings and recollections which time
had consecrated.
In Bishopsgate Street it had been found convenient to set down the
children and their young guests on these occasions at Pope-Joan, or
snip-snap-snorum, which was to them a more amusing because a noisier
game. But here was room for more legitimate gambols; and when a young
party had assembled numerous enough for such pastime, hunt the
slipper, hot cockles, or blind-man's buff were the sports of a
Christmas evening. These had been days of high enjoyment to Betsey for
a few years after their removal into the country; they ceased to be so
when she saw that her aunt's hair was passing from the steel to the
silver hue, and remembered that her father had reached the term of
life, beyond which, in the ordinary course of nature our strength is
but labour and sorrow;—that the one was at an age
When every day that comes, comes to decay
A day's work in us;[1]
the other,—
Even in the downfall of his mellowed years
When Nature brought him to the door of Death.[1]
[Footnote 1: SHAKESPEARE.]