The publication of his Sylva, by Evelyn,[5] gave a considerable impulse to planting in the time of Charles II.; but in the next century that duty was much neglected by the landed proprietors of this country.  There is a selfish feeling, that the planter of an elm or an oak does not reap such an immediate profit from it himself, as will compensate for the expense and trouble of raising it.  This is an extremely narrow principle, which, fortunately, the rich are beginning to be ashamed of.  It is a positive duty of a landed proprietor who cuts down a tree which his grandfather planted, to put a young one into the ground, as a legacy to his own grand-children:  he will otherwise leave the world worse than he found it.  Sir Walter Scott, who is himself a considerable planter, has eloquently denounced that contracted feeling which prevents proprietors thus improving their estates, because the profits of plantations make a tardy and distant return; and we cannot better conclude than with a short passage from the essay in which he enforces the duty of planting waste lands:—­

“The indifference to this great rural improvement arises, we have reason to believe, not so much out of the actual lucre of gain as the fatal vis inertiae—­that indolence which induces the lords of the soil to be satisfied with what they can obtain from it by immediate rent, rather than encounter the expense and trouble of attempting the modes of amelioration which require immediate expense—­and, what is, perhaps, more grudged by the first-born of Egypt—­a little future attention.  To such we can only say that the improvement by plantation is at once the easiest, the cheapest, and the least precarious mode of increasing the immediate value, as well as the future income, of their estates; and that therefore it is we exhort them to take to heart the exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son:  ’Be aye sticking in a tree Jock—­it will be growing whilst you are sleeping.’”

[5] Evelyn passed much of his time in planting; and his Sylva,
or a Discourse on Forest Trees, is one of the most valuable
works in the whole compass of English literature.  He describes
himself as “borne at Wotton, among the woods,” situate about
four miles from Dorking, in a fine valley leading to Leith Hill. 
In book iii. chap. 7, of his Sylva, he says, “To give an
instance of what store of woods and timber of prodigious size
were grown in our little county of Surrey, my own grandfather
had standing at Wotton, and about that estate, timber that now
were worth L100,000.  Since of what was left my father (who was
a great preserver of wood) there has been L30,000. worth of
limber fallen by the axe, and the fury of the hurricane in 1703,
by which upwards of 1,000 trees were blown down.  Now, no more
Wotton! stript and naked, and ashamed almost to own its name.” 
The Wotton woods are still flourishing, and