[Footnote 50:  This is Keil’s ingenious interpretation of an obscure passage.  We may compare the English designation of a church yard as “God’s acre.”  What Licinius Crassus actually did was, while haranguing from the rostra, to turn his back upon the Comitium, where the Senators gathered, and address himself directly to the people assembled in the Forum.  The act was significant as indicating that the sovereignty had changed place.]

[Footnote 51:  Tremelius Scrofa was the author of a treatise on agriculture, which Columella cites, but which has not otherwise survived.]

[Footnote 52:  “It was a received opinion amongst the antients that a large, busy, well peopled village, situated in a country thoroughly cultivated, was a more magnificent sight than the palaces of noblemen and princes in the midst of neglected lands.”  Harte’s Essays on Husbandry, p. 11.  This is a delightful book, the ripe product of a gentleman and a scholar.  In the middle of the eighteenth century it advocated what we are still advocating—­that agriculture, as the basis of national wealth, deserves the study and attention of the highest intelligence; specifically it proposed the introduction of new grasses and forage crops (alfalfa above all others) to enable the land to support more live stock.  It was published in 1764, just after France had ceded to England by the Treaty of Paris all of her possessions in America east of the Mississippi River; and not the least interesting passages of Harte’s book are those proposing an agricultural development of the newly acquired territory between Lake Illinois (Michigan) and the Mississippi, which he suggests may be readily brought under cultivation with the aid of the buffaloes of the country.  He shrewdly says:  “Maize may be raised in this part of Canada to what quantity we please, for it grows there naturally in great abundance.”  It happened, however, that a few years later, in 1778, Col.  George Rogers Clark of Virginia made a certain expedition through the wilderness to the British outpost at Vincennes, which saved England the trouble of taking Harte’s advice, but that it has not been neglected may be evident from the fact that less than a century and a half later, or in 1910, the State of Illinois produced 415 million bushels of maize, besides twice as much oats and half as much wheat as did old England herself in the same year of grace.

Harte was the travelling governor of that young Mr. Stanhope, to whom my lord Chesterfield wrote his famous worldly wise letters.  He was the author also of a Life of Gustavus Adolphus, which was a failure.  Dr. Johnson, who liked Harte, said:  “It was unlucky in coming out on the same day with Robertson’s History of Scotland.  His Husbandry, however, is good.” (Boswell, IV, 91).  With this judgment of Dr. Johnson there has been, and must be, general concurrence.]

[Footnote 53:  Pliny records (H.N.  XVIII, 7) that at Lucullus’ farm there was less ground for ploughing than of floor for sweeping.]