“iuvat Ismara Baccho
  Conserere, atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum.”

This is the blessed “surcease of sorrow” of which the crowded life of the modern city knows nothing:  but, as the practical Roman indicates, it will not support life of its own mere motion.  Cf.  Dr. Johnson’s picture of Shenstone:  “He began from this time to entangle his walks and to wind his waters:  which he did with such judgment and such fancy as made his little domain the envy of the great and the admiration of the skillful.  His house was mean, and he did not improve it:  his care was of his grounds....  In time his expences brought clamours about him, that overpowered the lambs’ bleat and the linnets’ song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies.”]

[Footnote 59:  Walter of Henley, in thirteenth century England, drove home a shrewd comment on the country gentleman who farms without keeping accounts and thinks he is engaged in a profitable industry.  “You know surely,” he says, “that an acre sown with wheat takes three ploughings, except lands which are sown yearly, and that one with another each ploughing is worth six pence, and harrowing a penny, and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels.  Now two bushels at Michaelmas are worth at least twelve pence, and weeding a half penny and reaping five pence, and carrying in August a penny:  the straw will pay for the threshing.  At three times your sowing you ought to have six bushels, worth three shillings; and the cost amounts to three shillings and three half pence, and the ground is yours and not reckoned.”

Of Walter of Henley little is known, but it is conjectured that he was the bailiff of the manors near Henley which belonged to the Abbey of Canterbury.  His curious and valuable Dite de Hosebondrie, which is as original in its way as Cato’s treatise, being entirely free from mere literary tradition, is now available to the modern reader in a translation, from the original barbarous English law French, by Elizabeth Lamond, made for the Royal Historical Society in 1890.]

[Footnote 60:  This was just before Pharsalia, and the army was that of Pompey which Varro had joined after surrendering to Caesar in Spain.]

[Footnote 61:  In this enumeration of trees Varro does not include the chestnut which is now one of the features of the Italian mountain landscape and furnishes support for a considerable part of the Italian population, who subsist on necci, those indigestible chestnut flour cakes, just as the Irish peasants do on potatoes.  The chestnut was late in getting a foothold in Italy but it was there in Varro’s day.  He mentions the nuts as part of the diet of dormice (III, 15).