Duke of Leeds, to allow him to place his name upon the title-page.  I am sorry to record such a scurvy bit of hypocrisy in so competent a man.  The book sold, however, and sold so well, that, a few years after, the elegant Mr. Mawe begged a visit from the nurseryman of Tottenham Court, whom he had never seen; so Abercrombie goes down to the seat of the Duke of Leeds, and finds his gardener so bedizened with powder, and wearing such a grand air, that he mistakes him for his Lordship; but it is a mistake, we may readily believe, which the elegant Mr. Mawe forgives, and the two gardeners become capital friends.

Abercrombie afterward published many works under his own name;[B] among these was “The Gardener’s Pocket Journal,” which maintained an unflagging popularity as a standard book for a period of half a century.  This hardy Scotchman lived to be eighty; and when he could work no longer, he was constantly afoot among the botanical gardens about London.  At the last it was a fall “down-stairs in the dark” that was the cause of death; and fifteen days after, as his quaint biographers tell us, “he expired, just as the clock upon St. Paul’s struck twelve,—­between April and May”:  as if the ripe old gardener could not tell which of these twin garden-months he loved the best; and so, with a foot planted in each, he made the leap into the realm of eternal spring.

A noticeable fact in regard to this out-of-door old gentleman is, that he never took “doctors’-stuff” in his life, until the time of that fatal fall in the dark.  He was, however, an inveterate tea-drinker; and there was another aromatic herb (I write this with my pipe in my mouth) of which he was, up to the very last, a most ardent consumer.

In the year 1766 was published for the first time a posthumous work by John Locke, the great philosopher and the good Christian, entitled, “Observations upon the Growth and Culture of Vines and Olives,”—­written, very likely, after his return from France, down in his pleasant Essex home, at the seat of Sir Francis Masham.  I should love to give the reader a sample of the way in which the author of “An Essay concerning Human Understanding” wrote regarding horticultural matters.  But, after some persistent search and inquiry, I have not been able to see or even to hear of a copy of the book.[C] No one can doubt but there is wisdom in it.  “I believe you think me,” he writes in a private letter to a friend, “too proud to undertake anything wherein I should acquit myself but unworthily.”  This is a sort of pride—­not very common in our day—­which does not go before a fall.

I name a poet next,—­not because a great poet, for he was not, nor yet because he wrote “The English Garden,"[D] for there is sweeter garden-perfume in many another poem of the day that does not pique our curiosity by its title.  But the Reverend William Mason, if not among the foremost of poets, was a man of most kindly and liberal sympathies.  He was a devoted Whig, at a time when Whiggism meant friendship for the American Colonists; and the open expression of this friendship cost him his place as a Royal Chaplain.  I will remember this longer than I remember his “English Garden,”—­longer than I remember his best couplet of verse:—­