About the time of Lord Kames’s establishment at Blair-Drummond, or perhaps a little earlier, a certain Master Claridge published “The Country Calendar; or, The Shepherd of Banbury’s Rules to know of the Change of the Weather.”  It professed to be based upon forty years’ experience, and is said to have met with great favor.  I name it only because it embodies these old couplets, which still lead a vagabond life up and down the pages of country-almanacs:—­

    “If the grass grows in Janiveer,
    It grows the worst for’t all the year.”

    “The Welshman had rather see his dam on the bier. 
    Than to see a fair Februeer.”

    “When April blows his horn,
    It’s good both for hay and corn.”

    “A cold May and a windy
    Makes a full barn and a findy.”

    “A swarm of bees in May
    Is worth a load of hay;
    But a swarm in July
    Is not worth a fly.”

Will any couplets of Tennyson reap as large a fame?

About the same period, John Mills, a Fellow of the Royal Society, published a work of a totally different character,—­being very methodic, very full, very clear.  It was distributed through five volumes.  He enforces the teachings of Evelyn and Duhamel, and is commendatory of the views of Tull.  The Rotherham plough is figured in his work, as well as thirteen of the natural grasses.  He speaks of potatoes and turnips as established crops, and enlarges upon their importance.  He clings to the Virgilian theory of small farms, and to the better theory of thorough tillage.

In 1759 was issued the seventh edition of Miller’s “Gardener’s Dictionary,"[K] in which was for the first time adopted (in English) the classical system of Linnaeus.  If I have not before alluded to Philip Miller, it is not because he is undeserving.  He was a correspondent of the chiefs in science over the Continent of Europe, and united to his knowledge a rare practical skill.  He was superintendent of the famous Chelsea Gardens of the Apothecaries Company, He lies buried in the Chelsea Church-yard, where the Fellows of the Linnaean and Horticultural Societies of London have erected a monument to his memory.  Has the reader ever sailed up the Thames, beyond Westminster?  And does he remember a little spot of garden-ground, walled in by dingy houses, that lies upon the right bank of the river near to Chelsea Hospital?  If he can recall two gaunt, flat-topped cedars which sentinel the walk leading to the river-gate, he will have the spot in his mind, where, nearly two hundred years ago, and a full century before the Kew parterres were laid down, the Chelsea Garden of the Apothecaries Company was established.  It was in the open country then; and even Philip Miller, in 1722, walked to his work between hedge-rows, where sparrows chirped in spring, and in winter the fieldfare chattered:  but the town has swallowed it; the city-smoke has starved it; even the marble image of Sir Hans Sloane in its centre is but the mummy of a statue.  Yet in the Physic Garden there are trees struggling still which Philip Miller planted; and I can readily believe, that, when the old man, at seventy-eight, (through some quarrel with the Apothecaries,) took his last walk to the river-bank, he did it with a sinking at the heart which kept by him till he died.