For a long time the crop had been known, and Sir Thomas Overbury had made it the vehicle of one of his sharp witticisms against people who were forever boasting of their ancestry,—­their best part being below ground.  But Foster anticipates the full value of what had before been counted a novelty and a curiosity.  He advises how custards, paste, puddings, and even bread, may be made from the flour of potatoes.

John Worlidge (1669) gives a full system of husbandry, advising green fallows, and even recommending and describing a drill for the putting in of seed, and for distributing with it a fine fertilizer.

Evelyn, also, about this time, gave a dignity to rural pursuits by his “Sylva” and “Terra,” both these treatises having been recited before the Royal Society.  The “Terra” is something muddy,[4] and is by no means exhaustive; but the “Sylva” for more than a century was the British planter’s hand-book, being a judicious, sensible, and eloquent treatise upon a subject as wide and as beautiful as its title.  Even Walter Scott,—­himself a capital woodsman,—­when he tells (in “Kenilworth”) of the approach of Tressilian and his Doctor companion to the neighborhood of Say’s Court, cannot forego his tribute to the worthy and cultivated author who once lived there, and who in his “Sylva” gave a manual to every British planter, and in his life an exemplar to every British gentleman.

Evelyn was educated at Oxford, travelled widely upon the Continent, was a firm adherent of the royal party, and at one time a member of Prince Rupert’s famous troop.  He married the daughter of the British ambassador in Paris, through whom he came into possession of Say’s Court, which he made a gem of beauty.  But in his later years he had the annoyance of seeing his fine parterres and shrubbery trampled down by that Northern boor, Peter the Great, who made his residence there while studying the mysteries of ship-building at Deptford, and who had as little reverence for a parterre of flowers as for any other of the tenderer graces of life.

The British monarchs have always been more regardful of those interests which were the object of Evelyn’s tender devotion.  I have already alluded to the horticultural fancies of James I. His son Charles was an extreme lover of flowers, as well as of a great many luxuries which hedged him against all Puritan sympathy.  “Who knows not,” says Milton, in his reply to the [Greek:  EIKON BASIAIKE], “the licentious remissness of his Sunday’s theatre, accompanied with that reverend statute for dominical jigs and May-poles, published in his own name,” etc.?

But the poor king was fated to have little enjoyment of either jigs or May-poles; harsher work belonged to his reign; and all his garden-delights came to be limited finally to a little pot of flowers upon his prison-window.  And I can easily believe that the elegant, wrong-headed, courteous gentleman tended these poor flowers daintily to the very last, and snuffed their fragrance with a Christian gratitude.