“First see that the land be clear
    In title of the seller;
    And that it stand in danger
    Of no woman’s dowrie;
    See whether the tenure be bond or free,
    And release of every fee of fee;
    See that the seller be of age,
    And that it lie not in mortgage;
    Whether ataile be thereof found,
    And whether it stand in statute bound;
    Consider what service longeth thereto,
    And what quit rent thereout must goe;
    And if it become of a wedded woman,
    Think thou then on covert baron;
    And if thou may in any wise,
    Make thy charter in warrantise,
    To thee, thine heyres, assignes also;
    Thus should a wise purchaser doe.”

The learned Lipsius was a contemporary of Councillor Heresbach, and although his orthodoxy was somewhat questionable, and his Calvinism somewhat stretchy, there can be no doubt of the honest rural love which belongs to some of his letters, and especially to this smack of verse (I dare not say poetry) with which he closes his Eighth (Cent.  I.)

    “Vitam si liceat mihi
    Formare arbitriis meis: 
    Non fasces cupiam aut opes,
    Non clarus niveis equis
    Captiva agmina traxerim. 
      In solis habitem locis,
    Hortos possideam atque agros,
    Illic ad strepitus aquae
    Musarum studiis fruar. 
      Sic cum fata mihi ultima
    Pernerit Lachesis mea;
    Tranquillus moriar senex.”

And with this I will have done with a dead language; for I am come to a period now when I can garnish my talk with the flowers of good old English gardens.  At the very thought of them, I seem to hear the royal captive James pouring madrigals through the window of his Windsor prison,—­

    “the hymnis consecrat
    Of lovis use, now soft, now loud among,
    That all the gardens and the wallis rung.”

And through the “Dreme” of Chaucer I seem to see the great plain of Woodstock stretching away under my view, all white and green, “green y-powdered with daisy.”  Upon the half-ploughed land, lying yonder veiled so tenderly with the mist and the rain, I could take oath to the very spot where five hundred years ago the plowman of Chaucer, all “forswat,”

“plucked up his plowe Whan midsomer mone was comen in And shoke off shear, and coulter off drowe, And honged his harnis on a pinne, And said his beasts should ete enowe And lie in grasse up to the chin.”

But Chaucer was no farmer, or he would have known it to be bad husbandry (even for poetry) to allow cattle steaming from the plough to lie down in grass of that height.

* * * * *

Sir Anthony Fitz-herbert is the first duly accredited writer on British husbandry.  There are some few earlier ones, it is true,—­a certain “Mayster Groshede, Bysshop of Lyncoln,” and a Henri Calcoensis, among them.  Indeed, Mr. Donaldson, who has compiled a bibliography of British farm-writers, and who once threatened a poem on kindred subjects, has the effrontery to include Lord Littleton.  Now I have a respect for Lord Littleton, and for Coke on Littleton, but it is tempered with some early experiences in a lawyer’s office, and some later experiences of the legal profession; he may have written well upon “Tenures,” but he had not enough of tenderness even for a teasel.