long in Scotland; he became gardener for Sir James
Douglas, into whose family (below-stairs) he eventually married;
afterwards he had experience in the royal gardens at Kew, and in
Leicester Fields. Finally he became proprietor of a patch of ground in
the neighborhood of London; and his success here, added to his success
in other service, gave him such reputation that he was one day waited
upon (about the year 1770) by Mr. Davis, a London bookseller, who
invited him to dine at an inn in Hackney; and at the dinner he was
introduced to a certain Oliver Goldsmith, an awkward man, who had
published four years before a book called "The Vicar of Wakefield." Mr.
Davis thought John Abercrombie was competent to write a good practical
work on gardening, and the Hackney dinner was intended to warm the way
toward such a book. Dinners are sometimes given with such ends even now.
The shrewd Mr. Davis was a little doubtful of Abercrombie's style, but
not at all doubtful of the style of the author of "The Traveller." Dr.
Goldsmith was not a man averse to a good meal, where he was to meet a
straightforward, out-spoken Scotch gardener; and Mr. Davis, at a mellow
stage of the dinner, brought forward his little plan, which was that
Abercrombie should prepare a treatise upon gardening, to be revised and
put in shape by the author of "The Deserted Village." The dinner at
Hackney was, I dare say, a good one; the scheme looked promising to a
man whose vegetable-carts streamed every morning into London, and to the
Doctor, mindful of his farm-retirement at the six-mile stone on the
Edgeware Road; so it was all arranged between them.

But, like many a publisher's scheme, it miscarried. The Doctor perhaps
saw a better bargain in the Lives of Bolingbroke and Parnell;[A] or
perhaps his appointment as Professor of History to the Royal Society put
him too much upon his dignity. At any rate, the world has to regret a
gardening-book in which the shrewd practical knowledge of Abercrombie
would have been refined by the grace and the always alluring limpidity
of the style of Goldsmith.

I know that the cultivators pretend to spurn graces of manner, and
affect only a clumsy burden of language, under which, I am sorry to say,
the best agriculturists have most commonly labored; but if the
transparent simplicity of Goldsmith had once been thoroughly infused
with the practical knowledge of Abercrombie, what a book on gardening we
should have had! What a lush