acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous
predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects
connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at
Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for
attachment to other men's wares,[6] and, finally, only escaping the
indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in
1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum,"
etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnaeus, and his account of British
cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best
which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his "New
Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel
"invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is
nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope.
The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous
agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there
are only two in the library of the British Museum.

I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Catawbas blighted,) a
rather ill-natured pleasure in reading how the Duke of Rutland, in the
beginning of the last century, was compelled to "keep up fires from
Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the
ripening of his grapes; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great
boast in that time. The quiet country squires--such as Sir Roger de
Coverley--had to content themselves with those old-fashioned fruits
which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells
us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine
Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with
filbert-bushes.[7]

In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers,
which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready
in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March.
Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at the end of
April; and the season of cauliflowers, which used to be limited to a
single month, now reached over a term of six months.

Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730, says,--"I have
more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I
have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small
boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, d