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Page 27
Lastly come a mort of things which you must not do. Here are some--for
some must be omitted from the decorous page:
Let not your twelve-year-old presume to sit
On things not to be moved. That's bad. His wit
Will never harden; nor let a twelve-month child.
Let no man wash in water that's defiled
By women washing in it. Bitter price
You pay for that in time. Burnt sacrifice
Mock not, lest Heaven be angry ... So do you
That men talk not against you. Talk's a brew
Mischievous, heady, easy raised, whose sting
Is ill to bear, and not by physicking
Voided. Talk never dies once set a-working--
Indeed, in talk a kind of god is lurking.
I regret to record the manner of death of the mainly pleasant old
country poet, still more the supposed cause of it--but it may not
be true. The Oracle at Delphi, which it seems he consulted after his
triumph at Chalkis, warned him that he would come by his end in the
grove of Nemean Zeus. He took pains, therefore, to avoid Nemea in his
travels, and chose to stay for a while at OEno� in Lokris, "where,"
says Mr. Evelyn-White, his editor in the _Loeb Library_, "he was
entertained by Amphiphanes and Ganyktor, sons of Phegeus." But you
never knew when the Oracle would have you, or where. OEno� was also
sacred to Nemean Zeus, "and the poet, suspected by his hosts of having
seduced their sister, was murdered there. His body, cast into the sea,
was brought to shore by dolphins, and buried at OEno�; at a later
date his bones were removed to Orchomenos." An unhappy ending for
the instructor of Perses! But it may not be true. To be sure, these
poets--I can only say that to me it sounds improbable, and so, I take
it, it sounded to Alk�us of Messene, who wrote this epigram upon his
dust:
When, in the Lokrian grove dead Hesiod lay,
The Nymphs with water washt the stains away.
From their own well they fetcht it, and heapt high
The Mound. Then certain goatherds, being by,
Poured milk and yellow honey on the grave,
Minding the Muses' honey which he gave
Living, that old man stored with poesy.
That, surely, bespeaks a happier end to Hesiod. It is an epitaph that
any poet might desire.
THE ENGLISH HESIOD
Now for Tusser, whom I feel that I belittled in the last Essay in
order to make a point for the Boeotian.
"Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry United to as Many of Good
Huswifery" was the sixth edition in twenty years of a book which that
fact alone proves to have been a power in its day. It was indeed more
lasting than that, for it had twenty editions between 1557, when
it began with a modest "Hundreth Pointes," and 1692, when the
black-letter quartos ended. Thomas Tusser, the author of it, was
a gentleman-farmer and had the education of one. He began as a
singing-boy at Wallingford, went next to St. Paul's, then to Eton,
where Nicholas Udall gave him once fifty-three strokes, "for fault but
small or none at all"; presently to Cambridge, where Trinity Hall had
him at nurse. All that done, he settled as a farmer under the Lord
Paget in Suffolk; and there it was that in 1557 he published his
notable book. Taking the months _seriatim_, beginning, as he should,
in September, he runs through the whole round of work with an
exhaustiveness and accuracy which could hardly be bettered to-day.
Given a holding of the sort he had, a man might do much worse than
obey old Tusser from point to point.
He wrote in verse, a verse which is not often much better than those
rustic runes which still survive, wherein weather-lore and suchlike
sometimes prompt and sometimes are prompted by a rhyme. The best of
these semi-proverbial maxims are recalled by the best of Tusser. Take
this of the autumn winds as an example:
The West, as a father, all goodness doth bring,
The East, a forbearer, no manner of thing;
The South, as unkind, draweth sickness too near,
The North, as a friend, maketh all again clear.
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