serious calamity; he is anxious to lay in happily his seed; he is then anxious for seasons favourable to its growth; and, after his fields are become ripe for the harvest, almost every cloud that flies over his head is an object of apprehension. Such high encomiums, therefore, can never be applicable, except in the case of a country gentleman who is not obliged to live on the fruits of his own industry, by whom a barren year is not felt, and who retains no more of his grounds in his own hands than may serve to his convenience or amusement. And even here the happiness is found often to exist merely in contemplation. It was some such form of life which appears to have smitten the imagination of Cowley; and what was the consequence? When he came at length to take possession of his elysium, he met with so rude a reception, that others, who indulge themselves in a like prospect, may learn thence to moderate their expectations. "The first night," says he, in a letter to Dr. Sprat, "that I came hither, I

caught so great a cold, with a defluxion, of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days; and, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal fortune here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbours. What this fignifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging*." Two years afterwards, he died; and thus terminated his plan of rural felicity.

It muft however be acknowledged, that there are few occupations more adapted to yield a rational delight than those of husbandry, as well on account of their utility, as of their suitableness to the primitive dig nity of our nature. The culture of the ground was the original employment of

* See Johnson's Life of Cowley.

man. Our first parents were placed in the garden of Eden to dress and to keep it; and there seems in their posterity a kind of instinctive disposition to recover at least an external image of the paradisiacal state, There is scarce any one, however privi-` leged or exalted he may be in the world, who does not sometimes please himself in the prospect of rural labours and enjoyments, who does not hope some day to adorn his own garden or cultivate his own farm, and to sit down in repose under his own vine or fig-tree: and among the eft personages in every age, who have gathered laurels in the field, or successfully governed kingdoms, we are told of some who have found, in the shade of retirement and agricultural occupations, that secret satisfaction which they had never experienced amidst the splendours of a court or the triumphs of victory. And the same spirit of content will be diffused among mankind at large, when they shall have learned, according to the word of prophecy, to beat their swords into plough-shares,

the great

and their spears into pruning-hooks; when, by a general prevalence of piety, the reapers, like those of Boaz, in gathering in the harvest, shall say to the master, The Lord: be with thee, and he shall answer, The Lord bless you*; and when every ruler shall become the shepherd of his people.

III. Rural diversions. As it might justly be thought impertinent for one who is no sportsman to undertake to estimate the pleasures of fowling and hunting, I shall dismiss this topic very briefly. It is certain that, in point of present gratification, every pleasure is such as it is felt to be; and therefore, if any one finds himself delighted in wandering through the woods with his fowling-piece, or in scouring the country along with dogs and horses and desperate riders, to the terror of an innocent quadruped, it would be in vain to dispute against his experience. To what persons, or in what cases, such diversions are allowable, I leave others to determine;

Ruth, ii. 4.

and shall content myself to observe, what I suppose none will deny, that when they are made a principal object, their manifest tendency is to induce an incapacity for nobler enjoyments, and so to lay the foundation of a despicable old age; for it would seem difficult to imagine a character more entirely sunk, and devoid of all respectability, than that of an old wornout sportsman, the vigour of whose days has been wasted in mere animal exertions, and whose memory is stored with nothing better than the history of hares and foxes, of rustic adventures and perilous escapes; and who dreams away the evening of life, like the hound sleeping upon his hearth, in retracing the vain images of his wild and sportive excursions.

IV. Rural scenery. With the pleasures of rural scenery, every inhabitant of a temperate climate, and especially of this favoured island, where nature smiles almost in perpetual verdure, must in some degree be acquainted. These pleasures