VIRGIL ON YEWS 251 



We might have learnt too, from your opening 

 Ecologue, that in those days non-combatant farmers 

 ran risks of dispossession of their holdings in favour 

 of fighting heroes, and from your tale of repatriation 

 pointed morals at some recruiting or war agricultural 

 meetings, on village schoolroom platform, or stony 

 steps of market town on market days. O Education, 

 O Education, what blunders have been committed in 

 your name ! and you, O learned teachers of our 

 youth — and far from unappreciated now by us at 

 distant date from the hours of your ministration — 

 who had, we well know, climbed the giddy pinnacles 

 of Parnassus, scaled the steep gradients of Olympian 

 heights, and fed on the literary delights of an Augustan 

 age, how long, sometimes I wonder, would it have 

 been before your fountains of knowledge in these 

 particular directions, of to you a strange and bucolic 

 life, had dried up and ceased to flow? 



We cannot vie with Virgil, perhaps, in all he taught, 

 yet we can humbly claim at least a little wakeful 

 progress in our generation. We have learnt, and 

 that of late years only, that with an application of 

 nitrate of soda, followed by plentiful dressings of 

 farmyard manure — for the Yew is a gross feeder, and 

 an omnivorous lover of rich treatment — you may, in 

 six or seven years, achieve a very respectable garden 

 hedge from small plants, or if you so wish, by obtaining 

 larger specimens — and the Yews transplant with 

 more ease than any other tree — in a still shorter 

 space of time you may arrange for still more bountiful 

 results. Care should always be taken in replanting 

 to place their roots in the same position to the points 

 of the compass as they occupied in the nursery. Old 

 Virgil knew all about this, and told us in so many 

 words — of which I give the translation — that in 

 those days the planter " even marked on the bark 

 the quarter of the sky, that in whatsoever way each 



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