SYLVA 229 



As well might corn, as verse in cities grow, 

 In vain the thankless glebe we plow and sow, 

 Against the unnatural soil in vain we strive, 

 'Tis not a ground in which these plants will thrive. 



Gowley. 



When it seems they will bear nothing but nettles and 

 thorns of satyrs, and as Juvenal says, by indignation 

 too ; and therefore 4 almost all the poets, except those 

 4 who were not able to eat bread without the bounty 

 4 of great men ; that is, without what they could get 

 4 by flattering them (which was Homer's and Pindar's 

 4 case) have not only withdrawn themselves from the 

 4 vices and vanities of the great world, into the inno- 

 4 cent felicities of gardens, and groves, and retiredness, 

 4 but have also commended and adorned nothing so 

 much in their never-dying Poems. * Here then is the 

 true Parnassus, Castalia, and the Muses, and at every 

 call in a grove of venerable oaks, methinks I hear the 

 answer of an hundred old Druids, and the bards of 

 our inspired ancestors. 



In a word, so charm'd were poets with those natural 

 shades, especially that of the platanus, that they 

 honour'd temples with the names of 2 groves, though 

 they had not a tree about them : Nay sometimes, 

 one stately tree alone was so rever'd : And of such a 

 one there is mention in a fragment of an inscription 

 in a garden at Rome, where there was a temple built 

 under a spreading beech-tree, sacred to Jupiter, under 

 the name of Fagutalis. 



Innumerable are the testimonies I might produce 

 in behalf of groves and woods out of the poets, 



1 Juvenal Sat. VII. Pers. Sat. I. 



* aXarj KaXovvTEQ rd hpd Travra KUV y \fsi\cL 01 Trowjrai Koafiovaiv. Strab. /. g. 



