xvi INTRODUCTION 



yea Sweet Marjoram, Barley, and further Gromwell-seed 

 and Virga Aurea, and Would, from the Western Isles, 

 though they grow in our hedges in England. 



Sir William Temple was born in the reign of 

 Charles I. in 1628, the year of Buckingham's assassin- 

 ation, and died in 1698, four years before his Royal 

 Master, William III. 



Every one knows from Macaulay's " pictured page " 

 that Sir William negotiated the famous Triple Alliance 

 with Holland and Sweden in 1668, learnt from his 

 grateful Sovereign how to cut Asparagus in the Dutch 

 fashion, and finally, weary of diplomacy and etiquette, 

 retired Diocletian-like from Court and ceremony, 

 first to Sheen and later to his beloved More Park, 

 near Farnham in Surrey (no/ Moor Park in Hertford- 

 shire, the subject of his eulogy). Here he devoted 

 himself to a lettered leisure amid books and apricots, 

 pears and vines took the losing side as the champion 

 of Antiquity in the great Book- War then raging 

 between the hosts of Ancients and Moderns (led by 

 the truculent scholar Bentley), which some of us still 

 look on safely from our arm-chairs in the satyric pages 

 of Swift's " Battle of the Books " ; and finally dving, 

 as he had lived, an Epicurean philosopher of the school 

 of Gassendi and St. Evremond, bequeathed his heart 



