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 
