OF FOREST-TREES. 191 



were these to a canoe in Congo, which was made to hold two hundred CHAP. in. 

 men ? The Lician Platanus recorded by Pliny, and remaining long after ^-^^"^ 

 his days, had a room in it of eighty-one feet in compass, adorned with 

 stately seats and tables of stone ; and it seems it was so glorious a tree 

 both in body and head, that Licinius Mucianus (three times consul and 

 governor of that province) used to feast his whole retinue in it, choosing 

 rather to lodge in it, than in his golden-roofed palace *, And of later • Lib. xii. 

 date, that vast Cerrus in which an eremite built bis cell and chapel, so 

 celebrated by the noble Fracastorius in his poem Malteide. Cant. viii. 



But for these capacious hollow trees we need go no farther than our 

 own country ; there being, besides that which I mention in Gloucester- 

 shire, an Oak at Kidlington-Green, in Oxfordshire, which has been fre- 

 quently used (before the death of the late judge Morton, near whose house 

 it stood) for the immediate imprisonment of vagabonds and malefactors, 

 till they could conveniently be removed to the county gaol : and such 

 another prison Dr. Plott does, in his excellent history of Oxfordshire, 

 mention out of Ferdinand Hertado, in Moravia, to be made out of the 

 trunk of a Willow, twenty-seven feet in compass. But not to go out 

 of our promised bounds, the learned doctor speaks of an Elm growing on 

 Blechington-Green, which gave reception and harbour to a poor great- 

 bellied woman, whom the inhospitable people would not receive into 

 their houses, who was brought to-bed in it of a son, now a lusty young 

 fellow. This puts me in mind of that (I know not what to call it) 

 privilege belonging to a venerable Oak, lately growing in Knoll Wood, 

 near Trely-Castle, in Staffordshire, of which, I think. Sir Charles 

 Skrymsher is owner ; that upon oath made of a bastard's being begotten 

 within the reach of the shade of its bough, (which I assure you at the 

 rising and declining of the sun is very ample,) the offence was not 



obnoxious to the censure of either ecclesiastical or civil magistrate. 



These, with our historian, I rather mention for their extravagant use, and 

 to refresh the reader with some variety, than for their extraordinary 

 capacity : because such instances were innumerable, should we pretend 

 to illustrate this particular with more than needs. 



And now I have spoken of Elms, and other extravagancies of trees, 

 there stands one (as this curious observer notes) in Binsey common, 



B b 2 



