OF FOREST-TREES. 337 



Or as thus expressed by Petrarch, BOOK IV. 



Silva placet Musis, urbs est inimica poetis. 

 The Muse herself enjoys 



Best in the woods ; verse flies the city noise. 



So true is that of yet as noble a poet of our own ; 



As well might corn as verse in cities grow : 



In vain the thankless glebe we plough and sow : 



Against th' unnatural soil in vain we strive : 



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



When it seems they will bear nothing but nettles and thorns of satire, 

 and, as Juvenal says, by indignation too ; and therefore, almost all the 

 poets, except those who were not able to eat bread without the bounty 

 of great men, that is, without what they could get by flattering them, 

 (which was Homer and Pindar's case,) have not only withdrawn them- 

 selves from the vices and vanities of the great world, into the innocent 

 felicities of gardens and groves, and retiredness, but have also com- 

 mended 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 Oak, methinks I hear the answer of an 

 hundred old Druids, and the bards of our inspired ancestors. 



In a word, so charmed were poets with those natural shades, especially 

 that of the Platanus, that they honoured temples with the names of 

 gi'oves "*, though they had not a tree about them. Nay, sometimes one *--'h.-h<rn 

 . stately tree alone was so revered : and of such a- one there is mention 

 in a fragment of an inscription in a garden at Rome, where there was a ^tf" 

 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, Virgil, Gratius, Ovid, Horace, Claudian, 

 Statins, Silius, and others of later times, especially the divine Petrarch, 

 (for scriptormn cJiorus omnis amat nemus,) were I minded to swell this 

 charming subject beyond the limits of a chapter. I think only to take 

 notice, that theatrical representations, such as were those of the Ionian, 

 called Andria, the scenes of pastorals, and the like innocent rural enter- 

 tainments, were of old adorned and trimmed up e ramis et frondihiis, cum 



'KatTa, xrev' n 



Strab. lib. ix. 



