356 



A DISCOURSE 



IV. as marked by heaven for the fire : but of this sufficient. We could, 

 indeed, fill many sheets with the catastrophe of such as maliciously 

 destroyed groves, to feed either their revenge or avarice ; see Plutarch 

 in Pericles, and the saying of Pompeius. Cicero sharply reproves C. 

 Gabinius for his prodigious spoil in Greece ; and it was of late days held a 

 piece of inhumanity in Charles the French king, when he entered the 

 Grisons, after he had slain their leader, to cut down their woods ; a pu- 

 nishment never inflicted by sober princes, but to prevent idolatry in the 

 old law ; and to shew the lieinousness of disloyalty and treason by latter 

 sanctions ; in which case, and for terror, even a traitor's woods have 

 become anathema, as were easy to instance out of histories. 



But what shall we say, then, of our late prodigious spoilers, whose fu- 

 rious devastation of so many goodly woods and forests have bequeathed 

 an infamy on their names and memories, not quickly to be forgotten ! 

 I mean our unhappy usurpers and injurious sequestrators ; not here 

 to mention the deplorable necessities of a gallant and loyal who. 

 for their compositions, were many of them compelled to add yet to 

 this waste, by an inhuman and unparalleled tyranny over them, 

 to preserve the poor remainder of their fortunes, and to find them 

 bread. 



Nor was it here they desisted ; for after the fate of that once beautiful 

 grove under Greenwich castle, (of late supplied by his present majesty,) 

 even the royal walk of Elms in St. James's park. 



That living gallery of aged trees, 



was once proposed to the late council of state (as they called) to be cut 

 down and sold ; that the rest of his majesty's houses already demo- 

 lished, and marked out for destruction, his trees might likewise undergo 

 the same destiny, and no footsteps of monarchy remain unviolated. 



It is from hence you may calculate what were the designs of those ex- 

 cellent reformers, and the care these great statesmen took for the preser- 

 vation of their country, when, being parties in the booty themselves, they 

 gave way to so dishonourable and impolitic a waste of that material, 

 which being left entire, or husbanded with discretion, had proved the best 

 support and defence of it. But this (say they) was the effect of war, and 

 in the height of our contentions. No, it was a late and cold deliberation. 



