The Nymphs with water washt the stains away.
From their own well they fetcht it, and heapt high
The Mound. Then certain goatherds, being by,
Poured milk and yellow honey on the grave,
Minding the Muses' honey which he gave
Living, that old man stored with poesy.

That, surely, bespeaks a happier end to Hesiod. It is an epitaph that
any poet might desire.




THE ENGLISH HESIOD


Now for Tusser, whom I feel that I belittled in the last Essay in
order to make a point for the Boeotian.

"Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry United to as Many of Good
Huswifery" was the sixth edition in twenty years of a book which that
fact alone proves to have been a power in its day. It was indeed more
lasting than that, for it had twenty editions between 1557, when
it began with a modest "Hundreth Pointes," and 1692, when the
black-letter quartos ended. Thomas Tusser, the author of it, was
a gentleman-farmer and had the education of one. He began as a
singing-boy at Wallingford, went next to St. Paul's, then to Eton,
where Nicholas Udall gave him once fifty-three strokes, "for fault but
small or none at all"; presently to Cambridge, where Trinity Hall had
him at nurse. All that done, he settled as a farmer under the Lord