144

A DISCOURSE

book x. be innocent: no forbidden fruit; no serpent to deceive; none to bedeceived.

Hail! O bail then, and welcome you blefsed Elysiums , where a newstate of things expects us ; where all the pompous and charming delightsthat detain us here a while, shall be changed into real and substantialfruitions, eternal springs, and pleasure intellectual, becoming the dignityof our nature!

I beg no pardon for the application, but deplore my no better use ofit; and that, whilst I am thus upon the wing, I must now descend so

soon again.

Of all the foresters, the Iiorn-beam preserves itself best from the brut-ting of deer, and therefore to be kindly entertained in parks. But thereason why, with us, we rarely find it ample and spreading, is, that ourhusbandman suffers, too large and grown a lop before he cuts them off,which leaves such ghastly wounds as often prove exitial to the tree, orcause it to grow deformed and hollow, and of little worth but for thefire; whereas, were they oftener taken off when the lops were younger,though they did not furnish so great wood, yet the continuance andflourishing of the tree would more than recompense it.

3. They very frequently plant a clump of these trees before the entriesof the most of the great towns in Germany , to which they apply timber-frames for convenience of the people to sit and solace in. Scamozzi , thearchitect , says, " That in his time he found one whose branches extendedseventy feet in breadth this was at Vuimfen, near the Necker, belong-ing to the Duke of Wirtemberg ; but that which I find planted before thegates of Strasburgh is a Platanus and a Lime-tree growing hard by oneanother, in which is erected a Pergula of fifty feet wide, and eight feetfrom the ground, having ten arches of twelve feet height, all fliadedwith their foliage; besides this, there is an over-grown Oak, which has anarbour in it of sixty feet diameter.