VEST-HOME, when the harvest-home goofe is to be killed. SEED-CAKE, a festival so called at the end of wheat-sowing in Effex and Suffolk, when the village is to be treated with feedcakes, pasties, and the frumentie-pot. But twice a week, according to antient right and cuftom, the farmer is to give roastmeat, that is, on Sundays and on Thursday-nights'. We have then a set of posies or proverbial rhymes, to be written in various rooms of the house, fuch as " Hufbandlie pofies for the Hall, "Pofies for the Parlour, Pofies for the Ghefts chamber, and "Pofies for thine own bedchamber"." Botany appears to have been eminently cultivated, and illuftrated with numerous treatifes in English, throughout the latter part of the fixteenth century. In this work are large enumerations of plants, as well for the medical as the culinary garden.

Our author's general precepts have often an expreffive brevity, and are sometimes pointed with an epigrammatic turn and a fmartness of allufion. As thus,

Saue wing for a thresher, when gander doth die;
Saue fethers of all things, the fofter to lie :
Much spice is a theefe, fo is candle and fire

Sweet faufe is as craftie as euer was frier '.

Again, under the leffons of the housewife.

Though cat, a good moufer, doth dwell in a house,
Yet euer in dairie haue trap for a mouse:

Take heed how thou laieft the bane* for the rats,
For poisoning thy fervant, thyfelf, and thy brats'.

And in the following rule of the fmaller economics.

Saue droppings and skimmings, however ye doo,
For medcine, for cattell, for cart, and for fhoo ".

In these stanzas on haymaking, he rises above his common

manner.

Go mufter thy feruants, be captain thyselfe,
Prouiding them weapons, and other like pelfe:
Get bottells and wallets, keepe fielde in the heat,
The feare is as much, as the danger is great.

With toffing, and raking, and fetting on cox,
Graffe latelie in fwathes, is haie for an oxe.
That done, go to cart it, and haue it awaie :
The battell is fought, ye haue gotten the daie ".

A great variety of verfe is used in this poem, which is thrown. into numerous detached chapters. The HUSBANDRIE is divided into the feveral months. Tuffer, in refpect of his antiquated diction, and his argument, may not improperly be styled the English Varro.

Such were the rude beginnings in the English language of didactic poetry, which, on a kindred fubject, the prefent age has feen brought to perfection, by the happy combination of judicious precepts with the most elegant ornaments of language and imagery, in Mr. Mafon's ENGLISH GARDEN.

SECT.

SE C T. Xxxvi.

A

MONG Antony Wood's manufcripts in the Bodleian library at Oxford, I find a poem of considerable length written by William Forreft, chaplain to queen Mary. It is entitled, "A true and most notable Hiftory of a right noble "and famous Lady produced in Spayne entitled the fecond "GRESIELD, practised not long out of this time in much part

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tragedous as delectable both to hearers and readers." This is a panegyrical history in octave rhyme, of the life of queen Catharine, the first queen of king Henry the eighth. The poet compares Catharine to patient Grifild, celebrated by Petrarch and Chaucer, and Henry to earl Walter her husband. Catharine had certainly the patience and conjugal compliance of Grifild: but Henry's cruelty was not, like Walter's, only artificial and affumed. It is dedicated to queen Mary: and Wood's manufcript, which was once very fuperbly bound and embossed, and is elegantly written on vellum, evidently appears to have been the book presented by the author to her majesty. Much of its antient finery is tarnished: but on the brafs boffes at each corner is ftill difcernible AVE, MARIA GRATIA PLENA. At the end

is this colophon. "Here endeth the Hiftorye of Gryfilde the "second, dulie meanyng Queene Catharine mother to our most "dread foveraigne Lady queene Mary, fynysched the xxv day "of June, the yeare of owre Lorde 1558. of owre Lorde 1558. By the fymple and "unlearned Syr Wylliam Forreft preeifte, propria manu." The poem, which confifts of twenty chapters, contains a zealous condemnation of Henry's divorce: and, I believe, preserves fome anecdotes, yet apparently misrepresented by the writer's religious and political bigotry, not extant in any of our printed histories. Forrest was a student at Oxford, at the time when this notable and knotty point of cafuiftry prostituted the learning of all the univerfities of Europe, to the gratification of the capricious amours of a libidinous and implacable tyrant. He has recorded many particulars and local incidents of what paffed in Oxford during that tranfaction . At the end of the poem is a metrical ORATION CONSOLATORY, in fix leaves, to queen Mary.

In the British Museum is another of Forreft's poems, written in two fplendid folio volumes on vellum, called "The tragedious "troubles of the most chaft and innocent Jofeph, fon to the

holy patriarch Jacob," and dedicated to Thomas Howard duke of Norfolk. In the fame repofitory is another of his pieces, never printed, dedicated to king Edward the fixth, “A "notable warke called The PLEASANT POESIE OF PRINCELIE

PRACTISE, compofed of late by the fimple and unlearned "fir William Forrest priest, much part collected out of a booke "entitled the GOVERNANCE OF NOBLEMEN, which booke "the wyfe philofopher Ariftotle wrote to his disciple Alexander