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
Paget in Suffolk; and there it was that in 1557 he published his
notable book. Taking the months _seriatim_, beginning, as he should,
in September, he runs through the whole round of work with an
exhaustiveness and accuracy which could hardly be bettered to-day.
Given a holding of the sort he had, a man might do much worse than
obey old Tusser from point to point.

He wrote in verse, a verse which is not often much better than those
rustic runes which still survive, wherein weather-lore and suchlike
sometimes prompt and sometimes are prompted by a rhyme. The best of
these semi-proverbial maxims are recalled by the best of Tusser. Take
this of the autumn winds as an example:

The West, as a father, all goodness doth bring,
The East, a forbearer, no manner of thing;
The South, as unkind, draweth sickness too near,
The North, as a friend, maketh all again clear.

But he can be more pointed than that and no less just--as when he is
telling the maids how to wash linen:

"Go wash well," saith Summer, "with sun I shall dry."
"Go wring well," saith Winter, "with wind so shall I."

He is never dull if he is never eloquent; he is always wise if he is
seldom witty. Among the Elizabethan poets there will have been many of
a lowlier quality, many who could not have reached the piety and sweet
humour of "My friend if cause doth wrest thee," which, with its happy
close of "And sit down, Robin, and rest thee," is the best known of
all his rhymes. As a verbal acrobat I don't suppose any of them
could approach him. His greatest feat in that kind was his "Brief
Conclusion" in twelve lines, every word in every line of which began
with T. Thus