into perpetual herbs, and such
pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens
of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that
had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that
had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of
it for ten pounds, but he thought it a "tickle hazard." In his own little
garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred
samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in
Elizabeth's time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of
any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate
appetite. "The situation of our region," he says, "lying near unto the
north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater
force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than
the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose
digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal
heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the
air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our
bodies." The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great
abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used
sometimes a confection, "whereof so much as a bean would qualify their
hunger above common expectation"; but when they had nothing to qualify it
with, they crept into the marsh water up to their chins, and there
remained a long time, "only to qualify the heat of their stomachs by
violence."

In Harrison's day the abstemious Welsh had learned to eat like the
English, and the Scotch exceeded the latter in "over much and
distemperate gormandize." The English eat all they can buy, there being
no restraint of any meat for religion's sake or for public order. The
white meats--milk, butter, and cheese--though very dear, are reputed as
good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all
sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility ("whose cooks are for
the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers ") exceed in number
of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef, mutton,
veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as the
season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry
delicacies "wher