How timely, for example, is this advice to the farmer, which in a Christian land should find thorough acceptance, no matter what may have been the demands upon him of the ill-advised amongst his labourers!—
Please such as did help thee man, woman, and child:
Thus doing, with alway such help as they can,
Thou winnest the praise of the labouring man."
—p. 188.
But, to complete our parallel with Hesiod, Tusser has his descriptions of the winds and planets; is alive to the wisdom of the "farm and fruit of old," as well as of the improved courses of husbandry in his own day: and if he now and then strikes out paths which have no parallel in Hesiod, even in such cases the homeliness and naïveté of his counsel savours of the ancient poet in whose footsteps he so distinctly treads. Though the domestic fowl does not figure in the 'Works and Days,' and the domestic cat is equally unmentioned by the Bœotian didactic poet, the following mention of them both by Tusser reminds us of his practical economic views, and would not have been deemed by him beneath the dignity of the subject, had poultry and mousers asserted the importance in old days which they now demand:—
Is nought for the poulter, and worse for the poor;
So now to keep hogs, and to starve them for meat,
Is as to keep dogs for to bawl in the street.
