the fountain of light and heat, when their natural heat was so far decayed:  or whether the piecing out of an old man’s life were worth the pains; I cannot tell:  perhaps the play is not worth the candle.”—­Monsieur Pompone, “French Ambassador in his (Sir William’s) time at the Hague,” certifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any man in France that arrived at a hundred years of age; a limitation of life which the old gentleman imputes to the excellence of their climate, giving them such a liveliness of temper and humour, as disposes them to more pleasures of all kinds than in other countries; and moralises upon the matter very sensibly.  The “late Robert Earl of Leicester” furnishes him with a story of a Countess of Desmond, married out of England in Edward the Fourth’s time, and who lived far in King James’s reign.  The “same noble person” gives him an account, how such a year, in the same reign, there went about the country a set of morrice-dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a Maid Marian, and a tabor and pipe; and how these twelve, one with another, made up twelve hundred years.  “It was not so much (says Temple) that so many in one small county (Herefordshire) should live to that age, as that they should be in vigour and in humour to travel and to dance.”  Monsieur Zulichem, one of his “colleagues at the Hague,” informs him of a cure for the gout; which is confirmed by another “Envoy,” Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried it.—­Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him the use of hammocks in that complaint; having been allured to sleep, while suffering under it himself, by the “constant motion or swinging of those airy beds.”  Count Egmont, and the Rhinegrave who “was killed last summer before Maestricht,” impart to him their experiences.

But the rank of the writer is never more innocently disclosed, than where he takes for granted the compliments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees.  For the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, he can truly say, that the French, who have eaten his peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have generally concluded that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France on this side Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they have eat in Gascony.  Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for in the later kind and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the Frontignac or Muscat grape.  His orange-trees too, are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau, or what he has seen since in the Low Countries; except some very old ones of the Prince of Orange’s.  Of grapes he had the honour of bringing over four sorts into England, which he enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this time pretty common among some gardeners in his neighbourhood, as well as several persons of quality; for he ever thought all things