But
even in these days when all sorts of sciences are forced upon all sorts
of students, we often meet with persons of considerable sagacity and
much information of a different kind who are marvellously ignorant of
the vegetable world.
In the just published Memoirs of the late James Montgomery, of
Sheffield, it is recorded that the poet and his brother Robert, a
tradesman at Woolwich, (not Robert Montgomery, the author of 'Satan,'
&c.) were one day walking together, when the trader seeing a field of
flax in full flower, asked the poet what sort of corn it was. "Such corn
as your shirt is made of," was the reply. "But Robert," observes a
writer in the _Athenaeum_, "need not be ashamed of his simplicity.
Rousseau, naturalist as he was, could hardly tell one berry from
another, and three of our greatest wits disputing in the field whether
the crop growing there was rye, barley, or oats, were set right by a
clown, who truly pronounced it wheat."
Men of genius who have concentrated all their powers on some one
favorite profession or pursuit are often thus triumphed over by the
vulgar, whose eyes are more observant of the familiar objects and
details of daily life and of the scenes around them. Wordsworth and
Coleridge, on one occasion, after a long drive, and in the absence of a
groom, endeavored to relieve the tired horse of its harness.
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