ABSTRACT

Most early modern poets would be familiar with Pliny’s praise of trees in his Natural History, and their less learned readers with Philemon Holland’s translation. In his preface Pliny reflects that trees were Nature’s supreme gift, furnishing all needs, before, through pride, “wee must needs cut through great mountaines for to meet with marble,” travel to China for silk, “dive down into the bottom of the red sea for pearls,” and “sinke deepe pits even to the bottom of the earth, for the precious [Emerald].” From “pride and vanity . . . we have devised means to pierce and wound our ears: because, forsooth, it would not serve our turns to weare costly pearles and rich stones . . . unless they were engraven also, and cut into the very flesh of our bodies.” Pliny’s wry comments on luxury goods (costing trees for shafts, ships, and fuel) resonate in seventeenth-century satire on what Andrew Marvell in “The Mower against Gardens,” calls “Luxurious man.”1