TENNYSON'S "NORTHERN FARMER" 



trivial accident set me to work, and I have in a great manner 

 resided here ever since. ... I have now gone over all of this 

 estate, and this I have done without the aid of a tenant. . . . 

 I need not inform you that the first steps in improvement 

 are draining when necessary, inclosing sufficiently, removing 

 stones, roots, rubbish of every kind, and liming. . . . These 

 operations cost me, I reckon, about £11 per acre upon an 

 average ; and I lay my account with being repaid all my 

 expenses by the first three crops, but at any rate by the 

 fourth. When the land which I make arable will give at 

 least (if brought from a state of nature) twenty times the 

 rent when I began to improve it.'"' 



Major-General Dirom, of Mount Annan, writing from that 

 place in 1811, says that all over Scotland for about thirty 

 years (from 1780-1810) he has seen " cultivation extending 

 from the valleys to the hills, commons inclosed, wastes 

 planted, and heaths everywhere giving way to corn : . . . 

 extension of towns and villages, by new lines of excellent 

 roads, magnificent bridges and inland navigation . . . our 

 rapidly increasing population, by our now exporting great 

 quantities of grain from parts of Scotland into which it was 

 formerly imported, and by the superior comfort and abund- 

 ance which appear in the domestic economy of the inhabit- 

 ants." If you read any newspaper of to-day published in 

 Canada or in the Argentine Republic, you find exactly 

 the same process at work, and the same enthusiasm about it. 

 Even in 1840-1850 all these improvements were still vigor- 

 ously going on. 



Look at Tennyson's Northern Farmer (old style) : — 



" 'An I a stubb'd Tliurnaby waaste. 

 Dobbut loook at the waaste, theer warnt no feead for a cow_, 

 Nowt at all but bracken an fuzz_, an loook at it now. 

 Warnt worth nowt a haacre and now there's lots o feead. 

 Four scoor yows upon it an some on it down i seead. " 



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