SOILS. 8 1 



is whimpering over his rood of unkindly soil remember 

 what the farmer has done and is doing, the wide world 

 over, amid the forest and the fen. And such pusillanimity 

 is specially comic in the case of a Scotsman or Englishman, 

 who is surrounded by a thousand proofs of triumphant 

 cultural skill ; who may walk, from dawn to dusk, among 

 golden corn, where once the antlered monarch spent his 

 life, unscared by hound or arrow ; among flocks and herds, 

 knee-deep in herbage, where fifty years ago the blackcock 

 crowed amid the purple heather, where 



" The coot was swimming in the reedy pond, 

 Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted ; 

 And where, by whispering sedge, the heron, fond 

 Of solitude, alighted." 



" Richard," thus I spoke to the indolent and obese pro- 

 prietor of a small freehold in my neighbourhood, who was 

 complaining to me that his garden, about as highly culti- 

 vated as Mariana's at the Moated Grange, was viciously 

 and desperately incapable of producing anything but 

 " docks " — " Richard, your forefathers have helped to re- 

 claim the greater part of Sherwood Forest, while their 

 neighbours were draining the Lincoln fens ; and I should 

 almost have hoped, taking into account the discoveries of 

 modern science, that you might, in a favourable season, 



