Rustic Manners and Czistoms. 91 



country farm and pays a visit to the metropolis. The citizen, 

 though some forty years younger, has just compared his own 

 aged appearance with the healthy, erect bearing of his old- 

 fashioned visitor. " Oh sir," replies the Northerner, " riots, 

 riots, surfeits overnight, and early potting it next morning, 

 stick white hairs upon young men's chins, when sparing diet 

 holds colour ; your crammed capons feed you fat here in 

 London, but our beef and bacon feeds us strong in the 

 country ; long sleeps and past midnight watchings, dry up 

 your bloods and wither your cheeks : we go to bed with the 

 lamb, and rise with the lark, which makes us healthful as the 

 spring. You are still sending to the apothecaries, and still 

 crying out, 'Fetch Master Doctor to me,' but our apothe- 

 cary's shop is our garden full of pot herbs, and our doctor is 

 a clove of garlick." The old man ends up with some plain 

 speaking against the citizen's practice of marrying at an age 

 when he might very easily be mistaken by a stranger for a 

 girl in breeches, " but in our country," he says, " we hold it as 

 dangerous to venture upon a wife as into a set battle ; it was 

 thirty-six ere I was pressed to that service, and am now as 

 lusty and sound at heart (I praise my God), as my yoke of 

 bullocks, that are the servants to my plough." 



It must not, however, be supposed that all rustics were so 

 prudent as this old north-countryman in the business of matri- 

 mony. Defoe tells us that in the marshes of Essex, about 

 Barnstable and Rochford, it was very frequent to meet men 

 who had had ten or twelve wives, the reason for which, so " a 

 merry fellow " told him, was because the marshmen went on 

 to the uplands in search of fresh-complexioned young women 

 as wives, but that the fogs and damps of their new homes 

 soon finished them off, upon which the undaunted but heart- 

 less widowers, bent on the same quest, would pay a renewed 

 visit to the uplands. Marrying of wives amidst these ague- 

 stricken haunts was, says Defoe, " a kind of good farm " to 

 their male inhabitants.^ 



Not by any means all, even of the richer country gentry, 



» A Tour through Great Britain, vol. i. p. 11. Defoe, 7th ed., 1769. 



