278 History of the English Landed Interest. 



and thickness of fleece, wliich alone can render mountain sheep- 

 feeding a profitable pursuit. 



The moral of all that has been now said is, that no one as 

 yet had been clever enough to get off one and the same sheep 

 the finest wool and the sweetest meat. The old mountain-fed 

 Cotswold yielded excellent material for warming the outer 

 man, but very poor stuff indeed for gratifying his inner wants. 

 The Cheviot sheep was just the other way about. The culti- 

 vated enclosure improved the flavour and quality of the mutton, 

 but the virgin waste afforded the best wool. It was probably 

 off part of an old-fashioned Cotswold ewe, fed on one of the 

 ancient commons, that Dr. Johnson dined whilst travelling 

 from London to Oxford. It was, he said, " ill fed, ill kept, 

 ill killed, and ill dressed," from which we may be fairly sure 

 that its wool (unless rendered brittle by irregular feeding) 

 would have been fit to have interwoven with cloth of gold 

 for a king's vesture. 



The finest mutton was, however, the Southdown ; and though 

 Lord Somerville once tricked the President of the Board and 

 several other connoisseurs into extolling the superior flavour of 

 a Leicester leg, there was no doubt, as Young saj's, that the 

 paler and closer texture of this mutton was really not to be 

 compared with the delicate and piquant taste of the South- 

 down's gravy. ^ 



But little remains to be said of the other varieties of farmer's 

 livestock. Swine were generally kept throughout the country, 

 and were as good, in the absence of any incentive like the 

 Prize Show to scientific management, as we could expect. 

 The first we hear of any public encouragement bestowed 

 on pig-breeding is the fact that Arthur Young obtained the 

 medal of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, etc., some- 

 where about 1780, and no doubt his interesting contributions 

 to his Annals ^ on the fattening of hogs let in a flood of new 

 light on the subject. 



^ Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxvi. pp. 433-4. At the present daj-, of 

 course, there is no comparison, the Southdown's flesh being far superior 

 to that of the Leicester. 



2 Id. Ibid, vol. i. p. 333 and vol. iii. p. 486. 



