328 History of the English Landed Interest. 



tlius (unconsciously perhaps) affording eloquent testimony of 

 their appreciation of what little had been effected for local 

 agriculture by the exemplary practice of a few landowners. 

 Even had there been the facilities of locomotion now afforded 

 by steam, and the diffusion of knowledge now available by a 

 cheap press, nothing but a prolonged ocular demonstration 

 could have drummed into the dull brain of the rustic the advan- 

 tages of the new husbandry. It was not exactly obstinacy 

 or ignorance which prevented tenant farmers from assimi- 

 lating fresh ideas. Any experimental husbandry jeopardised 

 the bread of the family, and the results of its success required 

 indisputable proof before the responsible head of that family 

 felt himself justified in hazarding its adoption. It is however 

 quite evident, as a quaint writer of the period expresses it, 

 " that characters wrote ^ with pen and ink " conveyed no 

 meaning to a class which was unable to read. They could 

 only be expressed in an intelligible form through the medium 

 of the plough and spade. Even then the ordinary farmer 

 might have been excused if he thought twice before adopting 

 some new-fangled economy which he saw attempted by one 

 or other of his richer neighbours. 



TuU had been reproached with " drilling away his fortune," 

 and though posterity has wrongly attributed to the father 

 the bankruptcy of the son, there is but little doubt that Jethro 

 was a man of straitened means.^ Arthur Young, as a farmer, 

 was a terrible failure, and so was many another well-known 

 agriculturist. 



But the mention of these two names in the same breath 

 affords us an opportunity, not to give an account of Tull's life 

 and character (for this we have more or less done when treat- 

 ing of that earlier portion of the century, to which Tull more 

 properly belongs), but to afford the reader an insight into his 

 system of husbandry, by describing Young's visit to Prosperous 

 Farm, long after its celebrated master had passed away. 



The house in which this famous farmer was content to re- 



' A Dissertation of the Chief Obstacles to the Improvement of Land, etc 

 Aberdeen, 1760. 



^ Annals of Agriculture, vol. xxiii. p. 173. 



