336 History of the English Landed Interest. 



such lasting benefits as his efforts to direct the attention of 

 the agricultural world to a correct course of cropping. His 

 works were bought up with avidity ; the first edition of the 

 Southern Tour being exhausted in a few weeks. They ap- 

 peared in almost every European language, and between 1766 

 and 1775 had earned their author £3,000. 



Young was in many respects a born literary genius. He was 

 noticeable even as a boy for his superior talents and inde- 

 fatigable industry ; and though at the unreasoning age of ten 

 he was beginning a History of England^ and while still in his 

 teens was writing pamphlets on the American War, by the 

 time he had arrived at the years of discretion he had wiselj'' 

 confined the area of his literary work to the special surround- 

 ings of his everyday life. 



Like Tull and other pioneers of agricultural reform he was 

 destined to fail in the profitable practice of what he preached. 

 His friend Paris describes him as " possessing a thirst for 

 experiment without a knowledge of what it demanded for its 

 success, or what were the fallacies to which it was exposed in 

 the execution." We cannot, for the sake of the ultimate 

 good they wrought amongst his countrymen, regret those 

 many fruitless efforts, those bitter disappointments and those 

 times of hardship and want which resulted from his prolonged 

 struggles to earn the livelihood of a farmer. Had he found 

 lucrative employment out of that " devouring wolf," as he 

 terms his Suffolk land, or that " hungry vitriolic gravel," as 

 he pb rases his Hertfordshire tenancy, posterity would never 

 have reaped the fruits of all the experience obtained in those 

 tours of 1767,1 1768,^ and 1770.^ As it was, the res angusta 



^ Tlie Soutliern Tour was written out of the materials collected whilst 

 looking out for another farm, which he eventuallj" hired in Herts. His 

 main difficulty was to find a suitable homestead. 



2 He took the farm of Samford Hall in Essex the same year that he 

 went his northern tour. This 300-acre holding he afterwards gave a 

 farmer £100 to be quit of. Here he wrote The Political Essays on the 

 Present State of the British Eininre, vide Dr. Pari,s' Biographical Memoir 

 of Young in the Quarterly Revieic, vol. ix. pp. 279-309. 



^ Tlie Eastern Tour, and indeed the Northern tour also, was adver- 

 tised beforehand, by which means he received valuable preliminary 

 information, 



