338 History of the English Landed Interest. 



successfully the carrot, cabbage, lucerne, etc., was thus made 

 general property." 



Such a combination of practical and philosophical know- 

 ledge has been rarely met with in the same mind. Such an 

 ability to contrast system with system was only obtainable by 

 wide and prolonged travel, and such powers of expression in 

 terse, pungent, but at the same time sufficiently elegant 

 English, would not be acquired by any amount of reading and 

 research, but were an innate peculiarity of the man. 



But in his daring literary ventures, Young affi)rds many 

 opportunities for unfriendly criticism. We will mention three, 

 one at least of which, we believe, has never been alluded to 

 before, and that is the barefaced manner in which he would 

 purloin the literary property of some brother quill-driver 

 without acknowledging the source of his information. In this 

 way he has extracted considerably over a page of Defoe's Tour 

 through Britain^ and inserted it in his Six Weeks' Tour ; and 

 it is not improbable that he borrowed from this writer the 

 idea of thus starring the provinces in search of agricultural 

 information. Our second objection to Young's literary ex- 

 cellence is that by professing a nicety in the selection of 

 his language, he indirectly invited criticism on his use of 

 words, and thus drew upon himself the charge of inconsistency. 

 Thus Eden points out,^ that Young in one of the letters be- 

 longing to the Northern Tour, rejects the phrase " labouring 

 poor " as a meaningless term, and " what none but the most 

 superficial reasoners can use." Yet he adopts the expression 

 when, in the Travels in France, he speaks of our " labouring 

 poor " as more at their ease than those of France, Our re- 

 maining objection to Young's literary feats is not so much 

 his bad spelling, which is intelligible, but his reasoning, which 

 i'requently is not. Any one like ourselves, who has had to 

 wade through the Political Essays in search of their author's 

 philosophical views, will agree that there is an utter want 

 of sequence of ideas throughout the entire work, and that it 

 is almost impossible to follow any argument to its proper 



' Eden on the State of the Poor, vol. i. ch. i. 



