34^ History of the English Landed Interest. 



the vexed question of horses versus oxen as draught beasts 

 has ever yet been thoroughly thrashed out.^ 



Farmer George's example was catching, and even statesmen 

 forgot the cares of office for a while in attending to the wants 

 of their cows and sheep. Mr. Prothero tells us how " Walpole 

 opened the letters of his farm steward before he broke the 

 seals of letters on State subjects," how Bolingbroke " read 

 Swift's Essays between two haycocks with his eyes to heaven, 

 not in admiration of the Dean, but in fear of rain," and how 

 Burke " studied the wants of the carrot with the same en- 

 lightened understanding that he bestowed on those of the 

 people," 2 



Let all then who are interested in agriculture forget the 

 poor old king's stubborn prosecution of the American war and 

 other poHtical blunders for the sake of those benefits he un- 

 doubtedly conferred by the force of his example upon farmers. 

 We, for our part, would fain obliterate from our thoughts the 

 sad significance of the padded room at Kew, and remember 

 only the red face beaming with suppressed merriment over 

 the Windsor uniform, as, like Alfred of old, its owner turned 

 the piece of roasting meat in the cottage kitchen. We prefer 

 to dwell on his attempts to get rid of triticum repens from the 

 farm, rather than on his efforts to weed the high seas of the 

 French. We would merge the errors of statecraft committed 

 by George the King in the many kindly actions of Ealph 

 Robinson,^ the writer to Young's Annals of Agriculture ; and 

 like his obstinate Tory subjects, yield him a willing allegiance 

 for the sake of his exemplary domestic life. 



He dissociated himself from most of the men who made his 

 reign celebrated ; he disliked Reynolds and Nelson, failed to 

 appreciate Chatham, was out of touch with Burke, but he never 

 turned his back on a poor man. Perhaps he erected as noble 

 a monument of his sterling qualities as was erected for any of 

 these, when he built that mill in Windsor Park from which 



1 Compare Walter of Henley's Statistics in Part I. of this work. 

 ^ Pioneers of English Farming, p. 78. E. E. Prothero. 

 ^ His pseudonym as an agricultural writer, vide Young's Annals of 

 Agriculture, vol. vii. p. 71. 



