Introduction xv 



blades of grass grow where not one was found before." Like 

 Faust in the drama, Young's restless, anxious, storm-tossed 

 life was to find in land reclamation a peaceful haven where at 

 length he, too, would be able to say to the fleeting moment, 

 " Stay, thou art so fair! " The decision to purchase was 

 quickly made, he was about to transfer his capital and his home 

 to Yorkshire, when an offer made by Pitt of the secretaryship 

 of the new Board of Agriculture ^ dissipated for ever that fair 

 vision of a creative autocracy. The Suffolk farmer, after his 

 many thousand miles of rural rides, found himself sitting at a 

 desk in Whitehall amid the smoke, fog, and din of London, at 

 the poor salary of ;/^400 a year, out of which he had to pay two 

 guineas a week for lodgings. A house was subsequently rented 

 for him which eased his pecuniary position, but Young soon 

 grew disgusted with his colleagues and with the frivolous 

 business of a Board which, he said, could produce nothing of 

 the least credit to the public. The vision of that solitary 

 lordship of 4000 acres again floated before his mind, but he had 

 already re-sold the estate and — a rare experience — at a small 

 profit. In truth the alert and brilliant spirit of the most social 

 of men would have moved uneasily in the dull diurnal round 

 of rural life. To his quick sensibility the society of cultured 

 gentlemen and fair ladies was a necessity, and such compensa- 

 tions he found at Whitehall in fullest measure. Dining out 

 from twenty-five to thirty days and receiving forty invitations 

 a month from people of the highest rank and consequence, he 

 carried on a correspondence with Jeremy Bentham, Lafayette, 

 Washington; Fox conferred with him; he visited Burke, 

 of whose melancholy state of mental decay he gives a 

 pathetic picture ; thrice he was invited to Holwood by Pitt and 

 strolled about its beautiful grounds in consultation with the 

 great statesman, even as his friend Wilberforce was wont to 

 do, communing doubtless with his host under the giant branches 

 of that famous oak tree which exists to this day, bearing the 

 Wilberforce inscription." 



In 1797, the Directory, at the suggestion of Camot, organiser 

 of victory, despite Young's recantation of his earlier sympathies 



^ The Board was not a state department in the modem sense, but a 

 subsidised kind of Royal Society. See The Village Labourer, J. L. and 

 B. Hammond, p. 74. 



*" From Mr. Wilberforce 's Diary, 1783. — At length I well remember 

 after a conversation with Mr. Pitt in the open air at the root of an old 

 tree at Holwood just above the steep descent into the vale of Keston I 

 resolved to give notice on a fit occasion in the House of Commons of my 

 intention to bring forward the abolition of the Slave Trade." 



