xvi Travels in France 



with Rousseau ^ and the movement for poUtical freedom in 

 France, resolved that all Young's works (twenty volumes) 

 should be translated into French at the public expense. 



But in that same year the heaviest sorrow of his life broke 

 for ever the buoyant spirit of the great agriculturist. Of the 

 children of his unhappy marriage the youngest girl, Martha 

 Ann, better known under her pet name of " Bobbin," was 

 never absent from his thoughts. On her, " his lovely Bobbin," 

 he lavished a burning, passionate affection. " I have more 

 pleasure," he writes, on his return from the first French 

 journey, " in giving my little girl a French doll than in viewing 

 Versailles," and to her most of his letters from France were 

 directed. In 1797 this " dear angelic chUd " was swept away 

 at fourteen years of age by the white scourge, a victim to the 

 hard regime of a Dothegirls school — where pupils lay two in 

 a vile bed so naiTow that they must both lie the same way, 

 unexercised, ill and insufficiently fed — and to the murderous 

 therapeutics of the age. Stuffed with medicine by a London 

 doctor she was brought so low that the unhappy child was little 

 more than skin and bone when she reached Bradfield, there to 

 be purged to a spectre by a Bury physician. " Had she been a 

 pauper child," the heart-broken father writes, " she would 

 be well and hearty." A hurried journey to the seaside with 

 his darling Bobbin proved of no avail; she died on the way 

 and the desolate father pours out his grief in sobbing, poignant 

 words that end abruptly in the middle of a sentence as the pen 

 falls from his hand, palsied with sorrow — words which it would 

 seem almost a profanity to transcribe from the diary. He 

 buried her beneath his own pew in Bradfield church so that 

 when he knelt in prayer his knees should rest between her head 

 and her heart; her little room with its childish possessions he 

 kept a sanctuary inviolate ; he watered and tended the flowers 

 her little hands had planted. 



The sun of Arthur Young's life was now to set in sombre 

 clouds. He fell into a morbid religious melancholia, moping 

 alone and devouring, rather than reading, every devotional 

 and theological book he could laj^ hands on, tearing his heart 

 to pieces with weeping over a lock of his sweet departed 

 Bobbin's hair; reproaching himself for any social gaiety or 

 public amusement that intermitted his repentant round of 

 devotion, prayer, philanthropy, or fasting. The grand enter- 

 tainments at ducal palaces were now but dust and ashes ; their 

 * See pp. 70, 72, in this volume. 



