Introduction xvii 



splendour paled before a cold Sundaj' dinner and hours spent 

 over his lost darling's burial-place in Bradfield church. The 

 chance reading of a French novel must be atoned for as sinful 

 backsliding ; his scientific cronies of the Royal Society became 

 a " gang of philosophers; " and the dearest joy of his life was 

 to educate, catechise, and feed the village children. From 

 March to May 1798, expenses for 627 dinners to children " in 

 memory of Bobbin " are noted in the diary. 



With a sensibility quickened by a personal sorrow Young 

 entered one day, in the year 1800, an English labourer's home 

 at Millbrook. It was a tumble-down hovel ; the wind searched 

 it through on every side; and a woman lay in childbirth, ill 

 and moaning, on a bed " hardly good enough for a hog." Her 

 dead infant lay by her side and one of the elder girls was raking 

 a few embers together on the hearth. " Merciful God ! what a 

 sight! " he exclaims. The poor folk, he learned, knew not 

 even by what tenure they held their cottages which they said 

 once belonged to the Duke,^ but that " he had swopped them 

 away to my Lord Ossory." Much has been heard of Young's 

 indignant outbursts against the Grands Seigneurs of pre- 

 revolutionary France. His "Oh! if I was the legislator of 

 France for a day how I would make such great lords skip again " 

 is familiar enough to the English reader. But the lash of 

 Young's fierce indignation fell not on French lords alone. As 

 he wended his way from this English labourer's sty to Wobum 

 Abbey, the seat of the Duke of Bedford, with its wealth and 

 grandeur and worldly greatness, he exclaims, " Ah! how little 

 do the great know what they swop and what they receive! 

 What have not the great and rich to answer for ! I am sick of 

 it as soon as I enter those splendid walls. I had rather be 

 among the cottagers at Millbrook had I the means of aiding 

 them." 



Now above the small gardens of these Millbrook cottages 

 Young had beheld an enclosed waste and the once vehement 

 advocate of the Enclosure Acts felt searchings of heart. 

 Shocked by his experience at Millbrook, Young determined to 

 undertake yet another Tour to examine, not the broad acres of 

 successful farmers and great landlords, but the homes of the 

 English poor and to elaborate a scheme for applying waste lands 

 to bettering their condition. The result he published in the 

 Annals (vol. xxxvi. pp. 497 et seq.) under the heading " On the 

 Propriety' of applying Wastes to the Better Maintenance of the 



1 Of Bedford. 



