xviii Travels in France 



Poor." " Go," he writes, " to an ale-house kitchen of an old 

 enclosed county and there you will see the origin of poverty 

 and poor rates. For whom are they to be sober ? for whom 

 save ? ' If I am sober shall I have land for a cow ? If I am 

 frugal shall I have half an acre for potatoes ? You offer me 

 no motives but the parish officer and the workhouse. — Land- 

 lord, bring me another pot.' " Young emphasises the im- 

 portance these poor folk attach to the possession of a bit of 

 land in a characteristic sentence: — " A man will love his country 

 better even for a pig." He proposed that twenty millions 

 should be spent in setting up half a million families with 

 cottages and allotments and protested that for the Enclosure 

 Bill then before Parliament to pass without a protest, however 

 feeble, from one voice, would be a wound to the feelings of 

 any man not lost to humanity who had witnessed the scenes 

 he had visited. But his appeal fell on deaf ears. " My 

 inquiry," he writes, " will have no more effect on the legislature 

 than if I had whistled ' Alley Croker.' " 



During the last years of Young's strenuous life physical 

 darkness was added to mental gloom. The heavy demands 

 made on his visual organs were paid for in failing sight and, at 

 length, in blindness. Endov/ed with an iron frame he was a 

 fanatic for work. He would read and write sixteen hours a 

 day; he rose normally at three or four in the morning, and 

 when in the country would begin the day by plunging into a 

 pond up to his neck, breaking the ice if necessary. " Sunday," 

 he writes when 60 years of age. " The ground white with snow 

 and wind cutting. I am up every morning at four and walk 

 into the garden pond. ... I do not mind it at all and some- 

 times stand in the wind till dry. It's however sharp work." 

 " I have worked more like a coal-heaver, though without his 

 reward," he writes from the fireside of his sick chamber on 

 Christmas Eve 1790, " and for what is this eternal struggle! 

 To serve the public ... a public that if I were in the dungeon 

 of a prison would leave me to rot there." ^ In the spring of 

 181 1 Young was couched for cataract and, either by reason of 

 an unskilful surgeon, or the intractability of the patient, or a 

 premature visit from his friend Wilberforce who excited him 

 to tears, the operation was a failure. A second consultation 

 with a famous London oculist in May 181 2 only served to con- 

 firm the sentence of doom: — incurable blindness. And so the 

 veteran servant of the public good declined to his end, scarce 



1 Annals, xv. 177. 



