X Travels in France 



" squandering much money under golden dreams of improve- 

 ments," the future author of so many works on agriculture 

 learned the bitter lesson which many another young fellow at 

 a loose end has learned — that to wring a livelihood out of the 

 stony breast of mother earth, knowledge and experience are 

 imperative. 



" I never refuse to write on any subject whatever," said a 

 well-known modem author, " it is an excellent way of learning 

 something about it;" even so Arthur Young set about the 

 writing of a book on farming. In 1767 "The Farmer's 

 Letters to the People of England, containing the sentiments of 

 a practical husbandman, etc.," appeared and went through 

 three editions, 1767, 1768, and (enlarged) 1771 — a work which 

 in later life the writer denounced as " nothing but ignorance, 

 folly, presumption, and rascality." 



For the time, authorship proved as stony-hearted a step- 

 mother as agriculture. The family was by no means rich, the 

 De Coussmaker fortune of ;^8o,ooo had been largely squandered 

 by his uncles' extravagances, and the young farmer's 

 patrimony during his mother's life was limited to a copyhold 

 farm of twenty acres with a rent roll of as many pounds. In 

 1765 he had married a daughter of Alderman Allen of Lynn 

 who brought him a substantial dowry and an introduction to 

 Fanny Bumey and her father Dr. Bumey, whose second wife's 

 sister, Martha Allen was. The espoused couple boarded with 

 the bridegroom's self-willed mother at Lynn. From the first 

 they did not pull together and, galled by the matrimonial 

 yoke, and having learned " to view the farms of other men with 

 an eye of more discrimination," Arthur Young, after another 

 brief unhappy essay at farming in Essex, ^ saddled his horse 

 and made the first of his many famous journeys — A Six Weeks' 

 Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales. 

 The journey was undertaken with a view of searching for a 

 suitable farm. But to Young might aptly be applied the 

 words addressed by Statins to Virgil in the gentle shades of 

 Purgatory : — 



" Facesti come quei che va di notte, 



Che porta il lume retro, e se non giova, 

 Ma dopo se fa le persone dotte." * 



^ Samford Hall, which after six months' trial he surrendered to a local 

 farmer whom he paid £300 to take ofi his hands. His successor made a 

 small fortune out of the farm. 



* " Thou didst like one who goes by night and carries the light behind 

 him, and profits not himself, but makes folk wise that follow him." — 

 Purg. xxii. 67-69. 



