i62 LAND REFORM 



" Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, 

 Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn ; 

 Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, 

 And desolation saddens all thy green : 

 One only master grasps the whole domain, 

 And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain ; 



111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, 

 Where wealth accumulates and men decay : 

 Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade ; 

 A breath can make them as a breath has made 

 But a bold peasantry, their country's pride. 

 When once destroyed, can never be supplied. 



Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen who survey 

 The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay, 

 'Tis yours to judge, how wide the limits stand 

 Between a splendid and a happy land. 



If to some common's fenceless limits strayed, 

 He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade, 

 Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, 

 And even the bare worn common is denied."' ^ 



1 "The Deserted Village." 



In that gem of English literature, Gray's "Elegy," is pictured the 

 ideal of village life ; the "short and simple annals of the poor" who keep 

 on " the even tenour of their way," and " over whose tombs no trophies 

 raise." The poem calms like a soft lullaby the doubts and misgivings as 

 to the actual state of rural life. But it was Crabbe who, following Gold- 

 smith, described in realistic verse the miserable condition to which the 

 rural population had been reduced. It was his poem "The Village" that 

 no doubt led later writers — Carlyle and others— to deal with the subject. 

 Crabbe's village is a place 



"Where Plenty smiles— alas I she smiles for few — 

 And those who taste not, yet behold her store. 

 Arc as the slaves that dig the golden ore, 

 The wealth around them makes them doubly poor." 



"The Village" (1783). 



