80 THE SHEEP. 



in trade. The Irish peasant must take land in order that 

 he may subsist, and is compelled to share his pittance with 

 another to the uttermost residue that will permit himself to 

 live. Hence the rents in Ireland are larger, in proportion to 

 the means of payment, than in any country in Europe. While 

 this defective relation exists between the landlord and tenant, 

 while the disposable produce of the land is expended out 

 of the country which it should enrich, and away from the 

 poor man whom it should employ, while the land is parcelled 

 out in order that excessive rents may be wrung from those 

 that till it, while the pecuniary claims of the landlord or 

 middle men are more directly answered by means of peasants 

 content to subsist on the scantiest pittance, than by the in- 

 dustry of tenants possessed of means to improve the land, 

 we must expect that the resources of the country will be 

 imperfectly developed, and that poor and wretched husband- 

 men, as well as miserable breeds of Sheep, will possess it. 



VII. THE FOREST BREEDS OF ENGLAND. 



England, like the sister Island, was once covered with 

 noble forests, which gradually fell before the ravages of war, 

 and the progress of the settler. But, on the conquest of the 

 Normans, vast tracts of fine country were retained in the 

 state in which they then existed, for the purposes of the 

 chase, but retaining the names of forests, chases, and other 

 denominations indicative of their original nature, and the 

 purposes to which they had been applied ; such were Windsor 

 Forest, Sherburne Forest, Mendip Forest, and many more. 

 Even to the reign of Elizabeth, a large part of the whole sur- 

 face of England was in the state of forest ; but, in place of 

 vast tracts reserved for the capricious sports of the sove- 

 reign, or the great feudatories, the unoccupied grounds had 



