38 Jethro Tall : his Life, Times, and Teaching. 
TuU's particular follies are noted in the Gentleman^ s Magazine ; ' 
history ^ refers generally to such schemes as importing jackasses 
from Spain, a wheel for perpetual motion, fishing for wrecks, 
&c. The inevitable end came ; he was arrested for debt, and in 
1764; died in the Fleet Prison. Jethro TuU, the father, doubtless 
with due appreciation, loft to his son John by will the sum of 
one shilling. 
Poor Tull ! it may be inferred that in a financial sense he 
was pulled down less by bad health than by the extravagance of 
his improvident son ; the father, a man of firm resolves, wrote 
thus : — 
It is to the new husbandry that I owe the property of my farm. . t . 
I propose no more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate better 
behind me than I found it, which unless some accident prevents, I shall 
perform. . . . But the lands of the farm I have now (Prosperous) lie so 
remote from all farmers, that they cannot be let without the house where I 
live, and which is situate in an air, that I would not willingly part vrith. 
To avoid this, and yet be out of trouble, as I was likely to be confined to 
my bed, I prepared materials for building a new farmhouse, and had in a 
manner agreed with a tenant to enter upon my farm the last summer, which 
was disappointed by an accident, and now perhaps I may be enforced to 
keep it as long as I live. However that may happen, I am confident (all 
things considered) that in the time I have already occupied it, if I had 
managed it in the common husbandry, the value of its purchase would have 
been lost by it, though a robust, able-bodied farmer in the clovering and 
turnip method might have thrived upon it : but every farmer on the old 
system that has rented it (and here have been few other since it was first 
made into a farm), that being about seventy years ago, has either broke, or 
quitted it before the end of his term. 
There is reason to suppose that Tull's infirmities confined 
him to his home at Prosperous for the six years preceding his 
death, and indeed we are told that during much of that time 
his many and increasing infirmities confined him to his room ; 
of his hundred acres of drilled wheat he says, " I have not *seen 
any of it being confined within dooi'S by many diseases which 
are adjudged to be the most cruel of any incident to a human 
body." He adds, touchingly, " I have no one here in whom 
I can confide." Often — how often — the rewards of mediocrity 
are immediately paid, those attending excellence being settled 
in reversion : poor Tull, in reference to the word " glory " in 
the before-referred-to letter from the noble lord, said pathetically 
of fame : ' Glory is the reward of warriors attained in the field 
' A new fish warehouse was opened in Covent Garden Market for the sale 
of fish brought by land-carriage from seaports at a great distance. Another 
of the same kind has been opened in Oxford Market. This is a project of Mr. 
John Tull, son of tlic late ingenious Jethro Tull, author of tho Ilorsc-Uoeing 
JJvKhandry. — Gent's Maq., 17C1. 
2 Uiist. Eng. IWi Cent., Lccky. 
