Jethro Tall : his Life, Times, and Teaching. 
11 
being starved in winter, were consequently puny. Cattle were 
killed when the grass failed in early autumn, and the beef was 
salted down for winter ; and at that season game and fresh-water 
fish were the only procurable fresh animal food. 
And now, and most important of all, we come to consider 
the provincial persons who used these Slough of Despond roads, 
because these people together formed the disjunct inert mass that, 
with extraordinary courage, Jethro Tall set himself to move in a 
new and unwonted direction. The country gentleman was usually 
poor, and often little better educated than his groom or his 
gamekeeper ; his pleasures were derived from the sports of the 
field, and his too often pot-house language was racy and redolent 
of the province from which he derived his origin. The farm- 
yard was at the back of his house, and cabbages and gooseberries 
grew by his front door. Yet in many respects the esquire was 
a gentleman : pride of family and family tradition made him 
sensible of responsibilities and jealous of his honour. In London 
the mere country squire was altogether out of his element, 
and looked andYelt like a bumpkin, stared at by every passer-by. 
They certainly drank in those days — all classes ; as claret was 
expensive, the tipple was strong beer. Beer was then not beer 
only, but everything that is now consumable in the natu.re of 
wine, tea, and spirits. 
The rural clergy, the rank and file of the Church as a whole, 
were generally disregarded as a plebeian class, and probably 
behaved accordingly. Anyway, they were certainly not usually 
instructed and enlightened men : helpmates meet for Tull and 
his undertakings. The yeomanry were a manly and true-hearted, 
but unimpressionable and very dogged race, the stuff out of 
which Cromwell created his Ironsides ; they were more numerous 
than the tenant-farmers. These small proprietors, with their 
families, were estimated at more than one-seventh of the whole 
population, their average income was supposed to be 601. or 701. 
a year. The tenant-farmer of those days was of inconsiderable im- 
portance ; his instincts accorded with those of the yeomen ; they 
taught him that the TuUian system, requiring as it did space and 
appliances, threatened his very existence — he had then given no 
promise of the gi'eat future that awaited his class ; with neither 
money nor book-learning, the tenant-farmer blindly trod the 
shallow and crooked furrow which had been turned by his sire 
and his grandsire and his fore-elders from time immemorial. 
Another and irresistible cause subsequently converted the 
yeomanry and small farmers into wage-earning labourers. Do- 
mestic industries formed an all-important element in the house- 
hold economy of the small farmer : these home and consequently 
