Arthur Young. 
3 
and farm-stock. It placed him in a position, which no mere 
literary study could have done, to appreciate and criticise the 
defects of national or local systems of agriculture, as well as 
to comprehend the principles insisted on and put in practice by 
the great improvers of British husbandry. The enthusiasm and 
genius of the man were brought into play, and he found no 
difficulty in adding to his splendid mastery of the English 
language the clearest possible technical treatment of agricultural 
subjects. 
Beyond this his head was always nearer the ground than the 
skies. He was no “ mooner.” He understood first principles, and, 
having mastered them, they became with him fixed principles. 
Though his talents, vivacity, and manners were a passport to 
intimacy with men of rank and position as well as of intellect, 
this intercourse never seems to have enticed him from association 
with persons of the middle and lower classes and from the closest 
observation and study of their pursuits, habits of life, industries, 
and means, as well as of the intolerable laws and customs under 
which the lives of so many in England, in Ireland especially, 
and on the Continent, were made hard and miserable. 
A severe political economist, he denounced with unshaken 
constancy and with unanswerable proofs statutes and institutions 
which were then, and are not unfrequently even now, regarded 
as beneficial. 
First in the ranks of writers on husbandry and rural economy, 
he was as complete a failure as a farmer. He makes no secret 
of his practical inferiority — and he did not mistake his in- 
capacity. In the business of farming, indeed, many are the 
examples of brilliant conceptions in the study and conspicuous 
blundering in the field. In the present day, more even than at 
the commencement of the century, quackery in the disguise of 
science prances and parades on the made-up advertising jade 
in heroic style ; while poor time-worn practice, plodding along 
on the lines of honest study and experience, sometimes scarcely 
meets with the respect it deserves. 
At twenty-four years of age Arthur Young married Martha 
Allen of King’s Lynn. A tablet in Bradfield Church informs us that 
she was born in 1740 and died in 1815, and that she was “ the 
great granddaughter of John Allen, Esq., of Lyng House in the 
county of Norfolk, the first person, according to the Count De 
Boulainvilliers, who there used marl.” 
She was attractive and accomplished, but the marriage turned 
out an unhappy one. Dying five years before her husband, it 
is fair to assume that it was with his sanction that the monu- 
ment is silent on the point of her merits as wife, mother, or 
