Little did these fair ladies, when sallying out for this frolic in the sylvan lanes of Surrey, dream, I dare say, that they should meet “a chiel takin’ notes,” that would put their exploits into print. Here they are, however; and if they should chance to see this, I must tell them, that they were very sweet nondescripts, but not very perfect beggars; and far, far indeed, from perfect Zinganies. For Madge Wildfires, they were not amiss; but beggars, impudent as they are, seldom ask for sixpences; seldom appear in new apparel; never run by the side of carriages—that is left to beggar children. Pleading looks, and a pitiful whining tone, with low genuflections, mark the young beggar-woman, as she stands fixed at one place;—her husband is dead, and she is going home to her parents or parish; or he is gone for a soldier, and she is following to the garrison. Lancashire witches they would have done for capitally—but then witches don’t tell fortunes by palmistry; their vocation is by spell and cauldron; and as for gipsies, why it is just as difficult to mistake the particular expression and cultivated voice of an English lady, as it is the features and voice of the real gipsy-woman. Black eyes and black hair these ladies had; but they had neither the olive skin, nor the bold, easy degagée air of the gipsy belle; and what do gipsies with such beautifully slender and delicate hands? They were importunate; but nothing but a life and an education in the gipsy-camp, and perhaps the blood and descent of the gipsy, can give the peculiar style of palaver—the suaviter in modo—the unique flattery—the “you are born fortunate, sir”—with which the gipsy accosts you. And the costume! The gipsy wears nothing short. She has a long gown,—a long red cloak—a handkerchief tied over her head, it is true, but upon it a large flapping bonnet with lace trimming, or black beaver hat;—instead of that fairy form, she is generally strapping, tall, and strong—and instead of those taper ankles and small feet, which could evidently dance down the four-and-twenty hours, she has her lower limbs arrayed in black stockings and stout shoes that would do for a wagoner. Young gipsy women walk with sticks! how rarely do you see an old one with one? Knowing now who these ladies were, I should, beforehand, have expected a closer personation of the gipsy; but the result only proves the difficulty of the attempt. It must, however be confessed, that this was as pretty a little rural adventure as one could desire to meet with.

CHAPTER II.
NOOKS OF THE WORLD;
OR, A PEEP INTO THE BACK SETTLEMENTS OF ENGLAND.

There are thousands of places in this beautiful kingdom, which if you could change their situation—if you could take some plain, monotonous, and uninteresting tracts from the neighbourhood of large cities, from positions barren and of daily observance, and place these in their stead—would acquire an incalculable value; while the common spots would serve the present inhabitants of those sweet places just as well, and often far better, for the ordinary purposes of their lives—for walking over in the day, sleeping in during the night, and raising grass, cattle, and corn upon. The dwellers of cities—the men who have made fortunes, or are making them, and yet long for the quietness and beauty of the country—but especially the literary, the nature-loving, the poetical—would, to use a common expression, jump at them; and, if it were in their power to secure them, would make heavens-upon-earth of them. Yes! they are such spots as thousands are longing for; as the day-dreaming young, and the world-weary old, are yearning after, and painting to their mind’s eye, daily in great cities; and the dull, the common-place, the unpercipient of their beauty and their glory, are dwelling in them;—paradisiacal fields and magnificent mountains; or cloudy hollows in their mottled sides; or little cleuchs and glens, hidden and green—overhung with wild wood—rocky, and resounding with dashing and splashing streams;—places, where the eye sees the distant flocks and their slowly-stalking shepherds—the climbing goat, the soaring eagle: and the ear catches their far-off cries; whence a thousand splendours and pageants, changing aspects, and kindling and dying glories, in earth and sky, are witnessed; the cheerful arising of morning—the still, crimson, violet, purple, azure, dim grey, and then dark fading away of day into night, are watched; where the high and clear grandeur and solitude of night, with its moon and stars, and wandering breezes, and soul-enwrapping freshness, are seen and felt. Such places as these, and the brown or summer-empurpled heath, with its patch of ancient forest; its blasted, shattered, yet living old trees, greeting you with feelings and fancies of long-past centuries; the clear, rushing brook; the bubbling and most crystalline spring; and the turf that springs under your feet with a delicious elasticity, and sends up to your senses a fresh and forest-born odour; or cottages perched in the sides of glades, or on eminences by the sea—the soul-inspiring sea—with its wide views of coming and going ships, its fresh gales, and its everlasting change of light and life, on its waters, and on its shores; its sailors, and its fishermen, with all their doings, families, and dependencies—every one of them thoroughly covered and saturated with the spirit of picturesque and homely beauty; or inland hollows and fields, and old hamlets, lying amid great woods and slopes of wondrous loveliness;—if we could but turn things round, and bring these near us, and unite, at once, city advantages, city society, and them! But it never can be! And there are living in them, from generation to generation, numbers of people who are not to be envied, because they know nothing at all of the enviableness of their situation.

We are continually labouring to improve society—to diffuse education—to confer higher and ampler religious knowledge; but these people know little of all this—experience little of its effect; for their abodes, and natural paradises, lie far from the great tracks of travel and commerce; far from our great roads; in the most out-of-the-world places—the very nooks of the world.

If you come by chance upon them, you are struck with their admirable beauty, their solemn repose, their fresh and basking solitude. You cannot help exclaiming, What happy people must these be! But, when you come to look closer into them, the delusion vanishes. They do not, in fact, see any beauty that you see. Their minds have never been stirred from the sluggish routine of their daily life; their mental eye has never been unsealed, and directed to survey the advantages of their situation. They have been occupied with other things. Like the farmer’s lad mentioned by Wordsworth, their souls have become encrusted in their own torpor.

This, however, is one of the worst specimens of the most stupified class—farm-servants. Wordsworth himself makes his good and wise Wanderer, a shepherd in his youth, and describes him, when a lad, as impressed with the deepest sense of nature’s majesty. He represents him, in one of the noblest passages of the language, as witnessing the sun rise from some bold headland, and

And, indeed, the mountaineer must be generally excepted from that torpor of mind I have alluded to. The forms of nature that perpetually surround him, are so bold and sublime, that they almost irresistibly impress, excite, and colour his spirit within him; and those legends and stirring histories which generally abound in them, co-operate with these natural influences. This unawakened intellect dwells more generally amid the humbler and quieter forms of natural beauty; in the “sleepy hollows” of more champaign regions.

It might be supposed that these nooks of the world would, in their seclusion, possess very much one moral character; but nothing can be more untrue. Universally, they may seem old-fashioned, and full of a sweet tranquillity; but their inhabitants differ widely in character in different parts of the country—widely often in a short space, and in a manner that can only be accounted for by their less or greater communion with towns, less or greater degree of education extended to them—and the kind extended. Where they are far from towns, and hold little intercourse with them, and have no manufactory in them, they may be dull, but they are seldom very vicious. If they have had little education, they lead a very mechanical sort of life; are often very boorish, and have very confined notions and contracted wishes; are rude in manner, but not bad in heart. I have been in places—ay, in this newspaper-reading age, where a newspaper never comes; where they have no public-house, no school, no church, and no doctor; and yet the district has been populous. But, in similarly situated places, where yet they had a simple, pious pastor—some primitive patriarch, like the venerable Robert Walker, of whom so admirable an account is given by Wordsworth; where they have been blest with such a man amongst them, and where they have had a school; where they knew little of what was going on in the world, and where yet you were sure to find, in some crypt-like hole in the wall, or in a little fireside window, about half a dozen books—the Bible, “Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs,” “Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” “Romaine’s Life of Faith,” or his “Drop of Honey from the Rock Christ,” “Macgowan’s Life of Christ,” or “Drelincourt on Death,” and such like volumes; or “Robinson Crusoe,” “Philip Quarle,” “The History of Henry the Earl of Moreland,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” or “Pamela;”—have you found a simplicity of heart and manner, a quiet prosperity, a nearer approach to the Arcadian idea of rural life, than anywhere else in this country. There are yet such places to be found in our island, notwithstanding the awful truth of what was said by Coleridge, that “Care, like a foul hag, sits on us all; one class presses with iron foot upon the wounded heads beneath, and all struggle for a worthless supremacy, and all, to rise to it, move shackled by their expenses.”

But these are now few and far between; and they are certainly “nooks of the world,” far from manufacturing towns; for my experience coincides with that of Captain Lloyd, as given in his “Field Sports of the North:”—“Manufactures, of whatever nature they may be, may certainly tend to enrich individuals, but, to my mind, they add little to the happiness of the community at large. In what parts of any country in the world, are such scenes of vice and squalid misery to be witnessed, as in manufacturing districts?” What he adds is very true—that, though it may appear singular, yet it is a fact, that the farther we retreat from great towns and manufactories, a greater degree of comfort is generally to be observed amongst the peasantry. It is, indeed, a strange relief to the spirit of one who has known something of the eager striving of the world, to come upon a spot where the inhabitants are passing through life, as it were, in a dreamlike pilgrimage, half unconscious of its trials and evils—an existence which, if it have not the merit of great and triumphant virtue, has that absence of selfish cunning, pride, sorrow, and degradation, which one would seek for in vain amid more bustling scenes. To find the young, soberly and cheerfully fulfilling their daily duties—nowhere affluence, but everywhere plenty and comfort observable—and the old, in their last tranquil days, seated in their easy chairs, or on the stone bench at their doors, glad to chat with you on all they have known on earth and hoped for in heaven—why, it would be more easy to scathe such a place with the evil spirit of the town, than to raise it in the scale of moral life. The experiment of improvement there, you feel, would be a hazardous one. It were easy and desirable to give more knowledge: but not easy to give it unaccompanied by those blighting contaminations that at present cling to it.

It is in those rural districts into which manufactories have spread—that are partly manufacturing and partly agricultural—that the population assumes its worst shape. The state of morals and manners amongst the working population of our great towns is terrible—far more so than casual observers are aware of. After all that has been done to reform and educate the working class, the torrent of corruption rolls on. The most active friends of education, the most active labourers in it, are ready to despair, and sometimes exclaim,—“What have we done, after all!” There, the spirit of man is aroused to a marvellous activity; but it is an unhealthful activity, and overpowers, in its extravagance, all attempts to direct it aright. “Evil communications corrupt good manners” faster than good communications can counteract them; and where the rural population, in its simplicity, comes in contact with this spirit, it receives the contagion in its most exaggerated form—a desolating moral pestilence; and suffers in person and in mind. There, spread all the vice and baseness of the lowest grade of the town, made hideous by still greater vulgarity and ignorance, and unawed by the higher authorities, unchecked by the better influences which there prevail, in the example and exertions of a higher caste of society.

The Methodists have done much to check the progress of demoralization in these districts. They have given vast numbers education; they have taken them away from the pot-house and the gambling-house; from low haunts and low pursuits. They have placed them in a certain circle, and invested them with a degree of moral and social importance. They have placed them where they have a character to sustain, and higher objects to strive after; where they have ceased to be operated upon by a perpetual series of evil influences, and have been brought under the regular operation of good ones. They have rescued them from brutality of mind and manners, and given them a more refined association on earth, and a warm hope of a still better existence hereafter. If they have not done all that could be desired, with such materials, they have done much, and the country owes them much. The thorough mastery of the evil requires the application of yet greater power—it requires a NATIONAL POWER. The evil lies deeper than the surface; it lies in the distorted nature of our social relations; and, before the population can be effectually reformed, its condition must be physically ameliorated!

There never was a more momentous and sure truth pronounced, than that pronounced by Christ,—“They who take the sword, shall fall by the sword.” If they do not fall by its edge, they will by its hilt. It is under this evil that we are now labouring. As a nation we have fallen, through war, into all our present misery and crime. It is impossible that the great European kingdoms, with their present wealth and cultivated surfaces, in their present artificial state of society, can carry on war without enduring evils far more extensive, tremendous, and lasting, than the mere ravaging of lands, the destruction of towns, or even of human lives. We are, as a nation, an awful proof of this at this moment. By the chances of war, at one time manufacturing and farming almost for the world; prospering, apparently, on the miseries of whole kingdoms wrapt in one wide scene of promiscuous carnage and anarchy, our tradesmen and agriculturists commanded their own terms; and hence, on the one hand, they accumulated large fortunes, while, on the other, the nation, by its enormous military preparations—its fleets and armies marching and sailing everywhere, prepared to meet emergencies at all points and in all climes; by its aids and subsidies abroad; by its wasteful expenditure at home—piled up the most astounding debt ever heard of in the annals of the world. A vast working population was not merely demanded by this unnatural state of excitement, but might be said to be forced into existence, to supply all manner of articles to realms too busy in mutual slaughter to be able to manufacture or plough for themselves. Every thing assumed a new and wonderful value. All classes, the working classes as well as the rest, with the apparent growing prosperity, advanced into habits of higher refinement and luxury. The tables of mechanics were heaped with loads of viands of the best quality, and of the highest price, as earliest in the market; their houses were crowded with furniture, till they themselves could scarcely turn round in them—clocks, sometimes two or three in one house; chests of drawers and tables thronged into the smallest rooms; looking-glasses, tea-trays, and prints, stuck on every possible space on the walls; and, from the ceiling depending hams, bags, baskets, fly-cages of many colours, and a miscellaneous congregation of other articles, that gave their abodes more the aspect of warerooms or museums, than the dwellings of the working class. Dress advanced in the same ratio; horses and gigs were in vast request; and the publicans and keepers of tea-gardens made ample fortunes.

The war ceased. Commerce was thrown open to the competition of the world. The continental nations began to breathe, and to look round on their condition. Their poverty and their spirit of emulation, the sight of their own stripped condition, and of England apparently enriched beyond calculation at their expense, set them rapidly about helping themselves. This could not but be quickly and deeply felt here. To maintain our position, all manner of artificial means were adopted. Every class, feeling the tide of wealth changing its course, strove to keep what it had got. The working class, as individually the weakest, because they had spent their gains as they came, went to the ground. The value of every necessary of life was kept up as much as possible by legal enactments. The rate of wages fell. The manufacturers, impelled by the same necessity of struggling for the maintenance of their rank, were plunged into the most eager competition; the utmost pressure of reduction fell on the labour of the operatives, who, with their acquired habits, were ill able to bear it. They were thrust down to a condition the most pitiful and morally destructive—to excessive labour, to semi-starvation, to pauperism. They could not send their children to school—not so much from the expense of schooling—for that was made light by public contribution, and new plans of facility in teaching large numbers—but because they wanted every penny their children could earn, by any means, to aid in the common support. Hence, mere infants were crowded in pestilent mills when they should have been growing in the fresh air, and were stunted and blighted in body and in mind—a system, the evil of which became so enormous as to call loudly upon the attention of the legislature, and the indignant wonder of the nation. The parents themselves had not a moment’s time to watch over their welfare or their morals; at least sixteen hours’ unremitting daily labour being necessary to the most miserable existence. Evils accumulated on all sides. The working class considered themselves cast off from the sympathies of the upper classes, regarded and valued but as tools and machines; their children grew into ignorant depravity, in spite of all efforts of law or philanthropy to prevent them. These causes still operate wherever manufacturing extends: and till the condition of this great class, whether in towns or villages, can be amended; till time for domestic relaxation can be given to the man, and a Christian, rather than a literary, education to the boy—an inculcation of the beauty and necessity of the great Christian principles; the necessity of reverencing the laws of God; doing, in all their intercourse with their fellow men, as they would be done by; the necessity of purity of life and justice of action, rather than the cant of religious feeling, and the blind mystery of sectarian doctrine,—the law and the philanthropy must be in vain.

To the simple, and yet uncontaminated parts of the country, there is yet a different kind of education that I should rejoice to see extended. It should be, to open the eyes of the rural population to the advantages of their situation;—to awaken a taste for the enjoyment of nature;—to give them a touch of the poetical;—to teach them to see the pleasantness of their quiet lives,—of their cottages and gardens,—of the freshness of the air and country around them, especially as contrasted with the poor and squalid alleys where those of their own rank, living in towns, necessarily take up their abode,—of the advantages in point of health and purity afforded to their children by their position,—of the majestic beauty of the day, with its morning animation, its evening sunsets, and twilights almost as beautiful; its nightly blue altitude, with its moon and stars:—all this might be readily done by the conversation of intelligent people, and by the diffusion of cheap publications amongst them; and done, too, without diminishing the relish for the daily business of their lives. Airy and dreamy notions—notions of false refinement, and aspirations of soaring beyond their own sphere—are not inspired by sound and good intelligence, but by defective and bad education.

The sort of education I mean has long been realized in Scotland, and with the happiest results. There, large towns and manufactories have produced their legitimate effect, as with us; but, in the rural districts, every child, by national provision, has a sound, plain education given him. He is brought up in habits of economy, and sentiments of rational religion, and the most solemn and thorough morality. The consequence is, that almost all grow up with a sense of self-respect; a sense of the dignity of human nature; a determined resolve of depending on their own exertions: and though no people are so national, because they are made sensible of the beauty of their country and the honourable deeds of their forefathers, yet, if they cannot find means of living at home without degradation, and, indeed, without bettering their condition, they soberly march off, and find some place where they can, though it be at the very ends of the earth.

Nothing is better known than the intelligence and order that distinguish a great portion of the rural population of Scotland. No people are more diligent and persevering in their proper avocations; and yet none are more alive to the delights of literature. Amid wild mountain tracks and vast heaths, where you scarcely see a house as you pass along for miles, and where you could not have passed two generations ago without danger of robbery or the dirk, they have book societies, and send new books to and fro to one another, with an alacrity and punctuality that are most delightful. When I have been pedestrianizing in that country, I have frequently accosted men at their work, or in their working dress—perhaps with their axe or their spade in their hands, and three or four children at their heels—and found them well acquainted with the latest good publications, and entertaining the soundest notions of them, without the aid of critics. Such men in England would probably not have been able to read at all. They would have known nothing but the routine of their business, the state of the crop, and the gossip of the neighbourhood: but there, sturdy and laborious men, tanned with the sun, or smeared with the marl in which they had been delving, have not only been able to give all the knowledge of the district; its histories and traditions; the proprietorships, and other particulars of the neighbourhood; but their eyes have brightened at the mention of their great patriots, reformers, and philosophers, and their tongues have grown perfectly eloquent in discussing the works of their poets and other writers. The names of Wallace, Bruce, Knox, Fletcher of Saltoun, the Covenanters, Scott, Burns, Hogg, Campbell, Wilson, and others, have been spells that have made them march away miles with me, when they could not get me into their own houses, and find it difficult to turn back.

Now, why should not this be so in England? Why should not similar means produce similar effects? They must and would; and by imbuing the rural population with a spirit as sound and rational, we should not only raise it in the social scale to a degree of worth and happiness at present not easily imaginable, but render the most important service to the country, by attaching “a bold peasantry, the country’s pride,” to their native soil, by the most powerful of ties, and rendering them both able and more determined to live in honourable dependence on self-exertion. Book Societies, under local management, should do for the Country what Mechanics’ Libraries are doing for the Towns—building up those habits, and perfecting those healthful tastes, for which popular education is but the bare foundation.

Wordsworth gives an account of the early years of his Wanderer, which, under such a system, might be that of thousands.

Such a process I should rejoice to see producing such characters in England. Yes! Milton, Thomson, Cowper, the pious and tender Montgomery, and Bloomfield, one of their own kind, would be noble and enriching studies for the simplest cottage, and cottage-garden, and field-walk. Some of our condensed historians, our best essayists and divines, travellers, naturalists in a popular shape, and writers of fiction, as Scott, and Edgeworth, and De Foe, might be with vast advantage diffused amongst them. Let us hope it will one day be so. And already I know some who have reaped those blessings of an awakened heart and intellect, too long denied to the hard path of poverty, and which render them not the less sedate, industrious, and provident, but, on the contrary, more so. They have made them, in the humblest of stations, the happiest of men; quickened their sensibilities towards their wives and children; converted the fields, the places of their daily toil, into places of earnest meditative delight—schools of perpetual observation of God’s creative energy and wisdom.

It was but the other day that the farming-man of a neighbouring lady having been pointed out to me as at once remarkably fond of reading and attached to his profession, I entered into conversation with him; and it is long since I experienced such a cordial pleasure as in the contemplation of the character that opened upon me. He was a strong man; not to be distinguished by his dress and appearance from those of his class, but having a very intelligent countenance; and the vigorous, healthful feelings, and right views, that seemed to fill not only his mind but his whole frame, spoke volumes for that vast enjoyment and elevation of character which a rightly directed taste for reading would diffuse amongst our peasantry. His sound appreciation of those authors he had read—some of our best poets, historians, essayists, and travellers—was truly cheering, when contrasted with the miserable and frippery taste which distinguishes a large class of readers; where a-thousand-times-repeated novels of fashionable life, neither original in conception nor of any worth in their object—the languid offspring of a tinsel and exotic existence—are read because they can be read without the labour of thinking. While such works are poured in legions upon the public, like a host of dead leaves from the forest, driven along in mimic life by a mighty wind—and while such things are suffered to swell the Puffiads of publishers, and shoulder away, or discourage, the substantial labours of high intellect—it is truly reviving to see the awakening of mind in the common people. It is, I am persuaded, from the people that a regenerating power must come—a new infusion of better blood into our literary system. The inanities of fashion must weary the spirit of a great nation, and be thrown off; strong, native genius, from the measureless, unploughed regions of the popular mind—robust, gigantic, uneffeminated by luxury, glitter, and sloth—will rise up, and put all soulless artificialities to shame; and already mighty are the symptoms of such a change manifested, in an array of names that might be adduced. But I must not be led farther away by this seducing topic.

I found this countryman was a member of our Artisans’ Library, and every Saturday evening he walked over to the town to exchange his books. I asked him whether reading did not make him less satisfied with his daily work; his answer deserves universal attention:—“Before he read, his work was weary to him; for, in the solitary fields, an empty head measured the time out tediously, to double its length; but, now, no place was so sweet as the solitary fields: he had always something pleasant floating across his mind; and the labour was delightful, and the day only too short.” Seeing his ardent attachment to the country, I sent him the last edition of “The Book of the Seasons;” and I must here give a verbatim et literatim extract from the note in which he acknowledged its receipt, because it not only contains an experimental proof of the falsity of a common alarm on the subject of popular education, but shews at what a little cost much happiness may be conveyed to a poor man:—“Believe me, dear sir, this kind act has made an impression on my heart that time will not easily erase. There are none of your works, in my opinion, more valuable than this. The study of nature is not only the most delightful, but the most elevating. This will be true in every station of life. But how much more ought the poor man to prize this study! which if prized and pursued as it ought, will enable him to bear, with patient resignation and cheerfulness, the lot by providence assigned him. O sir! I pity the working man who possesses not a taste for reading. ’Tis true, it may sometimes lead him to neglect the other more important duties of his station; but his better and more enlightened judgment will soon correct itself in this particular, and will enable him, while he steadily and diligently pursues his private studies, and participates in intellectual enjoyment, to prize, as he ought, his character as a man in every relative duty of life.”

What a nation would this be, filled with a peasantry holding such views, and possessing such a consequent character as this!

The sources of enjoyment in nature have been too long closed to the poor. The rich can wander from side to side of the island, and explore its coasts, its fields, and forests—but the poor man is fettered to the spot. The rich can enter the galleries and exhibitions of cities, and contemplate all the great works of art; the poor ought to be taught to know that, if they cannot see the works of art—statues and paintings—they can see those of God;—if they cannot gaze on the finest forms of beauty from the chisel of the sculptor, they may be taught to distinguish the beauty of all living forms;—if they cannot behold splendid paintings of landscapes, of mountains, of sea-coasts, of sunrises and sunsets; they can see, one or other of them, all the originals of these—originals to whose magnificence and glory the copies never can approach. To the poor, but properly educated man, every walk will become a luxury, a poem, a painting—a source of the sweetest feelings and the most elevating reflections.

But there is one class in these back settlements of England to whom a liberal education is most requisite, and to whom it would be most difficult to give it—the class of smaller resident proprietors. The effect of the possession of property in such places is singular and most lamentable. It produces the most impenetrable hardness of nature—the most selfish and sordid dispositions. Everywhere, the tendency of accumulation is to generate selfishness: but, in towns, there are many counteracting influences; the emulative desire of vying, in mode of life, with equals and superiors—the greater spread of information—the various objects of pleasure and association, which keep open the avenues of expenditure, not only in the purse, but in the heart. Here there are none. Amusements and dissipations are self-gratulatingly denounced as gross follies and sins; objects of display, as pride. The consequence is, that habits of the strangest parsimony prevail—the rudest furniture, the rudest style of living. Men who, in a town or its neighbourhood, would appear as gentlemen, and, perhaps, keep a carriage, there wear often clouted shoes, threadbare and patched clothes, and a hat not worth a farthing; and all in a fashion of the most awkward rusticity. All wisdom is supposed to lie in penuriousness. They have abundance of maxims for ever in their mouths, full of that philosophy; as “Penny-wise and pound-foolish”—“A penny saved is a penny got”—“A pin a-day’s a groat a-year.” All ideas seem absorbed in the one grand idea of accumulating coin, that will never be of more value to them than so many oyster-shells. Such a thing as a noble or generous sentiment would be a surprise to their own souls. Of such men are made the hardest overseers of the poor; whose screwing, iron-handed administration of relief is the boast of the parish, and has led to the most monstrous abuses. To them all objects are alike; they have no discrimination; the old and young, the idle and industrious, the sturdy vagabond, and the helpless and dying!—they deem it a virtue to deny them all, till a higher power forces the reluctant doit from their gripe. They are surly, yet proud churls, living wrapped in a sense of their own importance; for they see nobody above them, except there be a squire or a lord in the parish; and they see little of him, and then only to make their passing obsequious bow; for they are at once

Any education, any change, would be a blessing to these men, that would bring them into collision with those of their own supposed standing, but with better education and more liberal views and habits. The excess to which these causes operate in some of these out-of-the-world places, is scarcely to be credited: they produce the strangest scenes and the strangest characters. Let us take a specimen or two from one parish, that would be easily paralleled in many others.

In one part of this secluded neighbourhood, you approach extensive woods, and behold amongst them a house of corresponding air and dimensions—a mansion befitting a large landed proprietor. If you choose to explore the outbuildings belonging to it, you will find there a regularly educated and authorized physician, living in a dovecot, and writing prescriptions for any that choose to employ him, for a crown, or even half-a-crown, which he spends in drink. Paternal example and inculcations made him what he is; unfitted him for success in his profession, and left him dependent on his elder brother, who affords him the asylum of his dovecot, yet so grudgingly that he has even attempted to dislodge him by pulling off the roof; and the poor doctor owes his retreat, not to his brother’s good-will, but to his own possession of a brace of formidable bull-dogs, that menace the destruction of any assailant. The dogs lie in his chamber when you enter, with their noses on the ground, and their dark glittering eyes fixed steadily upon you, and are ready, at a signal, to spring on you, and tear you to pieces. The doctor’s free potations have now deprived him of the power of locomotion; he cannot quit his pigeon-house; but one of his bull-dogs he has trained to act as his emissary, and with a note suspended to his neck by a tape, he goes to certain houses in the neighbouring village, and so communicates his wishes to certain cronies of his, who are in the habit of attending to them. The dog would tear any one to pieces that attempted to stop him while on his master’s errands, being a very strong and fierce creature; but, if he is not molested, he goes very civilly along to his place of destination, and, when the note is taken off his neck by the proper hands, returns with great punctuality and decorum.

It must be said of this curiosity of a physician, that he is the descendant of a very curious family; whose history for the last three generations would be a regular series of eccentricities; and the first of whom, here resident, was a celebrated piratical captain, who is said to have come hither disguised as a peasant, seeking as secluded a country as he could find, and driving before him an ass loaded with gold. It is certain that he purchased very extensive estates, and that one of his descendants was lately in Parliament, who, partaking of the family qualities, excited more surprise and more laughter in the house, than, perhaps, any man since the days of Sir Thomas Lethbridge.

Not far thence, stands another residence. At some distance it appears a goodly manor-house. It is large; with white walls and many antique gables; a stately avenue of elms in front; tall pines about it, the landmark of the whole country round: a spacious garden, with a summer-house on the wall, seeming to have been built when there was some taste there for those rural enjoyments which such a place is calculated to afford to the amiable, country-loving, and refined. As you come near, there appear signs of neglect and decay. Old timber, litter, and large stones lie about; there are broken windows, unpainted and rotting wood-work: every thing looks forlorn, as if it were the residence of poverty on the verge of utter destitution.

The fact is, the owner has landed property worth from thirty to forty thousand pounds. But see the man himself! There he goes, limping across his yard, having permanently injured one of his legs in some of his farming operations. There he goes—a tall hard-featured, weather-beaten man, dressed in the garb of the most rustic husbandman: strong clouted ankle-boots, blue or black ribbed worsted stockings; corduroy small-clothes; a yellow striped waistcoat, and a coat of coarse grey cloth, cut short, in a rude fashion, and illustrated with metal buttons; a hat that seems to have been originally made of coarse wool or dog’s hair—to have cost some four-and-sixpence some dozen years ago—brown, threadbare, and cocked up behind, by propping on his coat collar.

He has brought up a family of three sons, and never spent on their education three pounds. The consequence has been just what might be expected. They came to know, as they grew up, “for quickly comes such knowledge,” their expectations; and they turned out rude, savage, and drunken. One married a servant girl, and she dying, the son brought himself and several children to the old man’s to live. Warned by this—for, with all his clownish parsimony, he has pride—the pride of property—he has put the others on farms, and they have married farmer’s daughters: but, always living in expectation of the old man’s death, they attend to no business; always looking forward to the possession of his wealth, they have already condemned a good part of it. If any man could be punished that man is, for sparing the expense of their education, and for the example set before them; for, what he has made the sole object of all his thoughts and labours, he sees them squandering, and knows that they will squander it all. But he himself is not guilty of all this; he is but the victim of his own education, and the maxims and manners of his ancestors. If he could have seen the usefulness of education to his sons, he could not have found in his heart to spend the necessary money; but he could not see it: anything further than to be able to sign a receipt, and reckon a sum of money in their heads, he called trash and nonsense.

When his sons were growing towards men, I have chanced to pass his farm-yard, and seen him and two of them filling a manure-cart; labouring, puffing and blowing, and perspiring, as if their lives depended on their labour; and the old man was urging them on with continual curses—“Curse thy body, Dick! Curse thy body, Ben!—Ben! Dick! Ben! Dick! work, lads, work!” And these hopeful sons were repaying their father’s curses with the same horrible earnestness.

A gentleman once told me that, having to call on this man about some money transaction, he was detained till twelve o’clock, and desired to stay dinner, that being his hour. Out of curiosity he consented. Every thing about the house was in the rudest and most desolate state. I do not know whether they had a cloth spread on the sturdy oak table, which supported a set of pewter plates, a roasted fowl, and a pudding in a huge brown earthen dish. The wife, stripped to her stays and quilted petticoat, was too busy making cheese and scolding the servants to come to dinner. The pater familias and his guest sat down together. As he cut up the fowl, the two great lads, Dick and Ben, then about twelve and fourteen years of age, came with their wild eyes staring sharply out of their bushy heads of wild hair, and hung over their father’s chair, one on each side, with an eager expression of voracity; for they were not asked to sit down. The father, as if he expected them to pounce on the dinner and carry it off, kept a sharp look-out on them; and though, out of deference to his guest, he restrained his curses, he kept vociferating, as he turned first to one and then to the other, and then gave a cut at the fowl—“Ben! Dick! get away, lads! get away! get away! get away!” But the moment a leg and a wing were cut off, the lads made a sudden spring, and each seizing a joint, bounded out of the apartment, leaving the old man in wonder at the unmanageableness of his sons. From such an education who can doubt the result?—a brood of savages, the nuisance of the neighbourhood, and torment of the old man’s days. To such a height has the old man’s agony arisen at times, as he saw the wasteful conduct of his sons, that it is a pretty well established fact, that on one occasion he threw himself down in a ditch in one of his own fields, and—did not pray to die, for he never knew the beginning, middle, or end of a prayer, but he tried to die; but, after a long and weary endeavour, finding it in vain, he got up and hobbled off home again, saying—“Well, I see it is as hard to die as to live. I can’t die! I can’t die! I must even bear it, till these lads kill me by inches—and that must be a plaguy while first; for I measure two yards of bad stuff, and I think I’m as hard as a nur,[5] and as tough as whit-leather.”