EASTERN TOUR.

"You permit the Jews openly to preach in their synagogues, and call Jesus Christ an impostor; and you send women to jail (to be brought to bed there, too), for declaring their unbelief in Christianity."--King of Bohemia's Letter to Canning, published in the Register, 4th of January, 1823.

Hargham, 22nd March, 1830.

I set off from London on the 8th of March, got to Bury St. Edmund's that evening; and, to my great mortification, saw the county-election and the assizes both going on at Chelmsford, where, of course, a great part of the people of Essex were met. If I had been aware of that, I should certainly have stopped at Chelmsford in order to address a few words of sense to the unfortunate constituents of Mr. Western. At Bury St. Edmund's I gave a lecture on the ninth and another on the tenth of March, in the playhouse, to very crowded audiences. I went to Norwich on the 12th, and gave a lecture there on that evening, and on the evening of the 13th. The audience here was more numerous than at Bury St. Edmund's, but not so numerous in proportion to the size of the place; and, contrary to what has happened in most other places, it consisted more of town's people than of country people.

During the 14th and 15th, I was at a friend's house at Yelverton, half way between Norwich and Bungay, which last is in Suffolk, and at which place I lectured on the 16th to an audience consisting chiefly of farmers, and was entertained there in a most hospitable and kind manner at the house of a friend.

The next day, being the 17th, I went to Eye, and there lectured in the evening in the neat little playhouse of the place, which was crowded in every part, stage and all. The audience consisted almost entirely of farmers, who had come in from Diss, from Harleston, and from all the villages round about, in this fertile and thickly-settled neighbourhood. I stayed at Eye all the day of the 18th, having appointed to be at Ipswich on the 19th. Eye is a beautiful little place, though an exceedingly rotten borough.

All was harmony and good humour: everybody appeared to be of one mind; and as these friends observed to me, so I thought, that more effect had been produced by this one lecture in that neighbourhood, than could have been produced in a whole year, if the Register had been put into the hands of every one of the hearers during that space of time; for though I never attempt to put forth that sort of stuff which the "intense" people on the other side of St. George's Channel call "eloquence," I bring out strings of very interesting facts; I use pretty powerful arguments; and I hammer them down so closely upon the mind, that they seldom fail to produce a lasting impression.

On the 19th I proceeded to Ipswich, not imagining it to be the fine, populous, and beautiful place that I found it to be. On that night, and on the night of the 20th, I lectured to boxes and pit, crowded principally with opulent farmers, and to a gallery filled, apparently, with journeymen tradesmen and their wives. On the Sunday before I came away, I heard, from all quarters, that my audiences had retired deeply impressed with the truths which I had endeavoured to inculcate. One thing, however, occurred towards the close of the lecture of Saturday, the 20th, that I deem worthy of particular attention. In general it would be useless for me to attempt to give anything like a report of these speeches of mine, consisting as they do of words uttered pretty nearly as fast as I can utter them, during a space of never less than two, and sometimes of nearly three hours. But there occurred here something that I must notice. I was speaking of the degrees by which the established church had been losing its legal influence since the peace. First, the Unitarian Bill, removing the penal act which forbade an impugning of the doctrine of the Trinity; second, the repeal of the Test Act, which declared, in effect, that the religion of any of the Dissenters was as good as that of the church of England; third, the repeal of the penal and excluding laws with regard to the Catholics; and this last act, said I, does in effect declare that the thing called "the Reformation" was unnecessary. "No," said one gentleman, in a very loud voice, and he was followed by four or five more, who said "No, No." "Then," said I, "we will, if you like, put it to the vote. Understand, gentlemen, that I do not say, whatever I may think, that the Reformation was unnecessary; but I say that this act amounts to a declaration that it was unnecessary; and, without losing our good humour, we will, if that gentleman choose, put this question to the vote." I paused a little while, receiving no answer, and perceiving that the company were with me, I proceeded with my speech, concluding with the complete demolishing blow which the church would receive by the bill for giving civil and political power for training to the bar, and seating on the bench, for placing in the commons and amongst the peers, and for placing in the council, along with the King himself, those who deny that there ever existed a Redeemer; who give the name of impostor to him whom we worship as God, and who boast of having hanged him upon the cross. "Judge you, gentlemen," said I, "of the figure which England will make, when its laws will seat on the bench, from which people have been sentenced to suffer most severely for denying the truth of Christianity; from which bench it has been held that Christianity is part and parcel of the law of the land; judge you of the figure which England will make amongst Christian nations, when a Jew, a blasphemer of Christ, a professor of the doctrines of those who murdered him, shall be sitting upon that bench; and judge, gentlemen, what we must think of the clergy of this church of ours, if they remain silent while such a law shall be passed."

We were entertained at Ipswich by a very kind and excellent friend, whom, as is generally the case, I had never seen or heard of before. The morning of the day of the last lecture, I walked about five miles, then went to his house to breakfast, and stayed with him and dined. On the Sunday morning, before I came away, I walked about six miles, and repeated the good cheer at breakfast at the same place. Here I heard the first singing of the birds this year; and I here observed an instance of that petticoat government, which, apparently, pervades the whole of animated nature. A lark, very near to me in a ploughed field, rose from the ground, and was saluting the sun with his delightful song. He was got about as high as the dome of St. Paul's, having me for a motionless and admiring auditor, when the hen started up from nearly the same spot whence the cock had risen, flew up and passed close by him. I could not hear what she said; but supposed that she must have given him a pretty smart reprimand; for down she came upon the ground, and he, ceasing to sing, took a twirl in the air, and came down after her. Others have, I dare say, seen this a thousand times over; but I never observed it before.

About twelve o'clock, my son and I set off for this place (Hargham), coming through Needham Market, Stowmarket, Bury St. Edmund's, and Thetford, at which latter place I intended to have lectured to-day and to-morrow, where the theatre was to have been the scene, but the mayor of the town thought it best not to give his permission until the assizes (which commence to-day the 22nd) should be over, lest the judge should take offence, seeing that it is the custom, while his Lordship is in the town, to give up the civil jurisdiction to him. Bless his worship! what in all the world should he think would take me to Thetford, except it being a time for holding the assizes? At no other time should I have dreamed of finding an audience in so small a place, and in a country so thinly inhabited. I was attracted, too, by the desire of meeting some of my "learned friends" from the Wen; for I deal in arguments founded on the law of the land, and on Acts of Parliament. The deuce take this mayor for disappointing me; and, now, I am afraid that I shall not fall in with this learned body during the whole of my spring tour.

Finding Thetford to be forbidden ground, I came hither to Sir Thomas Beevor's, where I had left my two daughters, having, since the 12th inclusive, travelled 120 miles, and delivered six lectures. Those 120 miles have been through a fine farming country, and without my seeing, until I came to Thetford, but one spot of waste or common land, and that not exceeding, I should think, from fifty to eighty acres. From this place to Norwich, and through Attleborough and Wymondham, the land is all good, and the farming excellent. It is pretty nearly the same from Norwich to Bungay, where we enter Suffolk. Bungay is a large and fine town, with three churches, lying on the side of some very fine meadows. Harleston, on the road to Eye, is a very pretty market-town: of Eye, I have spoken before. From Eye to Ipswich, we pass through a series of villages, and at Ipswich, to my great surprise, we found a most beautiful town, with a population of about twelve thousand persons; and here our profound Prime Minister might have seen most abundant evidence of prosperity; for the new houses are, indeed, very numerous. But if our famed and profound Prime Minister, having Mr. Wilmot Horton by the arm, and standing upon one of the hills that surround this town, and which, each hill seeming to surpass the other hill in beauty, command a complete view of every house, or, at least, of the top of every house, in this opulent town; if he, thus standing, and thus accompanied, were to hold up his hands, clap them together, and bless God for the proofs of prosperity contained in the new and red bricks, and were to cast his eye southward of the town, and see the numerous little vessels upon the little arm of the sea which comes up from Harwich, and which here finds its termination; and were, in those vessels, to discover an additional proof of prosperity; if he were to be thus situated, and to be thus feeling, would not some doubts be awakened in his mind; if I, standing behind him, were to whisper in his ear, "Do you not think that the greater part of these new houses have been created by taxes, which went to pay the about 20,000 troops that were stationed here for pretty nearly 20 years during the war, and some of which are stationed here still? Look at that immense building, my Lord Duke: it is fresh and new and fine and splendid, and contains indubitable marks of opulence; but it is a BARRACK; aye, and the money to build that barrack, and to maintain the 20,000 troops, has assisted to beggar, to dilapidate, to plunge into ruin and decay, hundreds upon hundreds of villages and hamlets in Wiltshire, in Dorsetshire, in Somersetshire, and in other counties who shared not in the ruthless squanderings of the war. But," leaning my arm upon the Duke's shoulder, and giving Wilmot a poke in the poll to make him listen and look, and pointing with my fore-finger to the twelve large, lofty, and magnificent churches, each of them at least 700 years old, and saying, "Do you think Ipswich was not larger and far more populous 700 years ago than it is at this hour?" Putting this question to him, would it not check his exultation, and would it not make even Wilmot begin to reflect?

Even at this hour, with all the unnatural swellings of the war, there are not two thousand people, including the bed-ridden and the babies, to each of the magnificent churches. Of adults, there cannot be more than about 1400 to a church; and there is one of the churches which, being well filled, as in ancient times, would contain from four to seven thousand persons, for the nave of it appears to me to be larger than St. Andrew's Hall at Norwich, which Hall was formerly the church of the Benedictine Priory. And, perhaps, the great church here might have belonged to some monastery; for here were three Augustine priories, one of them founded in the reign of William the Conqueror, another founded in the reign of Henry the Second, another in the reign of King John, with an Augustine friary, a Carmelite friary, an hospital founded in the reign of King John; and here, too, was the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey, the gateway of which, though built in brick, is still preserved, being the same sort of architecture as that of Hampton Court, and St. James's Palace.

There is no doubt but that this was a much greater place than it is now. It is the great outlet for the immense quantities of corn grown in this most productive county, and by farmers the most clever that ever lived. I am told that wheat is worth six shillings a quarter more, at some times, at Ipswich than at Norwich, the navigation to London being so much more speedy and safe. Immense quantities of flour are sent from this town. The windmills on the hills in the vicinage are so numerous that I counted, whilst standing in one place, no less than seventeen. They are all painted or washed white; the sails are black; it was a fine morning, the wind was brisk, and their twirling altogether added greatly to the beauty of the scene, which, having the broad and beautiful arm of the sea on the one hand, and the fields and meadows, studded with farm-houses, on the other, appeared to me the most beautiful sight of the kind that I had ever beheld. The town and its churches were down in the dell before me, and the only object that came to disfigure the scene was THE BARRACK, and made me utter involuntarily the words of BLACKSTONE: "The laws of England recognise no distinction between the citizen and the soldier; they know of no standing soldier: no inland fortresses; no barracks." "Ah!" said I to myself, but loud enough for any one to have heard me a hundred yards, "such were the laws of England when mass was said in those magnificent churches, and such they continued until a septennial Parliament came and deprived the people of England of their rights."

I know of no town to be compared with Ipswich, except it be Nottingham; and there is this difference in the two; that Nottingham stands high, and, on one side, looks over a very fine country; whereas Ipswich is in a dell, meadows running up above it, and a beautiful arm of the sea below it. The town itself is substantially built, well paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched dwellings to be seen on its outskirts. From the town itself, you can see nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave, and then, the country round about it, so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful state, the farm-houses all white, and all so much alike; the barns, and everything about the homesteads so snug: the stocks of turnips so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with a level: in short, here is everything to delight the eye, and to make the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great boasters of their superiority over others; and I must say that it is not without reason.

But, observe, this has been a very highly-favoured county: it has had poured into it millions upon millions of money, drawn from Wiltshire, and other inland counties. I should suppose that Wiltshire alone has, within the last forty years, had two or three millions of money drawn from it, to be given to Essex and Suffolk. At one time there were not less than sixty thousand men kept on foot in these counties. The increase of London, too, the swellings of the immortal Wen, have assisted to heap wealth upon these counties; but, in spite of all this, the distress pervades all ranks and degrees, except those who live on the taxes. At Eye, butter used to sell for eighteen-pence a pound: it now sells for nine-pence halfpenny, though the grass has not yet begun to spring; and eggs were sold at thirty for a shilling. Fine times for me, whose principal food is eggs, and whose sole drink is milk, but very bad times for those who sell me the food and the drink.

Coming from Ipswich to Bury St. Edmund's, you pass through Needham-market and Stowmarket, two very pretty market towns; and, like all the other towns in Suffolk, free from the drawback of shabby and beggarly houses on the outskirts. I remarked that I did not see in the whole county one single instance of paper or rags supplying the place of glass in any window, and did not see one miserable hovel in which a labourer resided. The county, however, is flat: with the exception of the environs of Ipswich, there is none of that beautiful variety of hill and dale, and hanging woods, that you see at every town in Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent. It is curious, too, that though the people, I mean the poorer classes of people, are extremely neat in their houses, and though I found all their gardens dug up and prepared for cropping, you do not see about their cottages (and it is just the same in Norfolk) that ornamental gardening; the walks, and the flower borders, and the honey-suckles, and roses, trained over the doors, or over arched sticks, that you see in Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent, that I have many a time sitten upon my horse to look at so long and so often, as greatly to retard me on my journey. Nor is this done for show or ostentation. If you find a cottage in those counties, by the side of a by lane, or in the midst of a forest, you find just the same care about the garden and the flowers. In those counties, too, there is great taste with regard to trees of every description, from the hazel to the oak. In Suffolk it appears to be just the contrary: here is the great dissight of all these three eastern counties. Almost every bank of every field is studded with pollards, that is to say, trees that have been beheaded, at from six to twelve feet from the ground, than which nothing in nature can be more ugly. They send out shoots from the head, which are lopped off once in ten or a dozen years for fuel, or other purposes. To add to the deformity, the ivy is suffered to grow on them, which, at the same time, checks the growth of the shoots. These pollards become hollow very soon, and, as timber, are fit for nothing but gate-posts, even before they be hollow. Upon a farm of a hundred acres these pollards, by root and shade, spoil at least six acres of the ground, besides being most destructive to the fences. Why not plant six acres of the ground with timber and underwood? Half an acre a year would most amply supply the farm with poles and brush, and with everything wanted in the way of fuel; and why not plant hedges to be unbroken by these pollards? I have scarcely seen a single farm of a hundred acres without pollards, sufficient to find the farm-house in fuel, without any assistance from coals, for several years.

However, the great number of farm-houses in Suffolk, the neatness of those houses, the moderation in point of extent which you generally see, and the great store of the food in the turnips, and the admirable management of the whole, form a pretty good compensation for the want of beauties. The land is generally as clean as a garden ought to be; and, though it varies a good deal as to lightness and stiffness, they make it all bear prodigious quantities of Swedish turnips; and on them pigs, sheep, and cattle, all equally thrive. I did not observe a single poor miserable animal in the whole county.

To conclude an account of Suffolk, and not to sing the praises of Bury St. Edmund's, would offend every creature of Suffolk birth; even at Ipswich, when I was praising that place, the very people of that town asked me if I did not think Bury St. Edmund's the nicest town in the world. Meet them wherever you will, they have all the same boast; and indeed, as a town in itself, it is the neatest place that ever was seen. It is airy, it has several fine open places in it, and it has the remains of the famous abbey walls and the abbey gate entire; and it is so clean and so neat that nothing can equal it in that respect. It was a favourite spot in ancient times; greatly endowed with monasteries and hospitals. Besides the famous Benedictine Abbey, there were once a college and a friary; and as to the abbey itself, it was one of the greatest in the kingdom; and was so ancient as to have been founded only about forty years after the landing of Saint Austin in Kent. The land all round about it is good; and the soil is of that nature as not to produce much dirt at any time of the year; but the country about it is flat, and not of that beautiful variety that we find at Ipswich.

After all, what is the reflection now called for? It is that this fine county, for which nature has done all that she can do, soil, climate, sea-ports, people; everything that can be done, and an internal government, civil and ecclesiastical, the most complete in the world, wanting nothing but to be let alone, to make every soul in it as happy as people can be upon earth; the peace provided for by the county rates; property protected by the law of the land; the poor provided for by the poor-rates; religion provided for by the tithes and the church-rates; easy and safe conveyance provided for by the highway-rates; extraordinary danger provided against by the militia-rates; a complete government in itself; but having to pay a portion of sixty millions a year in taxes, over and above all this; and that, too, on account of wars carried on, not for the defence of England, not for the upholding of English liberty and happiness, but for the purpose of crushing liberty and happiness in other countries; and all this because, and only because, a septennial Parliament has deprived the people of their rights.

That which we admire most is not always that which would be our choice. One might imagine, that after all that I have said about this fine county, I should certainly prefer it as a place of residence. I should not, however: my choice has been always very much divided between the woods of Sussex and the downs of Wiltshire. I should not like to be compelled to decide; but if I were compelled, I do believe that I should fix on some vale in Wiltshire. Water meadows at the bottom, corn-land going up towards the hills, those hills being Down land, and a farm-house, in a clump of trees, in some little cross vale between the hills, sheltered on every side but the south. In short, if Mr. Bennet would give me a farm, the house of which lies on the right-hand side of the road going from Salisbury to Warminster, in the parish of Norton Bovant, just before you enter that village; if he would but be so good as to do that, I would freely give up all the rest of the world to the possession of whoever may get hold of it. I have hinted this to him once or twice before, but I am sorry to say that he turns a deaf ear to my hinting.

Cambridge, 28th March, 1830.

I went from Hargham to Lynn on Tuesday, the 23rd; but owing to the disappointment at Thetford, everything was deranged. It was market-day at Lynn, but no preparations of any sort had been made, and no notification given. I therefore resolved, after staying at Lynn on Wednesday, to make a short tour, and to come back to it again. This tour was to take in Ely, Cambridge, St. Ives, Stamford, Peterborough, Wisbeach, and was to bring me back to Lynn, after a very busy ten days. I was particularly desirous to have a little political preaching at Ely, the place where the flogging of the English local militia under a guard of German bayonets cost me so dear.

I got there about noon on Thursday, the 25th, being market-day; but I had been apprised even before I left Lynn, that no place had been provided for my accommodation. A gentleman at Lynn gave me the name of one at Ely, who, as he thought, would be glad of an opportunity of pointing out a proper place, and of speaking about it; but just before I set off from Lynn, I received a notification from this gentleman, that he could do nothing in the matter. I knew that Ely was a small place, but I was determined to go and see the spot where the militia-men were flogged, and also determined to find some opportunity or other of relating that story as publicly as I could at Ely, and of describing the tail of the story; of which I will speak presently. Arrived at Ely, I first walked round the beautiful cathedral, that honour to our Catholic forefathers, and that standing disgrace to our Protestant selves. It is impossible to look at that magnificent pile without feeling that we are a fallen race of men. The cathedral would, leaving out the palace of the bishop, and the houses of the dean, canons, and prebendaries, weigh more, if it were put into a scale, than all the houses in the town, and all the houses for a mile round the neighbourhood if you exclude the remains of the ancient monasteries. You have only to open your eyes to be convinced that England must have been a far greater and more wealthy country in those days than it is in these days. The hundreds of thousands of loads of stone, of which this cathedral and the monasteries in the neighbourhood were built, must all have been brought by sea from distant parts of the kingdom. These foundations were laid more than a thousand years ago; and yet there are vagabonds who have the impudence to say that it is the Protestant religion that has made England a great country.

Ely is what one may call a miserable little town: very prettily situated, but poor and mean. Everything seems to be on the decline, as, indeed, is the case everywhere, where the clergy are the masters. They say that this bishop has an income of £18,000 a year. He and the dean and chapter are the owners of all the land and tithes, for a great distance round about, in this beautiful and most productive part of the country; and yet this famous building, the cathedral, is in a state of disgraceful irrepair and disfigurement. The great and magnificent windows to the east have been shortened at the bottom, and the space plastered up with brick and mortar, in a very slovenly manner, for the purpose of saving the expense of keeping the glass in repair. Great numbers of the windows in the upper part of the building have been partly closed up in the same manner, and others quite closed up. One door-way, which apparently had stood in need of repair, has been rebuilt in modern style, because it was cheaper; and the churchyard contained a flock of sheep acting as vergers for those who live upon the immense income, not a penny of which ought to be expended upon themselves while any part of this beautiful building is in a state of irrepair. This cathedral was erected "to the honour of God and the Holy Church." My daughters went to the service in the afternoon, in the choir of which they saw God honoured by the presence of two old men, forming the whole of the congregation. I dare say, that in Catholic times, five thousand people at a time have been assembled in this church. The cathedral and town stand upon a little hill, about three miles in circumference, raised up, as it were, for the purpose, amidst the rich fen land by which the hill is surrounded, and I dare say that the town formerly consisted of houses built over a great part of this hill, and of, probably, from fifty to a hundred thousand people. The people do not now exceed above four thousand, including the bedridden and the babies.

Having no place provided for lecturing, and knowing no single soul in the place, I was thrown upon my own resources. The first thing I did was to walk up through the market, which contained much more than an audience sufficient for me; but, leaving the market people to carry on their affairs, I picked up a sort of labouring man, asked him if he recollected when the local militia-men were flogged under the guard of the Germans; and, receiving an answer in the affirmative, I asked him to go and show me the spot, which he did; he showed me a little common along which the men had been marched, and into a piece of pasture-land, where he put his foot upon the identical spot where the flogging had been executed. On that spot, I told him what I had suffered for expressing my indignation at that flogging. I told him that a large sum of English money was now every year sent abroad to furnish half pay and allowances to the officers of those German troops, and to maintain the widows and children of such of them as were dead; and I added, "You have to work to help to pay that money; part of the taxes which you pay on your malt, hops, beer, leather, soap, candles, tobacco, tea, sugar, and everything else, goes abroad every year to pay these people: it has thus been going abroad ever since the peace; and it will thus go abroad for the rest of your life, if this system of managing the nation's affairs continue;" and I told him that about one million seven hundred thousand pounds had been sent abroad on this account, since the peace.

When I opened, I found that this man was willing to open too; and he uttered sentiments that would have convinced me, if I had not before been convinced of the fact, that there are very few, even amongst the labourers, who do not clearly understand the cause of their ruin. I discovered that there were two Ely men flogged upon that occasion, and that one of them was still alive and residing near the town. I sent for this man, who came to me in the evening when he had done his work, and who told me that he had lived seven years with the same master when he was flogged, and was bailiff or head man to his master. He has now a wife and several children; is a very nice-looking, and appears to be a hard-working, man, and to bear an excellent character.

But how was I to harangue? For I was determined not to quit Ely without something of that sort. I told this labouring man who showed me the flogging spot, my name, which seemed to surprise him very much, for he had heard of me before. After I had returned to my inn, I walked back again through the market amongst the farmers; then went to an inn that looked out upon the market-place, went into an up-stairs room, threw up the sash, and sat down at the window, and looked out upon the market. Little groups soon collected to survey me, while I sat in a very unconcerned attitude. The farmers had dined, or I should have found out the most numerous assemblage, and have dined with them. The next best thing was, to go and sit down in the room where they usually dropped in to drink after dinner; and, as they nearly all smoke, to take a pipe with them. This, therefore, I did; and, after a time, we began to talk.

The room was too small to contain a twentieth part of the people that would have come in if they could. It was hot to suffocation; but, nevertheless, I related to them the account of the flogging, and of my persecution on that account; and I related to them the account above stated with regard to the English money now sent to the Germans, at which they appeared to be utterly astonished. I had not time sufficient for a lecture, but I explained to them briefly the real cause of the distress which prevailed; I warned the farmers particularly against the consequences of hoping that this distress would remove itself. I portrayed to them the effects of the taxes; and showed them that we owe this enormous burden to the want of being fairly represented in the Parliament. Above all things, I did that which I never fail to do, showed them the absurdity of grumbling at the six millions a year given in relief to the poor, while they were silent, and seemed to think nothing of the sixty millions of taxes collected by the Government at London, and I asked them how any man of property could have the impudence to call upon the labouring man to serve in the militia, and to deny that that labouring man had, in case of need, a clear right to a share of the produce of the land. I explained to them how the poor were originally relieved; told them that the revenues of the livings, which had their foundation in charity, were divided amongst the poor. The demands for repair of the churches, and the clergy themselves; I explained to them how church-rates and poor-rates came to be introduced; how the burden of maintaining the poor came to be thrown upon the people at large; how the nation had sunk by degrees ever since the event called the Reformation; and, pointing towards the cathedral, I said, "Can you believe, gentlemen, that when that magnificent pile was reared, and when all the fine monasteries, hospitals, schools, and other resorts of piety and charity, existed in this town and neighbourhood; can you believe, that Ely was the miserable little place that it now is; and that that England which had never heard of the name of pauper, contained the crowds of miserable creatures that it now contains, some starving at stone-cracking by the way-side, and others drawing loaded wagons on that way?"

A young man in the room (I having come to a pause) said: "But, Sir, were there no poor in Catholic times?" "Yes," said I, "to be sure there were. The Scripture says, that the poor shall never cease out of the land; and there are five hundred texts of Scripture enjoining on all men to be good and kind to the poor. It is necessary to the existence of civil society, that there should be poor. Men have two motives to industry and care in all the walks of life: one, to acquire wealth; but the other and stronger, to avoid poverty. If there were no poverty, there would be no industry, no enterprise. But this poverty is not to be made a punishment unjustly severe. Idleness, extravagance, are offences against morality; but they are not offences of that heinous nature to justify the infliction of starvation by way of punishment. It is, therefore, the duty of every man that is able; it is particularly the duty of every government, and it was a duty faithfully executed by the Catholic Church, to take care that no human being should perish for want in a land of plenty; and to take care, too, that no one should be deficient of a sufficiency of food and raiment, not only to sustain life, but also to sustain health." The young man said: "I thank you, Sir; I am answered."

I strongly advised the farmers to be well with their work-people; for that, unless their flocks were as safe in their fields as their bodies were in their beds, their lives must be lives of misery; that if their sacks and barns were not places of as safe deposit for their corn as their drawers were for their money, the life of the farmer was the most wretched upon earth, in place of being the most pleasant, as it ought to be.

Boston, Friday, 9th April, 1830.

Quitting Cambridge and Dr. Chafy and Serjeant Frere, on Monday, the 29th of March, I arrived at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, about one o'clock in the day. In the evening I harangued to about 200 persons, principally farmers, in a wheelwright's shop, that being the only safe place in the town, of sufficient dimensions and sufficiently strong. It was market-day; and this is a great cattle-market. As I was not to be at Stamford in Lincolnshire till the 31st, I went from St. Ives to my friend Mr. Wells's, near Huntingdon, and remained there till the 31st in the morning, employing the evening of the 30th in going to Chatteris, in the Isle of Ely, and there addressing a good large company of farmers.

On the 31st, I went to Stamford, and, in the evening, spoke to about 200 farmers and others, in a large room in a very fine and excellent inn, called Standwell's Hotel, which is, with few exceptions, the nicest inn that I have ever been in. On the 1st of April, I harangued here again, and had amongst my auditors some most agreeable, intelligent, and public-spirited yeomen, from the little county of Rutland, who made, respecting the seat in Parliament, the proposition, the details of the purport of which I communicated to my readers in the last Register.

On the 2nd of April, I met my audience in the playhouse at Peterborough; and though it had snowed all day, and was very wet and sloppy, I had a good large audience; and I did not let this opportunity pass without telling my hearers of the part that their good neighbour, Lord Fitzwilliam, had acted with regard to the French war, with regard to Burke and his pension; with regard to the dungeoning law, which drove me across the Atlantic in 1817, and with regard to the putting into the present Parliament, aye, and for that very town, that very Lawyer Scarlett, whose state prosecutions are now become so famous. "Never," said I, "did I say that behind a man's back that I would not say to his face. I wish I had his face before me: but I am here as near to it as I can get: I am before the face of his friends: here, therefore, I will say what I think of him." When I had described his conduct, and given my opinion on it, many applauded, and not one expressed disapprobation.

On the 3rd, I speechified at Wisbeach, in the playhouse, to about 220 people, I think it was; and that same night, went to sleep at a friend's (a total stranger to me, however) at St. Edmund's, in the heart of the Fens. I stayed there on the 4th (Sunday), the morning of which brought a hard frost: ice an inch thick, and the total destruction of the apricot blossoms.

After passing Sunday and the greater part of Monday (the 5th) at St. Edmund's, where my daughters and myself received the greatest kindness and attention, we went, on Monday afternoon, to Crowland, where we were most kindly lodged and entertained at the houses of two gentlemen, to whom also we were personally perfect strangers; and in the evening, I addressed a very large assemblage of most respectable farmers and others, in this once famous town. There was another hard frost on the Monday morning; just, as it were, to finish the apricot bloom.

On the 6th I went to Lynn, and on that evening and on the evening of the 7th, I spoke to about 300 people in the playhouse. And here there was more interruption than I have ever met with at any other place. This town, though containing as good and kind friends as I have met with in any other, and though the people are generally as good, contains also, apparently, a large proportion of dead-weight, the offspring, most likely, of the rottenness of the borough. Two or three, or even one man, may, if not tossed out at once, disturb and interrupt everything in a case where constant attention to fact and argument is requisite, to insure utility to the meeting. There were but three here; and though they were finally silenced, it was not without great loss of time, great noise and hubbub. Two, I was told, were dead-weight men, and one a sort of higgling merchant.

On the 8th I went to Holbeach, in this noble county of Lincoln; and, gracious God! what a contrast with the scene at Lynn! I knew not a soul in the place. Mr. Fields, a bookseller and printer, had invited me by letter, and had, in the nicest and most unostentatious manner, made all the preparations. Holbeach lies in the midst of some of the richest land in the world; a small market-town, but a parish more than twenty miles across, larger, I believe, than the county of Rutland, produced an audience (in a very nice room, with seats prepared) of 178, apparently all wealthy farmers, and men in that rank of life; and an audience so deeply attentive to the dry matters on which I had to address it, I have very seldom met with. I was delighted with Holbeach; a neat little town; a most beautiful church with a spire, like that of "the man of Ross, pointing to the skies;" gardens very pretty; fruit-trees in abundance, with blossom-buds ready to burst; and land, dark in colour, and as fine in substance as flour, as fine as if sifted through one of the sieves with which we get the dust out of the clover seed; and when cut deep down into with a spade, precisely, as to substance, like a piece of hard butter; yet nowhere is the distress greater than here. I walked on from Holbeach, six miles, towards Boston; and seeing the fatness of the land, and the fine grass and the never-ending sheep lying about like fat hogs, stretched in the sun, and seeing the abject state of the labouring people, I could not help exclaiming, "God has given us the best country in the world; our brave and wise and virtuous fathers, who built all these magnificent churches, gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!"

I arrived at Boston (where I am now writing) to-day, (Friday, 9th April) about ten o'clock. I must arrive at Louth before I can say precisely what my future route will be. There is an immense fair at Lincoln next week; and a friend has been here to point out the proper days to be there; as, however, this Register will not come from the press until after I shall have had an opportunity of writing something at Louth, time enough to be inserted in it. I will here go back, and speak of the country that I have travelled over, since I left Cambridge on the 29th of March.

From Cambridge to St. Ives the land is generally in open, unfenced fields, and some common fields; generally stiff land, and some of it not very good, and wheat, in many places, looking rather thin. From St. Ives to Chatteris (which last is in the Isle of Ely), the land is better, particularly as you approach the latter place. From Chatteris I came back to Huntingdon and once more saw its beautiful meadows, of which I spoke when I went thither in 1823. From Huntingdon, through Stilton, to Stamford (the two last in Lincolnshire), is a country of rich arable land and grass fields, and of beautiful meadows. The enclosures are very large, the soil red, with a whitish stone below; very much like the soil at and near Ross in Herefordshire, and like that near Coventry and Warwick. Here, as all over this country, everlasting fine sheep. The houses all along here are built of the stone of the country: you seldom see brick. The churches are large, lofty, and fine, and give proof that the country was formerly much more populous than it is now, and that the people had a vast deal more of wealth in their hands and at their own disposal. There are three beautiful churches at Stamford, not less, I dare say, than three [quære] hundred years old; but two of them (I did not go to the other) are as perfect as when just finished, except as to the images, most of which have been destroyed by the ungrateful Protestant barbarians, of different sorts, but some of which (out of the reach of their ruthless hands) are still in the niches.

From Stamford to Peterborough is a country of the same description, with the additional beauty of woods here and there, and with meadows just like those at Huntingdon, and not surpassed by those on the Severn near Worcester, nor by those on the Avon at Tewkesbury. The cathedral at Peterborough is exquisitely beautiful, and I have great pleasure in saying, that, contrary to the more magnificent pile at Ely, it is kept in good order; the Bishop (Herbert Marsh) residing a good deal on the spot; and though he did write a pamphlet to justify and urge on the war, the ruinous war, and though he did get a pension for it, he is, they told me, very good to the poor people. My daughters had a great desire to see, and I had a great desire they should see, the burial-place of that ill-used, that savagely-treated, woman, and that honour to woman-kind, Catherine, queen of the ferocious tyrant, Henry the Eighth. To the infamy of that ruffian, and the shame of after ages, there is no monument to record her virtues and her sufferings; and the remains of this daughter of the wise Ferdinand and of the generous Isabella, who sold her jewels to enable Columbus to discover the new world, lie under the floor of the cathedral, commemorated by a short inscription on a plate of brass. All men, Protestants or not Protestants, feel as I feel upon this subject; search the hearts of the bishop and of his dean and chapter, and these feelings are there; but to do justice to the memory of this illustrious victim of tyranny, would be to cast a reflection on that event to which they owe their rich possessions, and, at the same time, to suggest ideas not very favourable to the descendants of those who divided amongst them the plunder of the people arising out of that event, and which descendants are their patrons, and give them what they possess. From this cause, and no other, it is, that the memory of the virtuous Catherine is unblazoned, while that of the tyrannical, the cruel, and the immoral Elizabeth, is recorded with all possible veneration, and all possible varnishing-over of her disgusting amours and endless crimes.

They relate at Peterborough, that the same sexton who buried Queen Catherine, also buried here Mary, Queen of Scots. The remains of the latter, of very questionable virtue, or, rather, of unquestionable vice, were removed to Westminster Abbey by her son, James the First; but those of the virtuous Queen were suffered to remain unhonoured! Good God! what injustice, what a want of principle, what hostility to all virtuous feeling, has not been the fruit of this Protestant Reformation; what plunder, what disgrace to England, what shame, what misery, has that event not produced! There is nothing that I address to my hearers with more visible effect than a statement of the manner in which the poor-rates and the church-rates came. This, of course, includes an account of how the poor were relieved in Catholic times. To the far greater part of people this is information wholly new; they are deeply interested in it; and the impression is very great. Always before we part, Tom Cranmer's church receives a considerable blow.

There is in the cathedral a very ancient monument, made to commemorate, they say, the murder of the abbot and his monks by the Danes. Its date is the year 870. Almost all the cathedrals, were, it appears, originally churches of monasteries. That of Winchester and several others, certainly were. There has lately died, in the garden of the bishop's palace, a tortoise that had been there more, they say, than two hundred years; a fact very likely to be known; because, at the end of thirty or forty, people would begin to talk about it as something remarkable; and thus the record would be handed down from father to son.

From Peterborough to Wisbeach, the road, for the most part, lies through the Fens, and here we passed through the village of Thorney, where there was a famous abbey, which, together with its valuable domain, was given by the savage tyrant, Henry VIII., to John Lord Russell (made a lord by that tyrant), the founder of the family of that name. This man got also the abbey and estate at Woburn; the priory and its estate at Tavistock; and in the next reign he got Covent Garden and other parts adjoining; together with other things, all then public property. A history, a true history of this family (which I hope I shall find time to write) would be a most valuable thing. It would be a nice little specimen of the way in which these families became possessed of a great part of their estates. It would show how the poor-rates and the church-rates came. It would set the whole nation right at once. Some years ago I had a set of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Scotch), which contained an account of every other great family in the kingdom; but I could find in it no account of this family, either under the word Russell or the word Bedford. I got into a passion with the book, because it contained no account of the mode of raising the birch-tree; and it was sold to a son (as I was told) of Mr. Alderman Heygate; and if that gentleman look into the book, he will find what I say to be true; but if I should be in error about this, perhaps he will have the goodness to let me know it. I shall be obliged to any one to point me out any printed account of this family; and particularly to tell me where I can get an old folio, containing (amongst other things) Bulstrode's argument and narrative in justification of the sentence and execution of Lord William Russell, in the reign of Charles the Second. It is impossible to look at the now-miserable village of Thorney, and to think of its once-splendid abbey; it is impossible to look at the twenty thousand acres of land around, covered with fat sheep, or bearing six quarters of wheat or ten of oats to the acre, without any manure; it is impossible to think of these without feeling a desire that the whole nation should know all about the surprising merits of the possessors.

Wisbeach, lying farther up the arm of the sea than Lynn, is, like the latter, a little town of commerce, chiefly engaged in exporting to the south, the corn that grows in this productive country. It is a good solid town, though not handsome, and has a large market, particularly for corn.

To Crowland, I went, as before stated, from Wisbeach, staying two nights at St. Edmund's. Here I was in the heart of the Fens. The whole country as level as the table on which I am now writing. The horizon like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come up, just as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. The kind and polite friends, with whom we were lodged, had a very neat garden, and fine young orchard. Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a pin's head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground; immense bowling-greens separated by ditches; and not the sign of dock or thistle or other weed to be seen. What a contrast between these and the heath-covered sand-hills of Surrey, amongst which I was born! Yet the labourers, who spuddle about the ground in the little dips between those sand-hills, are better off than those that exist in this fat of the land. Here the grasping system takes all away, because it has the means of coming at the value of all: there, the poor man enjoys something, because he is thought too poor to have anything: he is there allowed to have what is deemed worth nothing; but here, where every inch is valuable, not one inch is he permitted to enjoy.

At Crowland also (still in the Fens) was a great and rich abbey, a good part of the magnificent ruins of the church of which are still standing, one corner or part of it being used as the parish church, by the worms, which have crept out of the dead bodies of those who lived in the days of the founders;

"And wond'ring man could want the larger pile, Exult, and claim the corner with a smile."

They tell you, that all the country at and near Crowland was a mere swamp, a mere bog, bearing nothing, bearing nothing worth naming, until the modern drainings took place! The thing called the "Reformation," has lied common sense out of men's minds. So likely a thing to choose a barren swamp whereon, or wherein, to make the site of an abbey, and of a benedictine abbey too! It has been always observed, that the monks took care to choose for their places of abode, pleasant spots, surrounded by productive land. The likeliest thing in the world for these monks to choose a swamp for their dwelling-place, surrounded by land that produced nothing good! The thing gives the lie to itself: and it is impossible to reject the belief, that these Fens were as productive of corn and meat a thousand years ago, and more so, than they are at this hour. There is a curious triangular bridge here, on one part of which stands the statue of one of the ancient kings. It is all of great age; and everything shows that Crowland was a place of importance in the earliest times.

From Crowland to Lynn, through Thorney and Wisbeach, is all Fens, well besprinkled, formerly, with monasteries of various descriptions, and still well set with magnificent churches. From Lynn to Holbeach you get out of the real Fens, and into the land that I attempted to describe, when, a few pages back, I was speaking of Holbeach. I say attempted; for I defy tongue or pen to make the description adequate to the matter: to know what the thing is, you must see it. The same land continues all the way on to Boston: endless grass and endless fat sheep; not a stone, not a weed.

Boston, Sunday, 11th April, 1830.

Last night, I made a speech at the playhouse to an audience, whose appearance was sufficient to fill me with pride. I had given notice that I should perform on Friday, overlooking the circumstance that it was Good Friday. In apologising for this inadvertence, I took occasion to observe, that even if I had persevered, the clergy of the church could have nothing to object, seeing that they were now silent while a bill was passing in Parliament to put Jews on a level with Christians; to enable Jews, the blasphemers of the Redeemer, to sit on the bench, to sit in both Houses of Parliament, to sit in council with the King, and to be kings of England, if entitled to the Crown, which, by possibility, they might become, if this bill were to pass; that to this bill the clergy had offered no opposition; and that, therefore, how could they hold sacred the anniversary appointed to commemorate the crucifixion of Christ by the hands of the blaspheming and bloody Jews? That, at any rate, if this bill passed; if those who called Jesus Christ an impostor were thus declared to be as good as those who adored him, there was not, I hoped, a man in the kingdom who would pretend, that it would be just to compel the people to pay tithes, and fees, and offerings, to men for teaching Christianity. This was a clincher; and as such it was received.

This morning I went out at six, looked at the town, walked three miles on the road to Spilsby, and back to breakfast at nine. Boston (bos is Latin for ox) though not above a fourth or fifth part of the size of its daughter in New England, which got its name, I dare say, from some persecuted native of this place, who had quitted England and all her wealth and all her glories, to preserve that freedom, which was still more dear to him; though not a town like New Boston, and though little to what it formerly was, when agricultural produce was the great staple of the kingdom and the great subject of foreign exchange, is, nevertheless, a very fine town; good houses, good shops, pretty gardens about it, a fine open place, nearly equal to that of Nottingham, in the middle of it a river and a canal passing through it, each crossed by a handsome and substantial bridge, a fine market for sheep, cattle, and pigs, and another for meat, butter, and fish; and being, like Lynn, a great place for the export of corn and flour, and having many fine mills, it is altogether a town of very considerable importance; and, which is not to be overlooked, inhabited by people none of whom appear to be in misery.

The great pride and glory of the Bostonians, is their church, which is, I think, 400 feet long, 90 feet wide, and has a tower (or steeple, as they call it) 300 feet high, which is both a land-mark and a sea-mark. To describe the richness, the magnificence, the symmetry, the exquisite beauty of this pile, is wholly out of my power. It is impossible to look at it without feeling, first, admiration and reverence and gratitude to the memory of our fathers who reared it; and next, indignation at those who affect to believe, and contempt for those who do believe, that, when this pile was reared, the age was dark, the people rude and ignorant, and the country destitute of wealth and thinly peopled. Look at this church, then; look at the heaps of white rubbish that the parsons have lately stuck up under the "New-church Act," and which, after having been built with money forced from the nation by odious taxes, they have stuffed full of locked-up pens, called pews, which they let for money, as cattle- and sheep- and pig-pens are let at fairs and markets; nay, after having looked at this work of the "dark ages," look at that great, heavy, ugly, unmeaning mass of stone called St. PAUL'S, which an American friend of mine, who came to London from Falmouth and had seen the cathedrals at Exeter and Salisbury, swore to me, that when he first saw it, he was at a loss to guess whether it were a court-house or a jail; after looking at Boston Church, go and look at that great, gloomy lump, created by a Protestant Parliament, and by taxes wrung by force from the whole nation; and then say which is the age really meriting the epithet dark.

St. Botolph, to whom this church is dedicated, while he (if saints see and hear what is passing on earth) must lament that the piety-inspiring mass has been, in this noble edifice, supplanted by the monotonous hummings of an oaken hutch, has not the mortification to see his church treated in a manner as if the new possessors sighed for the hour of its destruction. It is taken great care of; and though it has cruelly suffered from Protestant repairs; though the images are gone and the stained glass; and though the glazing is now in squares instead of lozenges; though the nave is stuffed with pens called pews; and though other changes have taken place detracting from the beauty of the edifice, great care is taken of it as it now is, and the inside is not disfigured and disgraced by a gallery, that great and characteristic mark of Protestant taste, which, as nearly as may be, makes a church like a playhouse. Saint Botolph (on the supposition before mentioned) has the satisfaction to see, that the base of his celebrated church is surrounded by an iron fence, to keep from it all offensive and corroding matter, which is so disgusting to the sight round the magnificent piles at Norwich, Ely and other places; that the churchyard, and all appertaining to it, are kept in the neatest and most respectable state; that no money has been spared for these purposes; that here the eye tells the heart, that gratitude towards the fathers of the Bostonians is not extinguished in the breasts of their sons; and this the Saint will know that he owes to the circumstances, that the parish is a poor vicarage, and that the care of his church is in the hands of the industrious people, and not in those of a fat and luxurious dean and chapter, wallowing in wealth derived from the people's labour.

Horncastle, 12th April.

A fine, soft, showery morning saw us out of Boston, carrying with us the most pleasing reflections as to our reception and treatment there by numerous persons, none of whom we had ever seen before. The face of the country, for about half the way, the soil, the grass, the endless sheep, the thickly-scattered and magnificent churches, continue as on the other side of Boston; but, after that, we got out of the low and level land. At Sibsey, a pretty village five miles from Boston, we saw, for the first time since we left Peterborough, land rising above the level of the horizon; and, not having seen such a thing for so long, it had struck my daughters, who overtook me on the road (I having walked on from Boston), that the sight had an effect like that produced by the first sight of land after a voyage across the Atlantic.

We now soon got into a country of hedges and dry land and gravel and clay and stones; the land not bad, however; pretty much like that of Sussex, lying between the forest part and the South Downs. A good proportion of woodland also; and just before we got to Horncastle, we passed the park of that Mr. Dymock who is called "the Champion of England," and to whom, it is said hereabouts, that we pay out of the taxes eight thousand pounds a year! This never can be, to be sure; but if we pay him only a hundred a year, I will lay down my glove against that of the "Champion," that we do not pay him even that for five years longer.

It is curious, that the moment you get out of the rich land, the churches become smaller, mean, and with scarcely anything in the way of tower or steeple. This town is seated in the middle of a large valley, not, however, remarkable for anything of peculiar value or beauty; a purely agricultural town; well built, and not mean in any part of it. It is a great rendezvous for horses and cattle, and sheep-dealers, and for those who sell these; and accordingly, it suffers severely from the loss of the small paper-money.

Horncastle, 13th April, Morning.

I made a speech last evening to from 130 to 150, almost all farmers, and most men of apparent wealth to a certain extent. I have seldom been better pleased with my audience. It is not the clapping and huzzaing that I value so much as the silent attention, the earnest look at me from all eyes at once, and then when the point is concluded, the look and nod at each other, as if the parties were saying, "Think of that!" And of these I had a great deal at Horncastle. They say that there are a hundred parish churches within six miles of this town. I dare say that there was one farmer from almost every one of those parishes. This is sowing the seeds of truth in a very sure manner: it is not scattering broadcast; it is really drilling the country.

There is one deficiency, and that, with me, a great one, throughout this country of corn and grass and oxen and sheep, that I have come over during the last three weeks; namely, the want of singing birds. We are now just in that season when they sing most. Here, in all this country, I have seen and heard only about four sky-larks, and not one other singing bird of any description, and, of the small birds that do not sing, I have seen only one yellow-hammer, and it was perched on the rail of a pound between Boston and Sibsey. Oh! the thousands of linnets all singing together on one tree, in the sand-hills of Surrey! Oh! the carolling in the coppices and the dingles of Hampshire and Sussex and Kent! At this moment (5 o'clock in the morning) the groves at Barn Elm are echoing with the warblings of thousands upon thousands of birds. The thrush begins a little before it is light; next the black-bird; next the larks begin to rise; all the rest begin the moment the sun gives the signal; and, from the hedges, the bushes, from the middle and the topmost twigs of the trees, comes the singing of endless variety; from the long dead grass comes the sound of the sweet and soft voice of the white-throat or nettle-tom, while the loud and merry song of the lark (the songster himself out of sight) seems to descend from the skies. MILTON, in his description of paradise, has not omitted the "song of earliest birds." However, everything taken together, here, in Lincolnshire, are more good things than man could have had the conscience to ask of God.

And now, if I had time and room to describe the state of men's affairs in the country through which I have passed, I should show that the people at Westminster would have known, how to turn paradise itself into hell. I must, however, defer this until my next, when I shall have been at Hull and Lincoln, and have had a view of the whole of this rich and fine country. In the meanwhile, however, I cannot help congratulating that sensible fellow, Wilmot Horton, and his co-operator, Burdett, that Emigration is going on at a swimming rate. Thousands are going, and that, too, without mortgaging the poor-rates. But, sensible fellows! it is not the aged, the halt, the ailing; it is not the paupers that are going; but men with from 200l. to 2,000l. in their pocket! This very year, from two to five millions of pounds sterling will actually be carried from England to the United States. The Scotch, who have money to pay their passages, go to New York; those who have none get carried to Canada, that they may thence get into the United States. I will inquire, one of these days, what right Burdett has to live in England more than those whom he proposes to send away.

Spittal, near Lincoln, 19th April 1830.

Here we are, at the end of a pretty decent trip since we left Boston. The next place, on our way to Hull, was Horncastle, where I preached politics in the playhouse to a most respectable body of farmers, who had come in the wet to meet me. Mr. John Peniston, who had invited me to stop there, behaved in a very obliging manner, and made all things very pleasant.

The country from Boston continued, as I said before, flat for about half the way to Horncastle, and we then began to see the high land. From Horncastle I set off two hours before the carriage, and going through a very pretty village called Ashby, got to another at the foot of a hill, which, they say, forms part of the Wolds; that is, a ridge of hills. This second village is called Scamblesby. The vale in which it lies is very fine land. A hazel mould, rich and light too. I saw a man here ploughing for barley, after turnips, with one horse: the horse did not seem to work hard, and the man was singing: I need not say that he was young; and I dare say he had the good sense to keep his legs under another man's table, and to stretch his body on another man's bed.

This is a very fine corn country: chalk at bottom: stony near the surface, in some places: here and there a chalk-pit in the hills: the shape of the ground somewhat like that of the broadest valleys in Wiltshire; but the fields not without fences as they are there: fields from fifteen to forty acres: the hills not downs, as in Wiltshire; but cultivated all over. The houses white and thatched, as they are in all chalk countries. The valley at Scamblesby has a little rivulet running down it, just as in all the chalk countries. The land continues nearly the same to Louth, which lies in a deep dell, with beautiful pastures on the surrounding hills, like those that I once admired at Shaftesbury, in Dorsetshire, and like that near St. Austle, in Cornwall, which I described in 1808.

At Louth the wise corporation had refused to let us have the playhouse; but my friends had prepared a very good place; and I had an opportunity of addressing crowded audiences two nights running. At no place have I been better pleased than at Louth. Mr. Paddison, solicitor, a young gentleman whom I had the honour to know slightly before, and to know whom, whether I estimate by character or by talent, would be an honour to any man, was particularly attentive to us. Mr. Naull, ironmonger, who had had the battle to fight for me for twenty years, expressed his exultation at my triumph in a manner that showed that he justly participated it with me. I breakfasted at Mr. Naull's with a gentleman 88 or 89 years of age, whose joy at shaking me by the hand was excessive. "Ah!" said he, "where are now those savages who, at Hull, threatened to kill me for raising my voice against this system?" This is a very fine town, and has a beautiful church, nearly equal to that at Boston.

We left Louth on the morning of Thursday the 15th, and got to Barton on the Humber by about noon, over a very fine country, large fields, fine pastures, flocks of those great sheep, of from 200 to 1,000 in a flock; and here at Barton, we arrived at the northern point of this noble county, having never seen one single acre of waste land, and not one acre that would be called bad land, in the south of England. The Wolds, or high-lands, lie away to our right, from Horncastle to near Barton; and on the other side of the Wolds lie the Marshes of Lincolnshire, which extend along the coast from Boston to the mouth of the Humber, on the bank of which we were at Barton, Hull being on the opposite side of the river, which is here about five miles wide, and which we had to cross in a steam-boat.

But let me not forget Great Grimsby, at which we changed horses, and breakfasted, in our way from Louth to Barton. "What the devil!" the reader will say, "should you want to recollect that place for? Why do you want not to forget that sink of corruption? What could you find there to be snatched from everlasting oblivion, except for the purpose of being execrated?" I did, however, find something there worthy of being made known, not only to every man in England but to every man in the world; and not to mention it here would be to be guilty of the greatest injustice.

To my surprise I found a good many people assembled at the inn-door, evidently expecting my arrival. While breakfast was preparing, I wished to speak to the bookseller of the place, if there were one, and to give him a list of my books and writings, that he might place it in his shop. When he came, I was surprised to find that he had it already, and that he, occasionally, sold my books. Upon my asking him how he got it, he said that it was brought down from London and given to him by a Mr. Plaskitt, who, he said, had all my writings, and who, he said, he was sure would be very glad to see me; but that he lived above a mile from the town. A messenger, however, had gone off to carry the news, and Mr. Plaskitt arrived before we had done breakfast, bringing with him a son and a daughter. And from the lips of this gentleman, a man of as kind and benevolent appearance and manners as I ever beheld in my life, I had the following facts; namely, "that one of his sons sailed for New York some years ago; that the ship was cast away on the shores of Long Island; that the captain, crew, and passengers all perished; that the wrecked vessel was taken possession of by people on the coast; that his son had a watch in his trunk, or chest, a purse with fourteen shillings in it, and divers articles of wearing apparel; that the Americans, who searched the wreck, sent all these articles safely to England to him"; "and," said he, "I keep the purse and the money at home, and here is the watch in my pocket"!

It would have been worth the expense of coming from London to Grimsby, if for nothing but to learn this fact, which I record, not only in justice to the free people of America, and particularly in justice to my late neighbours in Long Island, but in justice to the character of mankind. I publish it as something to counterbalance the conduct of the atrocious monsters who plunder the wrecks on the coast of Cornwall, and, as I am told, on the coasts here in the east of the island.

Away go, then, all the accusations upon the character of the Yankees. People may call them sharp, cunning, overreaching; and when they have exhausted the vocabulary of their abuse, the answer is found in this one fact, stated by Mr. Joshua Plaskitt, of Great Grimsby, in Lincolnshire, Old England. The person who sent the things to Mr. Plaskitt was named Jones. It did not occur to me to ask his christian name, nor to inquire what was the particular place where he lived in Long Island. I request Mr. Plaskitt to contrive to let me know these particulars; as I should like to communicate them to friends that I have on the north side of that island. However, it would excite no surprise there, that one of their countrymen had acted this part; for every man of them, having the same opportunity, would do the same. Their forefathers carried to New England the nature and character of the people of Old England, before national debts, paper-money, septennial bills, standing armies, dead-weights, and jubilees, had beggared and corrupted the people.

At Hull I lectured (I laugh at the word) to about seven hundred persons on the same evening that I arrived from Louth, which was on Thursday the 15th. We had what they call the summer theatre, which was crowded in every part except on the stage; and the next evening the stage was crowded too. The third evening was merely accidental, no previous notice having been given of it. On the Saturday I went in the middle of the day to Beverley; saw there the beautiful minster, and some of the fine horses which they show there at this season of the year; dined with about fifty farmers; made a speech to them and about a hundred more, perhaps; and got back to Hull time enough to go to the theatre there.

The country round Hull appears to exceed even that of Lincolnshire. The three mornings that I was at Hull I walked out in three different directions, and found the country everywhere fine. To the east lies the Holderness country. I used to wonder that Yorkshire, to which I, from some false impression in my youth, had always attached the idea of sterility, should send us of the south those beautiful cattle with short horns and straight and deep bodies. You have only to see the country to cease to wonder at this. It lies on the north side of the mouth of the Humber; is as flat and fat as the land between Holbeach and Boston, without, as they tell me, the necessity of such numerous ditches. The appellation "Yorkshire bite"; the acute sayings ascribed to Yorkshiremen; and their quick manner, I remember, in the army. When speaking of what country a man was, one used to say, in defence of the party, "York, but honest." Another saying was that it was a bare common that a Yorkshireman would go over without taking a bite. Every one knows the story of the gentleman who, upon finding that a boot-cleaner in the south was a Yorkshireman, and expressing his surprise that he was not become master of the inn, received for answer, "Ah, sir, but master is York too!" And that of the Yorkshire boy who, seeing a gentleman eating some eggs, asked the cook to give him a little salt; and upon being asked what he could want with salt, he said, "Perhaps that gentleman may give me an egg presently."

It is surprising what effect sayings like these produce upon the mind. From one end to the other of the kingdom, Yorkshiremen are looked upon as being keener than other people; more eager in pursuit of their own interests; more sharp and more selfish. For my part, I was cured with regard to the people long before I saw Yorkshire. In the army, where we see men of all counties, I always found Yorkshiremen distinguished for their frank manners and generous disposition. In the United States, my kind and generous friends of Pennsylvania were the children and descendants of Yorkshire parents; and, in truth, I long ago made up my mind that this hardness and sharpness ascribed to Yorkshiremen arose from the sort of envy excited by that quickness, that activity, that buoyancy of spirits, which bears them up through adverse circumstances, and their conquent success in all the situations of life. They, like the people of Lancashire, are just the very reverse of being cunning and selfish; be they farmers, or be they what they may, you get at the bottom of their hearts in a minute. Everything they think soon gets to the tongue, and out it comes, heads and tails, as fast as they can pour it. Fine materials for Oliver to work on! If he had been sent to the west instead of the north, he would have found people there on whom he would have exercised his powers in vain. You are not to have every valuable quality in the same man and the same people: you are not to have prudent caution united with quickness and volubility.

But though, as to the character of the people, I, having known so many hundreds of Yorkshiremen, was perfectly enlightened, and had quite got the better of all prejudices many years ago, I still, in spite of the matchless horses and matchless cattle, had a general impression that Yorkshire was a sterile county, compared with the counties in the south and the west; and this notion was confirmed in some measure by my seeing the moory and rocky parts in the West Riding last winter. It was necessary for me to come and see the country on the banks of the Humber. I have seen the vale of Honiton, in Devonshire, that of Taunton and of Glastonbury, in Somersetshire: I have seen the vales of Gloucester and Worcester, and the banks of the Severn and the Avon: I have seen the vale of Berkshire, that of Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire: I have seen the beautiful vales of Wiltshire; and the banks of the Medway, from Tunbridge to Maidstone, called the Garden of Eden: I was born at one end of Arthur Young's "finest ten miles in England:" I have ridden my horse across the Thames at its two sources; and I have been along every inch of its banks, from its sources, to Gravesend, whence I have sailed out of it into the channel; and having seen and had ability to judge of the goodness of the land in all these places, I declare that I have never seen any to be compared with the land on the banks of the Humber, from the Holderness country included, and with the exception of the land from Wisbeach to Holbeach, and Holbeach to Boston. Really, the single parish of Holbeach, or a patch of the same size in the Holderness country, seems to be equal in value to the whole of the county of Surrey, if we leave out the little plot of hop-garden at Farnham.

Nor is the town of Hull itself to be overlooked. It is a little city of London: streets, shops, everything like it; clean as the best parts of London, and the people as bustling and attentive. The town of Hull is surrounded with commodious docks for shipping. These docks are separated, in three or four places, by draw-bridges; so that, as you walk round the town, you walk by the side of the docks and the ships. The town on the outside of the docks is pretty considerable, and the walks from it into the country beautiful. I went about a good deal, and I nowhere saw marks of beggary or filth, even in the outskirts: none of those nasty, shabby, thief-looking sheds that you see in the approaches to London: none of those off-scourings of pernicious and insolent luxury. I hate commercial towns in general: there is generally something so loathsome in the look, and so stern and unfeeling in the manners of seafaring people, that I have always, from my very youth, disliked sea-ports; but really the sight of this nice town, the manners of its people, the civil, and kind and cordial reception that I met with, and the clean streets, and especially the pretty gardens in every direction, as you walk into the country, has made Hull, though a sea-port, a place that I shall always look back to with delight.

Beverley, which was formerly a very considerable city, with three or four gates, one of which is yet standing, had a great college, built in the year 700 by the Archbishop of York. It had three famous hospitals and two friaries. There is one church, a very fine one, and the minster still left; of which a bookseller in the town was so good as to give me copper-plate representations. It is still a very pretty town; the market large; the land all round the country good; and it is particularly famous for horses; those for speed being shown off here on the market-days at this time of the year. The farmers and gentlemen assemble in a very wide street, on the outside of the western gate of the town; and at a certain time of the day the grooms come from their different stables to show off their beautiful horses; blood horses, coach horses, hunters, and cart horses; sometimes, they tell me, forty or fifty in number. The day that I was there (being late in the season) there were only seven or eight, or ten at the most. When I was asked at the inn to go and see "the horses," I had no curiosity, thinking it was such a parcel of horses as we see at a market in the south; but I found it a sight worth going to see; for besides the beauty of the horses, there were the adroitness, the agility, and the boldness of the grooms, each running alongside of his horse, with the latter trotting at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and then swinging him round, and showing him off to the best advantage. In short, I was exceedingly gratified by the trip to Beverley: the day was fair and mild; we went by one road and came back by another, and I have very seldom passed a pleasanter day in my life.

I found, very much to my surprise, that at Hull I was very nearly as far north as at Leeds, and, at Beverley, a little farther north. Of all things in the world, I wanted to speak to Mr. Foster of the Leeds Patriot; but was not aware of the relative situation till it was too late to write to him. Boats go up the Humber and the Ouse to within a few miles of Leeds. The Holderness country is that piece of land which lies between Hull and the sea: it appears to be a perfect flat; and is said to be, and I dare say is, one of the very finest spots in the whole kingdom. I had a very kind invitation to go into it; but I could not stay longer on that side of the Humber without neglecting some duty or other. In quitting Hull, I left behind me but one thing, the sight of which had not pleased me; namely, a fine gilded equestrian statue of the Dutch "Deliverer," who gave to England the national debt, that fruitful mother of mischief and misery. Until this statue be replaced by that of Andrew Marvell, that real honour of this town, England will never be what it ought to be.

We came back to Barton by the steam-boat on Sunday in the afternoon of the 18th, and in the evening reached this place, which is an inn, with three or four houses near it, at the distance of ten miles from Lincoln, to which we are going on Wednesday, the 21st. Between this place and Barton we passed through a delightfully pretty town called Brigg. The land in this, which is called the high part of Lincolnshire, has generally stone, a solid bed of stone of great depth, at different distances from the surface. In some parts this stone is of a yellowish colour, and in the form of very thick slate; and in these parts the soil is not so good; but, generally speaking, the land is excellent; easily tilled; no surface water; the fields very large; not many trees; but what there are, particularly the ash, very fine, and of free growth; and innumerable flocks of those big, long-woolled sheep, from one hundred to a thousand in a flock, each having from eight to ten pounds of wool upon its body. One of the finest sights in the world is one of these thirty or forty-acre fields, with four or five or six hundred ewes, each with her one or two lambs skipping about upon grass, the most beautiful that can be conceived, and on lands as level as a bowling-green. I do not recollect having seen a mole-hill or an ant-hill since I came into the country; and not one acre of waste land, though I have gone the whole length of the country one way, and am now got nearly half way back another way.

Having seen this country, and having had a glimpse at the Holderness country, which lies on the banks of the sea, and to the east and north-east of Hull, can I cease to wonder that those devils, the Danes, found their way hither so often. There were the fat sheep then, just as there are now, depend upon it; and these numbers of noble churches, and these magnificent minsters, were reared because the wealth of the country remained in the country, and was not carried away to the south, to keep swarms of devouring tax-eaters, to cram the maws of wasteful idlers, and to be transferred to the grasp of luxurious and blaspheming Jews.

You always perceive that the churches are large and fine and lofty, in proportion to the richness of the soil and the extent of the parish. In many places where there are now but a very few houses, and those comparatively miserable, there are churches that look like cathedrals. It is quite curious to observe the difference in the style of the churches of Suffolk and Norfolk, and those of Lincolnshire, and of the other bank of the Humber. In the former two counties the churches are good, large, and with a good, plain, and pretty lofty tower. And in a few instances, particularly at Ipswich and Long Melford, you find magnificence in these buildings; but in Lincolnshire the magnificence of the churches is surprising. These churches are the indubitable proof of great and solid wealth, and formerly of great population. From everything that I have heard, the Netherlands is a country very much resembling Lincolnshire; and they say that the church at Antwerp is like that at Boston; but my opinion is, that Lincolnshire alone contains more of these fine buildings than the whole of the continent of Europe.

Still, however, there is the almost total want of the singing birds. There had been a shower a little while before we arrived at this place; it was about six o'clock in the evening; and there is a thick wood, together with the orchards and gardens, very near to the inn. We heard a little twittering from one thrush; but at that very moment, if we had been as near to just such a wood in Surrey, or Hampshire, or Sussex, or Kent, we should have heard ten thousand birds singing altogether; and the thrushes continuing their song till twenty minutes after sunset. When I was at Ipswich, the gardens and plantations round that beautiful town began in the morning to ring with the voices of the different birds. The nightingale is, I believe, never heard anywhere on the eastern side of Lincolnshire; though it is sometimes heard in the same latitude in the dells of Yorkshire. How ridiculous it is to suppose that these frail birds, with their slender wings and proportionately heavy bodies, cross the sea, and come back again! I have not yet heard more than half a dozen skylarks; and I have, only last year, heard ten at a time make the air ring over one of my fields at Barn-Elm. This is a great drawback from the pleasure of viewing this fine country.

It is time for me now, withdrawing myself from these objects visible to the eye, to speak of the state of the people, and of the manner in which their affairs are affected by the workings of the system. With regard to the labourers, they are, everywhere, miserable. The wages for those who are employed on the land are, through all the counties that I have come, twelve shillings a week for married men, and less for single ones; but a large part of them are not even at this season employed on the land. The farmers, for want of means of profitable employment, suffer the men to fall upon the parish; and they are employed in digging and breaking stone for the roads; so that the roads are nice and smooth for the sheep and cattle to walk on in their way to the all-devouring jaws of the Jews and other tax-eaters in London and its vicinity. None of the best meat, except by mere accident, is consumed here. To-day (the 20th of April) we have seen hundreds upon hundreds of sheep, as fat as hogs, go by this inn door, their toes, like those of the foot-marks at the entrance of the lion's den, all pointing towards the Wen; and the landlord gave us for dinner a little skinny, hard leg of old ewe mutton! Where the man got it I cannot imagine. Thus it is: every good thing is literally driven or carried away out of the country. In walking out yesterday, I saw three poor fellows digging stone for the roads, who told me that they never had anything but bread to eat, and water to wash it down. One of them was a widower with three children; and his pay was eighteen-pence a-day; that is to say, about three pounds of bread a day each, for six days in the week; nothing for Sunday, and nothing for lodging, washing, clothing, candle-light, or fuel! Just such was the state of things in France at the eve of the revolution! Precisely such; and precisely the same were the causes. Whether the effect will be the same I do not take upon myself positively to determine. Just on the other side of the hedge, while I was talking to these men, I saw about two hundred fat sheep in a rich pasture. I did not tell them what I might have told them; but I explained to them why the farmers were unable to give them a sufficiency of wages. They listened with great attention; and said that they did believe that the farmers were in great distress themselves.

With regard to the farmers, it is said here that the far greater part, if sold up, would be found to be insolvent. The tradesmen in country towns are, and must be, in but little better state. They all tell you they do not sell half so many goods as they used to sell; and, of course, the manufacturers must suffer in the like degree. There is a diminution and deterioration, every one says, in the stocks upon the farms. Sheep-washing is a sort of business in this country; and I heard at Boston that the sheep-washers say that there is a gradual falling off in point of the numbers of sheep washed.

The farmers are all gradually sinking in point of property. The very rich ones do not feel that ruin is absolutely approaching; but they are all alarmed; and as to the poorer ones, they are fast falling into the rank of paupers. When I was at Ely a gentleman who appeared to be a great farmer told me, in presence of fifty farmers at the White Hart inn, that he had seen that morning three men cracking stones on the road as paupers of the parish of Wilbarton; and that all these men had been overseers of the poor of that same parish within the last seven years. Wheat keeps up in price to about an average of seven shillings a bushel; which is owing to our two successive bad harvests; but fat beef and pork are at a very low price, and mutton not much better. The beef was selling at Lynn for five shillings the stone of fourteen pounds, and the pork at four and sixpence. The wool (one of the great articles of produce in these countries) selling for less than half of its former price.

And here let me stop to observe that I was well informed before I left London that merchants were exporting our long wool to France, where it paid thirty per cent. duty. Well, say the landowners, but we have to thank Huskisson for this at any rate; and that is true enough; for the law was most rigid against the export of wool; but what will the manufacturers say? Thus the collective goes on, smashing one class and then another; and, resolved to adhere to the taxes, it knocks away, one after another, the props of the system itself. By every measure that it adopts for the sake of obtaining security, or of affording relief to the people, it does some act of crying injustice. To save itself from the natural effects of its own measures, it knocked down the country bankers, in direct violation of the law in 1822. It is now about to lay its heavy hand on the big brewers and the publicans, in order to pacify the call for a reduction of taxes, and with the hope of preventing such reduction in reality. It is making a trifling attempt to save the West Indians from total ruin, and the West India colonies from revolt; but by that same attempt it reflects injury on the British distillers, and on the growers of barley. Thus it cannot do justice without doing injustice; it cannot do good without doing evil; and thus it must continue to do, until it take off, in reality, more than one half of the taxes.

One of the great signs of the poverty of people in the middle rank of life is the falling off of the audiences at the playhouses. There is a playhouse in almost every country town, where the players used to act occasionally; and in large towns almost always. In some places they have of late abandoned acting altogether. In others they have acted, very frequently, to not more than ten or twelve persons. At Norwich the playhouse had been shut up for a long time. I heard of one manager who has become a porter to a warehouse, and his company dispersed. In most places the insides of the buildings seem to be tumbling to pieces; and the curtains and scenes that they let down seem to be abandoned to the damp and the cobwebs. My appearance on the boards seemed to give new life to the drama. I was, until the birth of my third son, a constant haunter of the playhouse, in which I took great delight; but when he came into the world I said, "Now, Nancy, it is time for us to leave off going to the play." It is really melancholy to look at things now, and to think of things then. I feel great sorrow on account of these poor players; for, though they are made the tools of the Government and the corporations and the parsons, it is not their fault, and they have uniformly, whenever I have come in contact with them, been very civil to me. I am not sorry that they are left out of the list of vagrants in the new Act; but in this case, as in so many others, the men have to be grateful to the women; for who believes that this merciful omission would have taken place, if so many of the peers had not contracted matrimonial alliances with players; if so many playeresses had not become peeresses. We may thank God for disposing the hearts of our law-makers to be guilty of the same sins and foibles as ourselves; for when a lord had been sentenced to the pillory, the use of that ancient mode of punishing offences was abolished: when a lord (CASTLEREAGH), who was also a minister of state, had cut his own throat, the degrading punishment of burial in cross-roads was abolished; and now, when so many peers and great men have taken to wife play-actresses, which the law termed vagrants, that term, as applied to the children of Melpomene and Thalia, is abolished! Laud we the Gods that our rulers cannot after all divest themselves of flesh and blood! For the Lord have mercy upon us if their great souls were once to soar above that tenement!

Lord Stanhope cautioned his brother peers a little while ago against the angry feeling which was rising up in the poor against the rich. His Lordship is a wise and humane man, and this is evident from all his conduct. Nor is this angry feeling confined to the counties in the south, where the rage of the people, from the very nature of the local circumstances, is more formidable; woods and coppices and dingles and bye-lanes and sticks and stones ever at hand, being resources unknown in counties like this. When I was at St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire, an open country, I sat with the farmers, and smoked a pipe by way of preparation for evening service, which I performed on a carpenter's bench in a wheelwright's shop; my friends, the players, never having gained any regular settlement in that grand mart for four-legged fat meat, coming from the Fens, and bound to the Wen. While we were sitting, a hand-bill was handed round the table, advertising farming stock for sale; and amongst the implements of husbandry "an excellent fire-engine, several steel traps, and spring guns"! And that is the life, is it, of an English farmer? I walked on about six miles of the road from Holbeach to Boston. I have before observed upon the inexhaustible riches of this land. At the end of about five miles and three quarters I came to a public-house, and thought I would get some breakfast; but the poor woman, with a tribe of children about her, had not a morsel of either meat or bread! At a house called an inn, a little further on, the landlord had no meat except a little bit of chine of bacon; and though there were a good many houses near the spot, the landlord told me that the people were become so poor that the butchers had left off killing meat in the neighbourhood. Just the state of things that existed in France on the eve of the Revolution. On that very spot I looked round me, and counted more than two thousand fat sheep in the pastures! How long; how long, good God! is this state of things to last? How long will these people starve in the midst of plenty? How long will fire-engines, steel traps, and spring guns be, in such a state of things, a protection to property? When I was at Beverley a gentleman told me, it was Mr. Dawson of that place, that some time before a farmer had been sold up by his landlord; and that, in a few weeks afterwards, the farmhouse was on fire, and that when the servants of the landlord arrived to put it out they found the handle of the pump taken away, and that the homestead was totally destroyed. This was told me in the presence of several gentlemen, who all spoke of it as a fact of perfect notoriety.

Another respect in which our situation so exactly resembles that of France on the eve of the Revolution is the fleeing from the country in every direction. When I was in Norfolk there were four hundred persons, generally young men, labourers, carpenters, wheelwrights, millwrights, smiths, and bricklayers; most of them with some money, and some farmers and others with good round sums. These people were going to Quebec in timber-ships, and from Quebec by land into the United States. They had been told that they would not be suffered to land in the United States from on board of ship. The roguish villains had deceived them: but no matter; they will get into the United States; and going through Canada will do them good, for it will teach them to detest everything belonging to it. From Boston, two great barge loads had just gone off by canal to Liverpool, most of them farmers; all carrying some money, and some as much as two thousand pounds each. From the North and West Riding of Yorkshire numerous wagons have gone carrying people to the canals leading to Liverpool; and a gentleman, whom I saw at Peterboro', told me that he saw some of them; and that the men all appeared to be respectable farmers. At Hull the scene would delight the eyes of the wise Burdett; for here the emigration is going on in the "Old Roman Plan." Ten large ships have gone this spring, laden with these fugitives from the fangs of taxation; some bound direct to the ports of the United States; others, like those at Yarmouth, for Quebec. Those that have most money go direct to the United States. The single men, who are taken for a mere trifle in the Canada ships, go that way, have nothing but their carcasses to carry over the rocks and swamps, and through the myriads of place-men and pensioners in that miserable region; there are about fifteen more ships going from this one port this spring. The ships are fitted up with berths as transports for the carrying of troops. I went on board one morning, and saw the people putting their things on board and stowing them away. Seeing a nice young woman, with a little baby in her arms, I told her that she was going to a country where she would be sure that her children would never want victuals; where she might make her own malt, soap, and candles without being half put to death for it, and where the blaspheming Jews would not have a mortgage on the life's labour of her children.

There is at Hull one farmer going who is seventy years of age; but who takes out five sons and fifteen hundred pounds! Brave and sensible old man! and good and affectionate father! He is performing a truly parental and sacred duty; and he will die with the blessing of his sons on his head for having rescued them from this scene of slavery, misery, cruelty, and crime. Come, then, Wilmot Horton, with your sensible associates, Burdett and Poulett Thomson; come into Lincolnshire, Norfolk, and Yorkshire; come and bring Parson Malthus along with you; regale your sight with this delightful "stream of emigration"; congratulate the "greatest captain of the age," and your brethren of the Collective: congratulate the "noblest assembly of free men," on these the happy effects of their measures. Oh! no, Wilmot! Oh! no, generous and sensible Burdett, it is not the aged, the infirm, the halt, the blind, and the idiots that go: it is the youth, the strength, the wealth, and the spirit, that will no longer brook hunger and thirst in order that the maws of tax-eaters and Jews may be crammed. You want the Irish to go, and so they will at our expense, and all the bad of them, to be kept at our expense on the rocks and swamps of Nova Scotia and Canada. You have no money to send them away with: the tax-eaters want it all; and thanks to the "improvements of the age," the steam-boats will continue to bring them in shoals in pursuit of the orts of the food that their task-masters have taken away from them.

After evening lecture at Horncastle a very decent farmer came to me and asked me about America, telling me that he was resolved to go, for that if he stayed much longer he should not have a shilling to go with. I promised to send him a letter from Louth to a friend at New York, who might be useful to him there and give him good advice. I forgot it at Louth; but I will do it before I go to bed. From the Thames, and from the several ports down the Channel, about two thousand have gone this spring. All the flower of the labourers of the east of Sussex and west of Kent will be culled out and sent off in a short time. From Glasgow the sensible Scotch are pouring out amain. Those that are poor and cannot pay their passages, or can rake together only a trifle, are going to a rascally heap of sand and rock and swamp, called Prince Edward's Island, in the horrible Gulf of St. Lawrence; but when the American vessels come over with Indian corn and flour and pork and beef and poultry and eggs and butter and cabbages and green pease and asparagus for the soldier-officers and other tax-eaters, that we support upon that lump of worthlessness; for the lump itself bears nothing but potatoes; when these vessels come, which they are continually doing, winter and summer; towards the fall, with apples and pears and melons and cucumbers; and, in short, everlastingly coming and taking away the amount of taxes raised in England; when these vessels return, the sensible Scotch will go back in them for a dollar a head, till at last not a man of them will be left but the bed-ridden. Those villanous colonies are held for no earthly purpose but that of furnishing a pretence of giving money to the relations and dependents of the aristocracy; and they are the nicest channels in the world through which to send English taxes to enrich and strengthen the United States. Withdraw the English taxes, and, except in a small part in Canada, the whole of those horrible regions would be left to the bears and the savages in the course of a year.

This emigration is a famous blow given to the borough-mongers. The way to New York is now as well known and as easy, and as little expensive as from old York to London. First, the Sussex parishes sent their paupers; they invited over others that were not paupers; they invited over people of some property; then persons of greater property; now substantial farmers are going; men of considerable fortune will follow. It is the letters written across the Atlantic that do the business. Men of fortune will soon discover that to secure to their families their fortunes, and to take these out of the grasp of the inexorable tax-gatherer, they must get away. Every one that goes will take twenty after him; and thus it will go on. There can be no interruption but war; and war the Thing dares not have. As to France or the Netherlands, or any part of that hell called Germany, Englishmen can never settle there. The United States form another England without its unbearable taxes, its insolent game-laws, its intolerable dead-weight, and its tread-mills.


EASTERN TOUR ENDED, MIDLAND TOUR BEGUN.

Lincoln, 23rd April 1830.

From the inn at Spittal we came to this famous ancient Roman station, and afterwards grand scene of Saxon and Gothic splendour, on the 21st. It was the third or fourth day of the Spring fair, which is one of the greatest in the kingdom, and which lasts for a whole week. Horses begin the fair; then come sheep; and to-day, the horned-cattle. It is supposed that there were about 50,000 sheep, and I think the whole of the space in the various roads and streets, covered by the cattle, must have amounted to ten acres of ground or more. Some say that they were as numerous as the sheep. The number of horses I did not hear; but they say that there were 1,500 fewer in number than last year. The sheep sold 5s. a head, on an average, lower than last year; and the cattle in the same proportion. High-priced horses sold well; but the horses which are called tradesmen's horses were very low. This is the natural march of the Thing: those who live on the taxes have money to throw away; but those who pay them are ruined, and have, of course, no money to lay out on horses.

The country from Spittal to Lincoln continued to be much about the same as from Barton to Spittal. Large fields, rather light loam at top, stone under, about half corn-land and the rest grass. Not so many sheep as in the richer lands, but a great many still. As you get on towards Lincoln, the ground gradually rises, and you go on the road made by the Romans. When you come to the city you find the ancient castle and the magnificent cathedral on the brow of a sort of ridge which ends here; for you look all of a sudden down into a deep valley, where the greater part of the remaining city lies. It once had fifty-two churches; it has now only eight, and only about 9,000 inhabitants! The cathedral is, I believe, the finest building in the whole world. All the others that I have seen (and I have seen all in England except Chester, York, Carlisle, and Durham) are little things compared with this. To the task of describing a thousandth-part of its striking beauties I am inadequate; it surpasses greatly all that I had anticipated; and oh! how loudly it gives the lie to those brazen Scotch historians who would have us believe that England was formerly a poor country! The whole revenue raised from Lincolnshire, even by this present system of taxation, would not rear such another pile in two hundred years. Some of the city gates are down; but there is one standing, the arch of which is said to be two thousand years old; and a most curious thing it is. The sight of the cathedral fills the mind alternately with wonder, admiration, melancholy, and rage: wonder at its grandeur and magnificence; admiration of the zeal and disinterestedness of those who here devoted to the honour of God those immense means which they might have applied to their own enjoyments; melancholy at its present neglected state; and indignation against those who now enjoy the revenues belonging to it, and who creep about it merely as a pretext for devouring a part of the fruit of the people's labour. There are no men in England who ought to wish for reform so anxiously as the working clergy of the church of England; we are all oppressed; but they are oppressed and insulted more than any men that ever lived in the world. The clergy in America; I mean in free America, not in our beggarly colonies, where clerical insolence and partiality prevail still more than here; I mean in the United States, where every man gives what he pleases, and no more: the clergy of the episcopal church are a hundred times better off than the working clergy are here. They are, also, much more respected, because their order has not to bear the blame of enormous exactions; which exactions here are swallowed up by the aristocracy and their dependents; but which swallowings are imputed to every one bearing the name of parson. Throughout the whole country I have maintained the necessity and the justice of resuming the church property; but I have never failed to say that I know of no more meritorious and ill-used men than the working clergy of the established church.

Leicester, 26th April 1830.

At the famous ancient city of Lincoln I had crowded audiences, principally consisting of farmers, on the 21st and 22nd; exceedingly well-behaved audiences; and great impression produced. One of the evenings, in pointing out to them the wisdom of explaining to their labourers the cause of their distress, in order to ward off the effects of the resentment which the labourers now feel everywhere against the farmers, I related to them what my labourers at Barn-Elm had been doing since I left home: and I repeated to them the complaints that my labourers made, stating to them, from memory, the following parts of that spirited petition:

"That your petitioners have recently observed that many great sums of the money, part of which we pay, have been voted to be given to persons who render no services to the country; some of which sums we will mention here; that the sum of 94,900l. has been voted for disbanded foreign officers, their widows and children; that your petitioners know that ever since the peace this charge has been annually made; that it has been on an average 110,000l. a-year, and that, of course, this band of foreigners have actually taken away out of England, since the peace, one million and seven hundred thousand pounds; partly taken from the fruit of our labour; and if our dinners were actually taken from our table and carried over to Hanover, the process could not be to our eyes more visible than it now is; and we are astonished that those who fear that we, who make the land bring forth crops, and who make the clothing and the houses, shall swallow up the rental, appear to think nothing at all of the swallowings of these Hanoverian men, women, and children, who may continue thus to swallow for half a century to come.

"That the advocates of the project for sending us out of our country to the rocks and snows of Nova Scotia, and the swamps and wilds of Canada, have insisted on the necessity of checking marriages amongst us, in order to cause a decrease in our numbers; that, however, while this is insisted on in your honourable House, we perceive a part of our own earnings voted away to encourage marriage amongst those who do not work, and who live at our expense; and that to your petitioners it does seem most wonderful, that there should be persons to fear that we, the labourers, shall, on account of our numbers, swallow up the rental, while they actually vote away our food and raiment to increase the numbers of those who never have produced, and who never will produce, anything useful to man.

"That your petitioners know that more than one-half of the whole of their wages is taken from them by the taxes; that these taxes go chiefly into the hands of idlers; that your petitioners are the bees, and that the tax-receivers are the drones; and they know, further, that while there is a project for sending the bees out of the country, no one proposes to send away the drones; but that your petitioners hope to see the day when the checking of the increase of the drones, and not of the bees, will be the object of an English Parliament.

"That, in consequence of taxes, your petitioners pay six-pence for a pot of worse beer than they could make for one penny; that they pay ten shillings for a pair of shoes that they could have for five shillings; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of soap or candles that they could have for three-pence; that they pay seven-pence for a pound of sugar that they could have for three-pence; that they pay six shillings for a pound of tea that they could have for two shillings; that they pay double for their bread and meat of what they would have to pay if there were no idlers to be kept out of the taxes; that, therefore, it is the taxes that make their wages insufficient for their support, and that compel them to apply for aid to the poor-rates; that, knowing these things, they feel indignant at hearing themselves described as paupers, while so many thousands of idlers, for whose support they pay taxes, are called noble Lords and Ladies, honourable Gentlemen, Masters, and Misses; that they feel indignant at hearing themselves described as a nuisance to be got rid of, while the idlers who live upon their earnings are upheld, caressed and cherished, as if they were the sole support of the country."

Having repeated to them these passages, I proceeded: "My workmen were induced thus to petition in consequence of the information which I, their master, had communicated to them; and, Gentlemen, why should not your labourers petition in the same strain? Why should you suffer them to remain in a state of ignorance relative to the cause of their misery? The eye sweeps over in this county more riches in one moment than are contained in the whole county in which I was born, and in which the petitioners live. Between Holbeach and Boston, even at a public-house, neither bread nor meat was to be found; and while the landlord was telling me that the people were become so poor that the butchers killed no meat in the neighbourhood. I counted more than two thousand fat sheep lying about in the pastures in that richest spot in the whole world. Starvation in the midst of plenty; the land covered with food, and the working people without victuals: everything taken away by the tax-eaters of various descriptions: and yet you take no measures for redress; and your miserable labourers seem to be doomed to expire with hunger, without an effort to obtain relief. What! cannot you point out to them the real cause of their sufferings; cannot you take a piece of paper and write out a petition for them; cannot your labourers petition as well as mine; are God's blessings bestowed on you without any spirit to preserve them; is the fatness of the land, is the earth teeming with food for the body and raiment for the back, to be an apology for the want of that courage for which your fathers were so famous; is the abundance which God has put into your hands, to be the excuse for your resigning yourselves to starvation? My God! is there no spirit left in England except in the miserable sand-hills of Surrey?" These words were not uttered without effect I can assure the reader. The assemblage was of that stamp in which thought goes before expression; but the effect of this example of my men in Surrey will, I am sure, be greater than anything that has been done in the petitioning way for a long time past.

We left Lincoln on the 23rd about noon, and got to Newark, in Nottinghamshire, in the evening, where I gave a lecture at the theatre to about three hundred persons. Newark is a very fine town, and the Castle Inn, where we stopped, extraordinarily good and pleasantly situated. Here I was met by a parcel of the printed petitions of the labourers at Barn-Elm.

I shall continue to sow these, as I proceed on my way. It should have been stated at the head of the printed petition that it was presented to the House of Lords by his Grace the Duke of Richmond, and by Mr. Pallmer to the House of Commons.

The country from Lincoln to Newark (sixteen miles) is by no means so fine as that which we have been in for so many weeks. The land is clayey in many parts. A pleasant country; a variety of hill and valley; but not that richness which we had so long had under our eye: fields smaller; fewer sheep, and those not so large, and so manifestly loaded with flesh. The roads always good. Newark is a town very much like Nottingham, having a very fine and spacious market-place; the buildings everywhere good; but it is in the villages that you find the depth of misery.

Having appointed positively to be at Leicester in the evening of Saturday, the 24th, we could not stop either at Grantham or at Melton Mowbray, not even long enough to view their fine old magnificent churches. In going from Newark to Grantham, we got again into Lincolnshire, in which last county Grantham is. From Newark nearly to Melton Mowbray, the country is about the same as between Lincoln and Newark; by no means bad land, but not so rich as that of Lincolnshire, in the middle and eastern parts; not approaching to the Holderness country in point of riches; a large part arable land, well tilled; but not such large homesteads, such numerous great stacks of wheat, and such endless flocks of lazy sheep.

Before we got to Melton Mowbray the beautiful pastures of this little verdant county of Leicester began to appear. Meadows and green fields, with here and there a corn field, all of smaller dimensions than those of Lincolnshire, but all very beautiful; with gentle hills and woods too; not beautiful woods, like those of Hampshire and of the wilds of Surrey, Sussex and Kent; but very pretty, all the country around being so rich. At Mowbray we began to get amongst the Leicestershire sheep, those fat creatures which we see the butchers' boys battering about so unmercifully in the streets and the outskirts of the Wen. The land is warmer here than in Lincolnshire; the grass more forward, and the wheat, between Mowbray and Leicester, six inches high, and generally looking exceedingly well. In Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire I found the wheat in general rather thin, and frequently sickly; nothing like so promising as in Suffolk and Norfolk.

We got to Leicester on the 24th at about half-after five o'clock; and the time appointed for the lecture was six. Leicester is a very fine town; spacious streets, fine inns, fine shops, and containing, they say, thirty or forty thousand people. It is well stocked with jails, of which a new one, in addition to the rest, has just been built, covering three acres of ground! And, as if proud of it, the grand portal has little turrets in the castle style, with embrasures in miniature on the caps of the turrets. Nothing speaks the want of reflection in the people so much as the self-gratulation which they appear to feel in these edifices in their several towns. Instead of expressing shame at these indubitable proofs of the horrible increase of misery and of crime, they really boast of these "improvements," as they call them. Our forefathers built abbeys and priories and churches, and they made such use of them that jails were nearly unnecessary. We, their sons, have knocked down the abbeys and priories; suffered half the parsonage-houses and churches to pretty nearly tumble down, and make such uses of the remainder, that jails and tread-mills and dungeons have now become the most striking edifices in every county in the kingdom.

Yesterday morning (Sunday the 25th) I walked out to the village of Knighton, two miles on the Bosworth road, where I breakfasted, and then walked back. This morning I walked out to Hailstone, nearly three miles on the Lutterworth road, and got my breakfast there. You have nothing to do but to walk through these villages, to see the cause of the increase of the jails. Standing on the hill at Knighton, you see the three ancient and lofty and beautiful spires rising up at Leicester; you see the river winding down through a broad bed of the most beautiful meadows that man ever set his eyes on; you see the bright verdure covering all the land, even to the tops of the hills, with here and there a little wood, as if made by God to give variety to the beauty of the scene, for the river brings the coal in abundance, for fuel, and the earth gives the brick and the tile in abundance. But go down into the villages; invited by the spires, rising up amongst the trees in the dells, at scarcely ever more than a mile or two apart; invited by these spires, go down into these villages, view the large, and once the most beautiful, churches; see the parson's house, large, and in the midst of pleasure-gardens; and then look at the miserable sheds in which the labourers reside! Look at these hovels, made of mud and of straw; bits of glass, or of old off-cast windows, without frames or hinges, frequently, but merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them, and look at the bits of chairs or stools; the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table; the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground; look at the thing called a bed; and survey the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants; and then wonder, if you can, that the jails and dungeons and tread-mills increase, and that a standing army and barracks are become the favourite establishments of England!

At the village of Hailstone, I got into the purlieu, as they call it in Hampshire, of a person well known in the Wen; namely, the Reverend Beresford, rector of that fat affair, St. Andrew's, Holborn! In walking through the village, and surveying its deplorable dwellings, so much worse than the cow-sheds of the cottagers on the skirts of the forests in Hampshire, my attention was attracted by the surprising contrast between them and the house of their religious teacher. I met a labouring man. Country people know everything. If you have ever made a faux pas, of any sort of description; if you have anything about you of which you do not want all the world to know, never retire to a village, keep in some great town; but the Wen, for your life, for there the next-door neighbour will not know even your name; and the vicinage will judge of you solely by the quantity of money that you have to spend. This labourer seemed not to be in a very great hurry. He was digging in his garden; and I, looking over a low hedge, pitched him up for a gossip, commencing by asking him whether that was the parson's house. Having answered in the affirmative, and I, having asked the parson's name, he proceeded thus: "His name is Beresford; but though he lives there, he has not this living now, he has got the living of St. Andrew's, Holborn; and they say it is worth a great many thousands a year. He could not, they say, keep this living and have that too, because they were so far apart. And so this living was given to Mr. Brown, who is the rector of Hobey, about seven miles off." "Well," said I, "but how comes Beresford to live here now, if the living be given to another man?" "Why, Sir," said he, "this Beresford married a daughter of Brown; and so, you know (smiling and looking very archly), Brown comes and takes the payment for the tithes, and pays a curate that lives in that house there in the field; and Beresford lives at that fine house still, just as he used to do." I asked him what the living was worth, and he answered twelve hundred pounds a year. It is a rectory, I find, and of course the parson has great tithes as well as small.

The people of this village know a great deal more about Beresford than the people of St. Andrew's, Holborn, know about him. In short, the country people know all about the whole thing. They will be long before they act; but they will make no noise as a signal for action. They will be moved by nothing but actual want of food. This the Thing seems to be aware of; and hence all the innumerable schemes for keeping them quiet: hence the endless jails and all the terrors of hardened law: hence the schemes for coaxing them, by letting them have bits of land: hence the everlasting bills and discussions of committees about the state of the poor, and the state of the poor-laws: all of which will fail; and at last, unless reduction of taxation speedily take place, the schemers will find what the consequences are of reducing millions to the verge of starvation.

The labourers here, who are in need of parochial relief, are formed into what are called roundsmen; that is to say, they are sent round from one farmer to another, each maintaining a certain number for a certain length of time; and thus they go round from one to the other. If the farmers did not pay three shillings in taxes out of every six shillings that they give in the shape of wages, they could afford to give the men four and sixpence in wages, which would be better to the men than the six. But as long as this burden of taxes shall continue, so long the misery will last, and it will go on increasing with accelerated pace. The march of circumstances is precisely what it was in France, just previous to the French revolution. If the aristocracy were wise, they would put a stop to that march. The middle class are fast sinking down to the state of the lower class. A community of feeling between these classes, and that feeling an angry one, is what the aristocracy has to dread. As far as the higher clergy are concerned, this community of feeling is already complete. A short time will extend the feeling to every other branch; and then, the hideous consequences make their appearance. Reform; a radical reform of the Parliament; this reform in time; this reform, which would reconcile the middle class to the aristocracy, and give renovation to that which has now become a mass of decay and disgust; this reform, given with a good grace, and not taken by force, is the only refuge for the aristocracy of this kingdom. Just as it was in France. All the tricks of financiers have been tried in vain; and by-and-by some trick more pompous and foolish than the rest; Sir Henry Parnell's trick, perhaps, or something equally foolish, would blow the whole concern into the air.

Worcester, 18th May, 1830.

In tracing myself from Leicester to this place, I begin at Lutterworth, in Leicestershire, one of the prettiest country towns that I ever saw; that is to say, prettiest situated. At this place they have, in the church (they say), the identical pulpit from which Wickliffe preached! This was not his birth-place; but he was, it seems, priest of this parish.

I set off from Lutterworth early on the 29th of April, stopped to breakfast at Birmingham, got to Wolverhampton by two o'clock (a distance altogether of about 50 miles), and lectured at six in the evening. I repeated, or rather continued, the lecturing, on the 30th, and on the 3rd of May. On the 6th of May went to Dudley, and lectured there: on the 10th of May, at Birmingham; on the 12th and 13th, at Shrewsbury; and on the 14th, came here.

Thus have I come through countries of corn and meat and iron and coal; and from the banks of the Humber to those of the Severn, I find all the people, who do not share in the taxes, in a state of distress, greater or less, Mortgagers all frightened out of their-wits; fathers trembling for the fate of their children; and working people in the most miserable state, and, as they ought to be, in the worst of temper. These will, I am afraid, be the state-doctors at last! The farmers are cowed down: the poorer they get, the more cowardly they are. Every one of them sees the cause of his suffering, and sees general ruin at hand; but every one hopes that by some trick, some act of meanness, some contrivance, he shall escape. So that there is no hope of any change for the better but from the working people. The farmers will sink to a very low state; and thus the Thing (barring accidents) may go on, until neither farmer nor tradesman will see a joint of meat on his table once in a quarter of a year. It appears likely to be precisely as it was in France: it is now just what France was at the close of the reign of Louis XV. It has been the fashion to ascribe the French Revolution to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and others. These writings had nothing at all to do with the matter: no, nothing at all. The Revolution was produced by taxes, which at last became unbearable; by debts of the State; but, in fact, by the despair of the people, produced by the weight of the taxes.

It is curious to observe how ready the supporters of tyranny and taxation are to ascribe rebellions and revolutions to disaffected leaders; and particularly to writers; and, as these supporters of tyranny and taxation have had the press at their command; have had generally the absolute command of it, they have caused this belief to go down from generation to generation. It will not do for them to ascribe revolutions and rebellions to the true cause; because then the rebellions and revolutions would be justified; and it is their object to cause them to be condemned. Infinite delusion has prevailed in this country, in consequence of the efforts of which I am now speaking. Voltaire was just as much a cause of the French Revolution as I have been the cause of imposing these sixty millions of taxes. The French Revolution was produced by the grindings of taxation; and this I will take an opportunity very soon of proving, to the conviction of every man in the kingdom who chooses to read.

In the iron country, of which Wolverhampton seems to be a sort of central point, and where thousands, and perhaps two or three hundred thousand people, are assembled together, the truck or tommy system generally prevails; and this is a very remarkable feature in the state of this country. I have made inquiries with regard to the origin, or etymology, of this word tommy, and could find no one to furnish me with the information. It is certainly, like so many other good things, to be ascribed to the army; for, when I was a recruit at Chatham barracks, in the year 1783, we had brown bread served out to us twice in the week. And, for what reason God knows, we used to call it tommy. And the sergeants, when they called us out to get our bread, used to tell us to come and get our tommy. Even the officers used to call it tommy. Any one that could get white bread, called it bread; but the brown stuff that we got in lieu of part of our pay was called tommy; and so we used to call it when we got abroad. When the soldiers came to have bread served out to them in the several towns in England, the name of "tommy" went down by tradition; and, doubtless, it was taken up and adapted to the truck system in Staffordshire and elsewhere.

Now, there is nothing wrong, nothing essentially wrong, in this system of barter. Barter is in practice in some of the happiest communities in the world. In the new settled parts of the United States of America, to which money has scarcely found its way, to which articles of wearing apparel are brought from a great distance, where the great and almost sole occupations are, the rearing of food, the building of houses, and the making of clothes, barter is the rule and money payment the exception. And this is attended with no injury and with very little inconvenience. The bargains are made, and the accounts kept in money; but the payments are made in produce or in goods, the price of these being previously settled on. The store-keeper (which we call shop-keeper) receives the produce in exchange for his goods, and exchanges that produce for more goods; and thus the concerns of the community go on, every one living in abundance, and the sound of misery never heard.

But when this tommy system; this system of barter; when this makes its appearance where money has for ages been the medium of exchange, and of payments for labour; when this system makes its appearance in such a state of society, there is something wrong; things are out of joint; and it becomes us to inquire into the real cause of its being resorted to; and it does not become us to join in an outcry against the employers who resort to it, until we be perfectly satisfied that those employers are guilty of oppression.

The manner of carrying on the tommy system is this: suppose there to be a master who employs a hundred men. That hundred men, let us suppose, to earn a pound a week each. This is not the case in the iron-works; but no matter, we can illustrate our meaning by one sum as well as by another. These men lay out weekly the whole of the hundred pounds in victuals, drink, clothing, bedding, fuel, and house-rent. Now, the master finding the profits of his trade fall off very much, and being at the same time in want of money to pay the hundred pounds weekly, and perceiving that these hundred pounds are carried away at once, and given to shopkeepers of various descriptions; to butchers, bakers, drapers, hatters, shoemakers, and the rest; and knowing that, on an average, these shopkeepers must all have a profit of thirty per cent., or more, he determines to keep this thirty per cent. to himself; and this is thirty pounds a week gained as a shop-keeper, which amounts to 1,560l. a year. He, therefore, sets up a tommy shop: a long place containing every commodity that the workman can want, liquor and house-room excepted. Here the workman takes out his pound's worth; and his house-rent he pays in truck, if he do not rent of his master; and if he will have liquor, beer, or gin, or anything else, he must get it by trucking with the goods that he has got at the tommy shop.

Now, there is nothing essentially unjust in this. There is a little inconvenience as far as the house-rent goes; but not much. The tommy is easily turned into money; and if the single saving man does experience some trouble in the sale of his goods, that is compensated for in the more important case of the married man, whose wife and children generally experience the benefit of this payment in kind. It is, to be sure, a sorrowful reflection, that such a check upon the drinking propensities of the fathers should be necessary; but the necessity exists; and, however sorrowful the fact, the fact, I am assured, is, that thousands upon thousands of mothers have to bless this system, though it arises from a loss of trade and the poverty of the masters.

I have often had to observe on the cruel effects of the suppression of markets and fairs, and on the consequent power of extortion possessed by the country shop-keepers. And what a thing it is to reflect on, that these shopkeepers have the whole of the labouring men of England constantly in their debt; have on an average a mortgage on their wages to the amount of five or six weeks, and make them pay any price that they choose to extort. So that, in fact, there is a tommy system in every village, the difference being, that the shop-keeper is the tommy man instead of the farmer.

The only question is in this case of the manufacturing tommy work, whether the master charges a higher price than the shop-keepers would charge; and, while I have not heard that the masters do this, I think it improbable that they should. They must desire to avoid the charge of such extortion; and they have little temptation to it; because they buy at best hand and in large quantities; because they are sure of their customers, and know to a certainty the quantity that they want; and because the distribution of the goods is a matter of such perfect regularity, and attended with so little expense, compared with the expenses of the shopkeeper. Any farmer who has a parcel of married men working for him, might supply them with meat for four-pence the pound, when the butcher must charge them seven-pence, or lose by his trade; and to me, it has always appeared astonishing, that farmers (where they happen to have the power completely in their hands) do not compel their married labourers to have a sufficiency of bread and meat for their wives and children. What would be more easy than to reckon what would be necessary for house-rent, fuel, and clothing; to pay that in money once a month, or something of that sort, and to pay the rest in meat, flour, and malt? I may never occupy a farm again; but if I were to do it, to any extent, the East and West Indies, nor big brewer, nor distiller, should ever have one farthing out of the produce of my farm, except he got it through the throats of those who made the wearing apparel. If I had a village at my command, not a tea-kettle should sing in that village: there should be no extortioner under the name of country shop-keeper, and no straight-backed, bloated fellow, with red eyes, unshaven face, and slip-shod till noon, called a publican, and generally worthy of the name of sinner. Well-covered backs and well-lined bellies would be my delight; and as to talking about controlling and compelling, what a controlling and compelling are there now! It is everlasting control and compulsion. My bargain should be so much in money, and so much in bread, meat, and malt.

And what is the bargain, I want to know, with yearly servants? Why, so much in money and the rest in bread, meat, beer, lodging and fuel. And does any one affect to say that this is wrong? Does any one say that it is wrong to exercise control and compulsion over these servants; such control and compulsion is not only the master's right, but they are included in his bounden duties. It is his duty to make them rise early, keep good hours, be industrious, and careful, be cleanly in their persons and habits, be civil in their language. These are amongst the uses of the means which God has put into his hands; and are these means to be neglected towards married servants any more than towards single ones?

Even in the well-cultivated and thickly-settled parts of the United States of America, it is the general custom, and a very good custom it is, to pay the wages of labour partly in money and partly in kind; and this practice is extended to carpenters, bricklayers, and other workmen about buildings, and even to tailors, shoemakers, and weavers, who go (a most excellent custom) to farm-houses to work. The bargain is, so much money and found; that is to say, found in food and drink, and sometimes in lodging. The money then used to be, for a common labourer, in Long Island, at common work (not haying or harvesting), three York shillings a day, and found; that is to say, three times seven-pence halfpenny of our money; and three times seven-pence halfpenny a day, which is eleven shillings and three-pence a week, and found. This was the wages of the commonest labourer at the commonest work. And the wages of a good labourer now, in Worcestershire, is eight shillings a week, and not found. Accordingly, they are miserably poor and degraded.

Therefore, there is in this mode of payment nothing essentially degrading; but the tommy system of Staffordshire, and elsewhere, though not unjust in itself, indirectly inflicts great injustice on the whole race of shop-keepers, who are necessary for the distribution of commodities in great towns, and whose property is taken away from them by this species of monopoly, which the employers of great numbers of men have been compelled to adopt for their own safety. It is not the fault of the masters, who can have no pleasure in making profit in this way: it is the fault of the taxes, which, by lowering the price of their goods, have compelled them to resort to this means of diminishing their expenses, or to quit their business altogether, which a great part of them cannot do without being left without a penny; and if a law could be passed and enforced (which it cannot) to put an end to the tommy system, the consequence would be, that instead of a fourth part of the furnaces being let out of blast in this neighbourhood, one-half would be let out of blast, and additional thousands of poor creatures would be left solely dependent on parochial relief.

A view of the situation of things at Shrewsbury, will lead us in a minute to the real cause of the tommy system. Shrewsbury is one of the most interesting spots that man ever beheld. It is the capital of the county of Salop, and Salop appears to have been the original name of the town itself. It is curiously enclosed by the river Severn, which is here large and fine, and which, in the form of a horse-shoe, completely surrounds it, leaving, of the whole of the two miles round, only one little place whereon to pass in and out on land. There are two bridges, one on the east, and the other on the west; the former called the English, and the other, the Welsh bridge. The environs of this town, especially on the Welsh side, are the most beautiful that can be conceived. The town lies in the midst of a fine agricultural country, of which it is the great and almost only mart. Hither come the farmers to sell their produce, and hence they take, in exchange, their groceries, their clothing, and all the materials for their implements and the domestic conveniences. It was fair-day when I arrived at Shrewsbury. Everything was on the decline. Cheese, which four years ago sold at sixty shillings the six-score pounds, would not bring forty. I took particular pains to ascertain the fact with regard to the cheese, which is a great article here. I was assured that shop-keepers in general did not now sell half the quantity of goods in a month that they did in that space of time four or five years ago. The ironmongers were not selling a fourth-part of what they used to sell five years ago.

Now, it is impossible to believe that a somewhat similar falling off in the sale of iron must not have taken place all over the kingdom; and need we then wonder that the iron in Staffordshire has fallen, within these five years, from thirteen pounds to five pounds a ton, or perhaps a great deal more; and need we wonder that the iron-masters, who have the same rent and taxes to pay that they had to pay before, have resorted to the tommy system, in order to assist in saving themselves from ruin! Here is the real cause of the tommy system; and if Mr. Littleton really wishes to put an end to it, let him prevail upon the Parliament to take off taxes to the amount of forty millions a year.

Another article had experienced a still greater falling off at Shrewsbury; I mean the article of corn-sacks, of which there has been a falling off of five-sixths. The sacks are made by weavers in the North; and need we wonder, then, at the low wages of those industrious people, whom I used to see weaving sacks in the miserable cellars at Preston!

Here is the true cause of the tommy system, and of all the other evils which disturb and afflict the country. It is a great country; an immense mass of industry and resources of all sorts, breaking up; a prodigious mass of enterprise and capital diminishing and dispersing. The enormous taxes co-operating with the Corn-bill, which those taxes have engendered, are driving skill and wealth out of the country in all directions; are causing iron-masters to make France, and particularly Belgium, blaze with furnaces, in the lieu of those which have been extinguished here; and that have established furnaces and cotton-mills in abundance. These same taxes and this same Corn-bill are sending the long wool from Lincolnshire to France, there to be made into those blankets which, for ages, were to be obtained nowhere but in England.

This is the true state of the country, and here are the true causes of that state; and all that the corrupt writers and speakers say about over-population and poor-laws, and about all the rest of their shuffling excuses, is a heap of nonsense and of lies.

I cannot quit Shrewsbury without expressing the great satisfaction that I derived from my visit to that place. It is the only town into which I have gone, in all England, without knowing, beforehand, something of some person in it. I could find out no person that took the Register; and could discover but one person who took the Advice to Young Men. The number of my auditors was expected to be so small, that I doubled the price of admission, in order to pay the expense of the room. To my great surprise, I had a room full of gentlemen, at the request of some of whom I repeated the dose the next night; and if my audience were as well pleased with me as I was with them, their pleasure must have been great indeed. I saw not one single person in the place that I had ever seen before; yet I never had more cordial shakes by the hand; in proportion to their numbers, not more at Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Halifax, Leeds, or Nottingham, or even Hull. I was particularly pleased with the conduct of the young gentlemen at Shrewsbury, and especially when I asked them, whether they were prepared to act upon the insolent doctrine of Huskisson, and quietly submit to this state of things "during the present generation"?


TOUR IN THE WEST.

3rd July, 1830.

Just as I was closing my third Lecture (on Saturday night), at Bristol, to a numerous and most respectable audience, the news of the above event [the death of George IV.] arrived. I had advertised, and made all the preparations, for lecturing at Bath on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; but, under the circumstances, I thought it would not be proper to proceed thither, for that purpose, until after the burial of the King. When that has taken place, I shall, as soon as may be, return to Bath, taking Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire in my way; from Bath, through Somerset, Devon, and into Cornwall; and back through Dorset, South Wilts, Hants, Sussex, Kent, and then go into Essex, and, last of all, into my native county of Surrey. I shall then have seen all England with my own eyes, except Rutland, Westmoreland, Durham, Cumberland, and Northumberland; and these, if I have life and health till next spring, I shall see, in my way to Scotland. But never shall I see another place to interest me, and so pleasing to me, as Bristol and its environs, taking the whole together. A good and solid and wealthy city: a people of plain and good manners; private virtue and public spirit united; no empty noise, no insolence, no flattery; men very much like the Yorkers and Lancastrians. And as to the seat of the city and its environs, it surpasses all that I ever saw. A great commercial city in the midst of corn-fields, meadows and woods, and the ships coming into the centre of it, miles from anything like sea, up a narrow river, and passing between two clefts of a rock probably a hundred feet high; so that from the top of these clefts, you look down upon the main-top gallant masts of lofty ships that are gliding along!


PROGRESS IN THE NORTH.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 23rd September, 1832.

From Bolton, in Lancashire, I came, through Bury and Rochdale, to Todmorden, on the evening of Tuesday, the 18th September. I have formerly described the valley of Todmorden as the most curious and romantic that was ever seen, and where the water and the coal seemed to be engaged in a struggle for getting foremost in point of utility to man. On the 19th I staid all day at Todmorden to write and to sleep. On the 20th I set off for Leeds by the stage coach, through Halifax and Bradford; and as to agriculture, certainly the poorest country that I have ever set my eyes on, except that miserable Nova Scotia, where there are the townships of Horton and of Wilmot, and whither the sensible suckling statesman, Lord Howick, is wanting to send English country girls, lest they should breed if they stay in England! This country, from Todmorden to Leeds, is, however, covered over with population, and the two towns of Halifax and Bradford are exceedingly populous. There appears to be nothing produced by the earth but the natural grass of the country, which, however, is not bad. The soil is a sort of yellow-looking, stiffish stuff, lying about a foot thick, upon a bed of rocky stone, lying upon solid rock beneath. The grass does not seem to burn here; nor is it bad in quality; and all the grass appears to be wanted to rear milk for this immense population, that absolutely covers the whole face of the country. The only grain crops that I saw were those of very miserable oats; some of which were cut and carried; some standing in shock, the sheaves not being more than about a foot and a half long; some still standing, and some yet nearly green. The land is very high from Halifax to Bradford, and proportionably cold. Here are some of those "Yorkshire Hills" that they see from Lancashire and Cheshire.

I got to Leeds about four o'clock, and went to bed at eight precisely. At five in the morning of the 21st, I came off by the coach to Newcastle, through Harrowgate, Ripon, Darlington, and Durham. As I never was in this part of the country before, and can, therefore, never have described it upon any former occasion, I shall say rather more about it now than I otherwise should do. Having heard and read so much about the "Northern Harvest," about the "Durham ploughs," and the "Northumberland system of husbandry," what was my surprise at finding, which I verily believe to be the fact, that there is not as much corn grown in the North-Riding of Yorkshire, which begins at Ripon, and in the whole county of Durham, as is grown in the Isle of Wight alone. A very small part, comparatively speaking, is arable land; and all the outward appearances show that that which is arable was formerly pasture. Between Durham and Newcastle there is a pretty general division of the land into grass fields and corn fields; but, even here, the absence of homesteads, the absence of barns, and of labourers' cottages, clearly show that agriculture is a sort of novelty; and that nearly all was pasturage not many years ago, or at any rate only so much of the land was cultivated as was necessary to furnish straw for the horses kept for other purposes than those of agriculture, and oats for those horses, and bread corn sufficient for the graziers and their people. All along the road from Leeds to Durham I saw hardly any wheat at all, or any wheat stubble, no barley, the chief crops being oats and beans mixed with peas. These everywhere appeared to be what we should deem most miserable crops. The oats, tied up in sheaves, or yet uncut, were scarcely ever more than two feet and a half long, the beans were about the same height, and in both cases the land so full of grass as to appear to be a pasture, after the oats and the beans were cut.

The land appears to be divided into very extensive farms. The corn, when cut, you see put up into little stacks of a circular form, each containing about three of our southern wagon-loads of sheaves, which stacks are put up round about the stone house and the buildings of the farmer. How they thrash them out I do not know, for I could see nothing resembling a barn or a barn's door. By the corn being put into such small stacks, I should suppose the thrashing places to be very small, and capable of holding only one stack at a time. I have many times seen one single rick containing a greater quantity of sheaves than fifteen or twenty of these stacks; and I have seen more than twenty stacks, each containing a number of sheaves equal to, at least, fifteen of these stacks; I have seen more than twenty of these large stacks, standing at one and the same time, in one single homestead in Wiltshire. I should not at all wonder if Tom Baring's farmers at Micheldever had a greater bulk of wheat-stacks standing now than any one would be able to find of that grain, especially, in the whole of the North-Riding of Yorkshire, and in one half of Durham.

But this by no means implies that these are beggarly counties, even exclusive of their waters, coals, and mines. They are not agricultural counties; they are not counties for the producing of bread, but they are counties made for the express purpose of producing meat; in which respect they excel the southern counties, in a degree beyond all comparison. I have just spoken of the beds of grass that are everywhere seen after the oats and the beans have been out. Grass is the natural produce of this land, which seems to have been made on purpose to produce it; and we are not to call land poor because it will produce nothing but meat. The size and shape of the fields, the sort of fences, the absence of all homesteads and labourers' cottages, the thinness of the country churches, everything shows that this was always a country purely of pasturage. It is curious, that, belonging to every farm, there appears to be a large quantity of turnips. They are sowed in drills, cultivated between, beautifully clean, very large in the bulb, even now, and apparently having been sowed early in June, if not in May. They are generally the white globe turnip, here and there a field of the Swedish kind. These turnips are not fed off by sheep and followed by crops of barley and clover, as in the South, but are raised, I suppose, for the purpose of being carried in and used in the feeding of oxen, which have come off the grass lands in October and November. These turnip lands seem to take all the manure of the farm; and, as the reader will perceive, they are merely an adjunct to the pasturage, serving, during the winter, instead of hay, wherewith to feed the cattle of various descriptions.

This, then, is not a country of farmers, but a country of graziers; a country of pasture, and not a country of the plough; and those who formerly managed the land here were not husbandmen, but herdsmen. Fortescue was, I dare say, a native of this country; for he describes England as a country of shepherds and of herdsmen, not working so very hard as the people of France did, having more leisure for contemplation, and, therefore, more likely to form a just estimate of their rights and duties; and he describes them as having, at all times, in their houses, plenty of flesh to eat, and plenty of woollen to wear. St. Augustine, in writing to the Pope an account of the character and conduct of his converts in England, told him that he found the English an exceedingly good and generous people; but they had one fault, their fondness for flesh-meat was so great, and their resolution to have it so determined, that he could not get them to abstain from it, even on the fast-days; and that he was greatly afraid that they would return to their state of horrible heathenism, rather than submit to the discipline of the church in this respect. The Pope, who had more sense than the greater part of bishops have ever had, wrote for answer: "Keep them within the pale of the church, at any rate, even if they slaughter their oxen in the churchyards: let them make shambles of the churches, rather than suffer the devil to carry away their souls." The taste of our fathers was by no means for the potato; for the "nice mealy potato." The Pope himself would not have been able to induce them to carry "cold potatoes in their bags" to the plough-field, as was, in evidence before the special commissions, proved to have been the common practice in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and which had been before proved by evidence taken by unfeeling committees of the boroughmonger House of Commons. Faith! these old papas of ours would have burnt up not only the stacks, but the ground itself, rather than have lived upon miserable roots, while those who raised none of the food were eating up all the bread and the meat.

Brougham and Birkbeck, and the rest of the Malthusian crew, are constantly at work preaching content to the hungry and naked. To be sure, they themselves, however, are not content to be hungry and naked. Amongst other things, they tell the working-people that the working-folks, especially in the North, used to have no bread, except such as was made of oats and of barley. That was better than potatoes, even the "nice mealy ones;" especially when carried cold to the field in a bag. But these literary impostors, these deluders, as far as they are able to delude; these vagabond authors, who thus write and publish for the purpose of persuading the working-people to be quiet, while they sack luxuries and riches out of the fruit of their toil; these literary impostors take care not to tell the people, that these oatcakes and this barley-bread were always associated with great lumps of flesh-meat; they forget to tell them this, or rather these half-mad, perverse, and perverting literary impostors suppress the facts, for reasons far too manifest to need stating.

The cattle here are the most beautiful by far that I ever saw. The sheep are very handsome; but the horned cattle are the prettiest creatures that my eyes ever beheld. My sons will recollect that when they were little boys I took them to see the "Durham Ox," of which they drew the picture, I dare say, a hundred times. That was upon a large scale, to be sure, the model of all these beautiful cattle: short horns, strait back, a taper neck, very small in proportion where it joins on the small and handsome head, deep dewlap, small-boned in the legs, hoop-ribbed, square-hipped, tail slender. A great part of them are white, or approaching very nearly to white: they all appear to be half fat, cows and oxen and all; and the meat from them is said to be, and I believe it is, as fine as that from Lincolnshire, Herefordshire, Romney Marsh, or Pevensey Level; and I am ready, at any time, to swear, if need be, that one pound of it fed upon this grass is worth more, to me at least, than any ten pounds or twenty pounds fed upon oil-cake, or the stinking stuff of distilleries; aye, or even upon turnips. This is all grass-land, even from Staffordshire to this point. In its very nature it produces grass that fattens. The little producing-land that there is even in Lancashire and the West-Riding of Yorkshire, produces grass that would fatten an ox, though the land be upon the tops of hills. Everywhere, where there is a sufficiency of grass, it will fatten an ox; and well do we Southern people know that, except in mere vales and meadows, we have no land that will do this; we know that we might put an ox up to his eyes in our grass, and that it would only just keep him from growing worse: we know that we are obliged to have turnips and meal and cabbages and parsnips and potatoes, and then, with some of our hungry hay for them to pick their teeth with, we make shift to put fat upon an ox.

Yet, so much are we like the beasts which, in the fable, came before Jupiter to ask him to endow them with faculties incompatible with their divers frames and divers degrees of strength, that we, in this age of "waust improvements, Ma'um," are always hankering after laying fields down in pasture, in the South, while these fellows in the North, as if resolved to rival us in "improvement" and perverseness, must needs break up their pasture-lands, and proclaim defiance to the will of Providence, and, instead of rich pasture, present to the eye of the traveller half-green starveling oats and peas, some of them in blossom in the last week of September. The land itself, the earth, of its own accord, as if resolved to vindicate the decrees of its Maker, sends up grass under these miserable crops, as if to punish them for their intrusion; and, when the crops are off, there comes a pasture, at any rate, in which the grass, like that of Herefordshire and Lincolnshire, is not (as it is in our Southern countries) mixed with weeds; but, standing upon the ground as thick as the earth can bear it, and fattening everything that eats of it, it forbids the perverse occupier to tear it to pieces. Such is the land of this country; all to the North of Cheshire, at any rate, leaving out the East-Riding of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, which are adapted for corn in some spots and for cattle in others.

These Yorkshire and Durham cows are to be seen in great numbers in and about London, where they are used for the purpose of giving milk, of which I suppose they give great quantities; but it is always an observation that if you have these cows you must keep them exceedingly well: and this is very true; for, upon the food which does very well for the common cows of Hampshire and Surrey, they would dwindle away directly and be good for nothing at all; and these sheep, which are as beautiful as even imagination could make them, so round and so loaded with flesh, would actually perish upon those downs and in those folds where our innumerable flocks not only live but fatten so well, and with such facility are made to produce us such quantities of fine mutton and such bales of fine wool. There seems to be something in the soil and climate, and particularly in the soil, to create everywhere a sort of cattle and of sheep fitted to it; Dorsetshire and Somersetshire have sheep different from all others, and the nature of which it is to have their lambs in the fall instead of having them in the spring. I remember when I was amongst the villages on the Cotswold-hills, in Gloucestershire, they showed me their sheep in several places, which are a stout big-boned sheep. They told me that many attempts had been made to cross them with the small-boned Leicester breed, but that it had never succeeded, and that the race always got back to the Cotswold breed immediately.

Before closing these rural remarks, I cannot help calling to the mind of the reader an observation of LORD JOHN SCOTT ELDON, who, at a time when there was a great complaint about "agricultural distress" and about the fearful increase of the poor-rates, said, "that there was no such distress in Northumberland, and no such increase of the poor-rates:" and so said my dignitary, Dr. Black, at the same time: and this, this wise lord, and this not less wise dignitary of mine, ascribed to "the bad practice of the farmers o' the Sooth paying the labourers their wages out of the poor-rates, which was not the practice in the North." I thought that they were telling what the children call stories; but I now find that these observations of theirs arose purely from that want of knowledge of the country which was, and is, common to them both. Why, Lord John, there are no such persons here as we call farmers, and no such persons as we call farm-labourers. From Cheshire to Newcastle, I have never seen one single labourer's cottage by the side of the road! Oh, Lord! if the good people of this country could but see the endless strings of vine-covered cottages and flower-gardens of the labourers of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire; if they could go down the vale of the Avon in Wiltshire, from Marlborough Forest to the city of Salisbury, and there see thirty parish churches in a distance of thirty miles; if they could go up from that city of Salisbury up the valley of Wylly to Warminster, and there see one-and-thirty churches in the space of twenty-seven miles; if they could go upon the top of the down, as I did, not far (I think it was) from St. Mary Cotford, and there have under the eye, in the valley below, ten parish churches within the distance of eight miles, see the downs covered with innumerable flocks of sheep, water meadows running down the middle of the valley, while the sides rising from it were covered with corn, sometimes a hundred acres of wheat in one single piece, while the stack-yards were still well stored from the previous harvest; if John Scott Eldon's countrymen could behold those things, their quick-sightedness would soon discover why poor-rates should have increased in the South and not in the North; and, though their liberality would suggest an apology for my dignitary, Dr. Black, who was freighted to London in a smack, and has ever since been impounded in the Strand, relieved now and then by an excursion to Blackheath or Clapham Common; to find an apology for their countryman, Lord John, would be putting their liberality to an uncommonly severe test; for he, be it known to them, has chosen his country abode, not in the Strand like my less-informed dignitary, Dr. Black, nor in his native regions in the North; but has, in the beautiful county of Dorset, amidst valleys and downs precisely like those of Wiltshire, got as near to the sun as he could possibly get, and there, from the top of his mansion he can see a score of churches, and from his lofty and ever-green downs, and from his fat valleys beneath, he annually sends his flocks of long-tailed ewes to Appleshaw fair, thence to be sold to all the southern parts of the kingdom, having L. E. marked upon their beautiful wool; and, like the two factions at Maidstone, all tarred with the same brush. It is curious, too, notwithstanding the old maxim, that we all try to get as nearly as possible in our old age to the spot whence we first sprang. Lord John's brother William (who has some title that I have forgotten) has taken up his quarters on the healthy and I say beautiful Cotswold of Gloucestershire, where, in going in a postchaise from Stowe-in-the-Wold to Cirencester, I thought I should never get by the wall of his park; and I exclaimed to Mr. Dean, who was along with me, "Curse this Northumbrian ship-broker's son, he has got one half of the county;" and then all the way to Cirencester I was explaining to Mr. Dean how the man had got his money, at which Dean, who is a Roman Catholic, seemed to me to be ready to cross himself several times.

No, there is no apology for Lord John's observations on the difference between the poor-rates of the South and the North. To go from London to his country-houses he must go across Surrey and Hampshire, along one of the vales of Wiltshire, and one of the vales of Dorsetshire, in which latter county he has many a time seen in one single large field a hundred wind-rows (stacks made in the field in order that the corn may get quite dry before it be put into great stacks); he has many a time seen, on one farm, two or three hundred of these, each of which was very nearly as big as the stacks which you see in the stack-yards of the North Riding of Yorkshire and of Durham, where a large farm seldom produces more than ten or a dozen of these stacks, and where the farmer's property consists of his cattle and sheep, and where little, very little, agricultural labour is wanted. Lord John ought to have known the cause of the great difference, and not to have suffered such nonsense to come out of a head covered with so very large a wig.

I looked with particular care on the sides of the road all the way through Yorkshire and Durham. The distance, altogether, from Oldham in Lancashire, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is about a hundred and fifty miles; and, leaving out the great towns, I did not see so many churches as are to be seen in any twenty miles of any of the valleys of Wiltshire. All these things prove that these are by nature counties of pasturage, and that they were formerly used solely for that purpose. It is curious that there are none of those lands here which we call "meadows." The rivers run in deep beds, and have generally very steep sides; no little rivulets and occasional overflowings that make the meadows in the South, which are so very beautiful, but the grass in which is not of the rich nature that the grass is in these counties in the North: it will produce milk enough, but it will not produce beef. It is hard to say which part of the country is the most valuable gift of God; but every one must see how perverse and injurious it is to endeavour to produce in the one that which nature has intended to confine to the other. After all the unnatural efforts that have been made here to ape the farming of Norfolk and Suffolk, it is only playing at farming, as stupid and "loyal" parents used to set their children to play at soldiers during the last war.

If any of these sensible men of Newcastle were to see the farming in the South Downs, and to see, as I saw in the month of July last, four teams of large oxen, six in a team, all ploughing in one field in preparation for wheat, and several pairs of horses, in the same field, dragging, harrowing, and rolling, and had seen on the other side of the road from five to six quarters of wheat standing upon the acre, and from nine to ten quarters of oats standing alongside of it, each of the two fields from fifty to a hundred statute acres; if any of these sensible men of Newcastle could see these things, they would laugh at the childish work that they see going on here under the name of farming; the very sight would make them feel how imperious is the duty on the law-giver to prevent distress from visiting the fields, and to take care that those whose labour produced all the food and all the raiment, shall not be fed upon potatoes and covered with rags; contemplating the important effects of their labour, each man of them could say as I said when this mean and savage faction had me at my trial, "I would see all these labourers hanged, and be hanged along with them, rather than see them live upon potatoes."

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 24th September, 1832.

Since writing the above I have had an opportunity of receiving information from a very intelligent gentleman of this county, who tells me, that in Northumberland there are some lands which bear very heavy crops of wheat; that the agriculture in this county is a great deal better than it is farther south; that, however, it was a most lamentable thing that the paper-money price of corn tempted so many men to break up these fine pastures; that the turf thus destroyed cannot be restored probably in a whole century; that the land does not now, with present prices, yield a clear profit, anything like what it would have yielded in the pasture; and that thus was destroyed the goose with the golden eggs. Just so was it with regard to the downs in the south and the west of England, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres, where the turf was the finest in the world, broken up for the sake of the paper-money prices, but now left to be downs again; and which will not be downs for more than a century to come. Thus did this accursed paper-money cause even the fruitful qualities of the earth to be anticipated, and thus was the soil made worth less than it was before the accursed invention appeared! This gentleman told me that this breaking up of the pasture-land in this country had made the land, though covered again with artificial grasses, unhealthy for sheep; and he gave as an instance the facts, that three farmers purchased a hundred and fifty sheep each, out of the same flock; that two of them, who put their sheep upon these recently broken-up lands, lost their whole flocks by the rot, with the exception of four in the one case and four in the other, out of the three hundred: and that the third farmer, who put his sheep upon the old pastures, and kept them there, lost not a single sheep out of the hundred and fifty! These, ever accursed paper-money, are amongst thy destructive effects!

I shall now, laying aside for the present these rural affairs, turn to the politics of this fine, opulent, solid, beautiful, and important town; but as this would compel me to speak of particular transactions and particular persons, and as this Register will come back to Newcastle before I am likely to quit it, the reader will see reasons quite sufficient for my refraining to go into matters of this sort, until the next Register, which will in all probability be dated from Edinburgh.

While at Manchester, I received an invitation to lodge while here at the house of a friend, of whom I shall have to speak more fully hereafter; but every demonstration of respect and kindness met me at the door of the coach in which I came from Leeds, on Friday, the 21st September. In the early part of Saturday, the 22nd, a deputation waited upon me with an address. Let the readers, in my native county and parish, remember that I am now at the end of thirty years of calumnies poured out incessantly upon me from the poisonous mouths and pens of three hundred mercenary villains, called newspaper editors and reporters; that I have written and published more than a hundred volumes in those thirty years; and that more than a thousand volumes (chiefly paid for out of the taxes) have been written and published for the sole purpose of impeding the progress of those truths that dropped from my pen; that my whole life has been a life of sobriety and labour; that I have invariably shown that I loved and honoured my country, and that I preferred its greatness and happiness far beyond my own; that, at four distinct periods, I might have rolled in wealth derived from the public money, which I always refused on any account to touch; that, for having thwarted this Government in its wastefulness of the public resources, and particularly for my endeavours to produce that Reform of the Parliament which the Government itself has at last been compelled to resort to; that, for having acted this zealous and virtuous part, I have been twice stripped of all my earnings by the acts of this Government; once lodged in a felon's jail for two years, and once driven into exile for two years and a half; and that, after all, here I am on a spot within a hundred miles of which I never was before in my life; and here I am receiving the unsolicited applause of men amongst the most intelligent in the whole kingdom, and the names of some of whom have been pronounced accompanied with admiration, even to the southernmost edge of the kingdom.

Hexham, 1st Oct., 1832.

I left Morpeth this morning pretty early, to come to this town, which lies on the banks of the Tyne, at thirty-four miles distant from Morpeth, and at twenty distant from Newcastle. Morpeth is a great market-town, for cattle especially. It is a solid old town; but it has the disgrace of seeing an enormous new jail rising up in it. From cathedrals and monasteries we are come to be proud of our jails, which are built in the grandest style, and seemingly as if to imitate the Gothic architecture.

From Morpeth to within about four miles of Hexham, the land is but very indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in a stack; and not another house to be seen within a mile or two of the farmhouse. There appeared to be no such thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly destitute of people. Immense tracks of corn-land, but neither cottages nor churches. There is here and there a spot of good land, just as in the deep valleys that I crossed; but, generally speaking, the country is poor; and its bleakness is proved by the almost total absence of the oak tree, of which we see scarcely one all the way from Morpeth to Hexham. Very few trees of any sort, except in the bottom of the warm valleys; what there are, are chiefly the ash, which is a very hardy tree, and will live and thrive where the oak will not grow at all, which is very curious, seeing that it comes out into leaf so late in the spring, and sheds its foliage so early in the fall. The trees which stand next in point of hardiness are the sycamore, the beech, and the birch, which are all seen here; but none of them fine. The ash is the most common tree, and even it flinches upon the hills, which it never does in the South. It has generally become yellow in the leaf already; and many of the trees are now bare of leaf before any frost has made its appearance.

The cattle all along here are of a coarse kind; the cows swag-backed and badly shaped; Kiloe oxen, except in the dips of good land by the sides of the bourns which I crossed. Nevertheless, even here, the fields of turnips, of both sorts, are very fine. Great pains seem to be taken in raising the crops of these turnips: they are all cultivated in rows, are kept exceedingly clean, and they are carried in as winter food for all the animals of a farm, the horses excepted.

As I approached Hexham, which, as the reader knows, was formerly the seat of a famous abbey, and the scene of a not less famous battle, and was, indeed, at one time the see of a bishop, and which has now churches of great antiquity and cathedral-like architecture; as I approached this town, along a valley down which runs a small river that soon after empties itself into the Tyne, the land became good, the ash trees more lofty, and green as in June; the other trees proportionably large and fine; and when I got down into the vale of Hexham itself, there I found the oak tree, certain proof of a milder atmosphere; for the oak, though amongst the hardest woods, is amongst the tenderest of plants known as natives of our country. Here everything assumes a different appearance. The Tyne, the southern and northern branches of which meet a few miles above Hexham, runs close by this ancient and celebrated town, all round which the ground rises gradually away towards the hills, crowned here and there with the remains of those castles which were formerly found necessary for the defence of this rich and valuable valley, which, from tip of hill to tip of hill, varies, perhaps, from four to seven miles wide, and which contains as fine corn-fields as those of Wiltshire, and fields of turnips, of both kinds, the largest, finest, and best cultivated, that my eyes ever beheld. As a proof of the goodness of the land and the mildness of the climate here, there is, in the grounds of the gentleman who had the kindness to receive and to entertain me (and that in a manner which will prevent me from ever forgetting either him or his most amiable wife); there is, standing in his ground, about an acre of my corn, which will ripen perfectly well; and in the same grounds, which, together with the kitchen-garden and all the appurtenances belonging to a house, and the house itself, are laid out, arranged, and contrived, in a manner so judicious, and to me so original, as to render them objects of great interest, though, in general, I set very little value on the things which appertain merely to the enjoyments of the rich. In these same grounds (to come back again to the climate), I perceived that the rather tender evergreens not only lived but throve perfectly well, and (a criterion infallible) the biennial stocks stand the winter without any covering or any pains taken to shelter them; which, as every one knows, is by no means always the case, even at Kensington and Fulham.

At night I gave a lecture at an inn, at Hexham, in the midst of the domains of that impudent and stupid man, Mr. Beaumont, who, not many days before, in what he called a speech, I suppose, made at Newcastle, thought proper, as was reported in the newspapers, to utter the following words with regard to me, never having, in his life, received the slightest provocation for so doing. "The liberty of the press had nothing to fear from the Government. It was the duty of the administration to be upon their guard to prevent extremes. There was a crouching servility on the one hand, and an excitement to disorganization and to licentiousness on the other, which ought to be discountenanced. The company, he believed, as much disapproved of that political traveller who was now going through the country--he meant Cobbett--as they detested the servile effusions of the Tories." Beaumont, in addition to his native stupidity and imbecility, might have been drunk when he said this, but the servile wretch who published it was not drunk; and, at any rate, Beaumont was my mark, it not being my custom to snap at the stick, but at the cowardly hand that wields it.

Such a fellow cannot be an object of what is properly called vengeance with any man who is worth a straw; but, I say, with SWIFT, "If a flea or a bug bite me, I will kill it if I can;" and, acting upon that principle, I, being at Hexham, put my foot upon this contemptible creeping thing, who is offering himself as a candidate for the southern division of the county, being so eminently fitted to be a maker of the laws!

The newspapers have told the whole country that Mr. John Ridley, who is a tradesman at Hexham, and occupies some land close by, has made a stand against the demand for tithes; and that the tithe-owner recently broke open, in the night, the gate of his field, and carried away what he deemed to be the tithe; that Mr. Ridley applied to the magistrates, who could only refer him to a court of law to recover damages for the trespass. When I arrived at Hexham, I found this to be the case. I further found that Beaumont, that impudent, silly and slanderous Beaumont, is the lay-owner of the tithes in and round about Hexham; he being, in a right line, doubtless, the heir or successor of the abbot and monks of the Abbey of Hexham; or, the heir of the donor, Egfrid, king of Northumberland. I found that Beaumont had leased out his tithes to middle men, as is the laudable custom with the pious bishops and clergy of the law-church in Ireland.

North Shields, 2nd Oct., 1832.

These sides of the Tyne are very fine: corn-fields, woods, pastures, villages; a church every four miles, or thereabouts; cows and sheep beautiful; oak trees, though none very large; and, in short, a fertile and beautiful country, wanting only the gardens and the vine-covered cottages that so beautify the counties in the South and the West. All the buildings are of stone. Here are coal-works and railways every now and then. The working people seem to be very well off; their dwellings solid and clean, and their furniture good; but the little gardens and orchards are wanting. The farms are all large; and the people who work on them either live in the farmhouse, or in buildings appertaining to the farmhouse; and they are all well fed, and have no temptation to acts like those which sprang up out of the ill-treatment of the labourers in the South. Besides, the mere country people are so few in number, the state of society is altogether so different, that a man who has lived here all his life-time, can form no judgment at all with regard to the situation, the wants, and the treatment of the working people in the counties of the South.

They have begun to make a railway from Carlisle to Newcastle; and I saw them at work at it as I came along. There are great lead mines not far from Hexham; and I saw a great number of little one-horse carts bringing down the pigs of lead to the point where the Tyne becomes navigable to Newcastle; and sometimes I saw loads of these pigs lying by the road-side, as you see parcels of timber lying in Kent and Sussex, and other timber counties. No fear of their being stolen: their weight is their security, together with their value compared with that of the labour of carrying. Hearing that Beaumont was, somehow or other, connected with this lead-work, I had got it into my head that he was a pig of lead himself, and half expected to meet with him amongst these groups of his fellow-creatures; but, upon inquiry, I found that some of the lead-mines belonged to him; descending, probably, in that same right line in which the tithes descended to him; and as the Bishop of Durham is said to be the owner of great lead-mines, Beaumont and the bishop may possibly be in the same boat with regard to the subterranean estate as well as that upon the surface; and if this should be the case, it will, I verily believe, require all the piety of the bishop, and all the wisdom of Beaumont, to keep the boat above water for another five years.

North Shields, 3rd Oct., 1832.

I lectured at South Shields last evening, and here this evening. I came over the river from South Shields about eleven o'clock last night, and made a very firm bargain with myself never to do the like again. This evening, after my lecture was over, some gentlemen presented an address to me upon the stage, before the audience, accompanied with the valuable and honourable present of the late Mr. Eneas Mackenzie's History of the County of Northumberland; a very interesting work, worthy of every library in the kingdom.

From Newcastle to Morpeth; from Morpeth to Hexham; and then all the way down the Tyne; though everywhere such abundance of fine turnips, and in some cases of mangel-wurzel, you see scarcely any potatoes: a certain sign that the working people do not live like hogs. This root is raised in Northumberland and Durham, to be used merely as garden stuff; and, used in that way, it is very good; the contrary of which I never thought, much less did I ever say it. It is the using of it as a substitute for bread and for meat, that I have deprecated it; and when the Irish poet, Dr. Drennen, called it "the lazy root, and the root of misery," he gave it its true character. Sir Charles Wolseley, who has travelled a great deal in France, Germany and Italy, and who, though Scott-Eldon scratched him out of the commission of the peace, and though the sincere patriot Brougham will not put him in again, is a very great and accurate observer as to these interesting matters, has assured me that, in whatever proportion the cultivation of potatoes prevails in those countries, in that same proportion the working-people are wretched.

From this degrading curse; from sitting round a dirty board, with potatoes trundled out upon it, as the Irish do: from going to the field with cold potatoes in their bags, as the working-people of Hampshire and Wiltshire did, but which they have not done since the appearance of certain coruscations, which, to spare the feelings of the "Lambs, the Broughams, the Greys, and the Russells," and their dirty bill-of-indictment-drawer Denman, I will not describe, much less will I eulogize; from this degrading curse the county of Northumberland is yet happily free!

Sunderland, 4th Oct., 1832.

This morning I left North Shields in a post-chaise, in order to come hither through Newcastle and Gateshead, this affording me the only opportunity that I was likely to have of seeing a plantation of Mr. Annorer Donkin, close in the neighbourhood of Newcastle; which plantation had been made according to the method prescribed in my book, called the "Woodlands;" and to see which plantation I previously communicated a request to Mr. Donkin. That gentleman received me in a manner which will want no describing to those who have had the good luck to visit Newcastle. The plantation is most advantageously circumstanced to furnish proof of the excellence of my instructions as to planting. The predecessor of Mr. Donkin also made plantations upon the same spot, and consisting precisely of the same sort of trees. The two plantations are separated from each other merely by a road going through them. Those of the predecessor have been made six-and-twenty years; those of Mr. Donkin six years; and, incredible as it may appear, the trees in the latter are full as lofty as those in the former; and, besides the equal loftiness, are vastly superior in point of shape, and, which is very curious, retain all their freshness at this season of the year, while the old plantations are brownish and many of the leaves falling off the trees, though the sort of trees is precisely the same. As a sort of reward for having thus contributed to this very rational source of his pleasure, Mr. Donkin was good enough to give me an elegant copy of the fables of the celebrated Bewick, who was once a native of Newcastle and an honour to the town, and whose books I had had from the time that my children began to look at books, until taken from me by that sort of rapine which I had to experience at the time of my memorable flight across the Atlantic, in order to secure the use of that long arm which I caused to reach them from Long Island to London.

In Mr. Donkin's kitchen-garden (my eyes being never closed in such a scene) I saw what I had never seen before in any kitchen-garden, and which it may be very useful to some of my readers to have described to them. Wall-fruit is, when destroyed in the spring, never destroyed by dry-cold; but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, by wet-frosts, which descend always perpendicularly, and which are generally fatal if they come between the expansion of the blossom and the setting of the fruit; that is to say, if they come after the bloom is quite open, and before it has disentangled itself from the fruit. The great thing, therefore, in getting wall-fruit, is to keep off these frosts. The French make use of boards, in the neighbourhood of Paris, projecting from the tops of the walls and supported by poles; and some persons contrive to have curtains to come over the whole tree at night and to be drawn up in the morning. Mr. Donkin's walls have a top of stone; and this top, or cap, projects about eight inches beyond the face of the wall, which is quite sufficient to guard against the wet-frosts which always fall perpendicularly. This is a country of stone to be sure; but those who can afford to build walls for the purpose of having wall-fruit, can afford to cap them in this manner: to rear the wall, plant the trees, and then to save the expense of the cap, is really like the old proverbial absurdity, "of losing the ship for the sake of saving a pennyworth of tar."

At Mr. Donkin's I saw a portrait of Bewick, which is said to be a great likeness, and which, though imagination goes a great way in such a case, really bespeaks that simplicity, accompanied with that genius, which distinguished the man. Mr. Wm. Armstrong was kind enough to make me a present of a copy of the last performance of this so justly celebrated man. It is entitled "Waits for Death," exhibiting a poor old horse just about to die, and preceded by an explanatory writing, which does as much honour to the heart of Bewick as the whole of his designs put together do to his genius. The sight of the picture, the reading of the preface to it, and the fact that it was the last effort of the man; altogether make it difficult to prevent tears from starting from the eyes of any one not uncommonly steeled with insensibility.

You see nothing here that is pretty; but everything seems to be abundant in value; and one great thing is, the working people live well. Theirs is not a life of ease to be sure, but it is not a life of hunger. The pitmen have twenty-four shillings a week; they live rent-free, their fuel costs them nothing, and their doctor cost them nothing. Their work is terrible, to be sure; and, perhaps, they do not have what they ought to have; but, at any rate, they live well, their houses are good and their furniture good; and though they live not in a beautiful scene, they are in the scene where they were born, and their lives seem to be as good as that of the working part of mankind can reasonably expect. Almost the whole of the country hereabouts is owned by that curious thing called the Dean and Chapter of Durham. Almost the whole of South Shields is theirs, granted upon leases with fines at stated periods. This Dean and Chapter are the lords of the Lords. Londonderry, with all his huffing and strutting, is but a tenant of the Dean and Chapter of Durham, who souse him so often with their fines that it is said that he has had to pay them more than a hundred thousand pounds within the last ten or twelve years. What will Londonderry bet that, he is not the tenant of the public before this day five years? There would be no difficulty in these cases, but on the contrary a very great convenience; because all these tenants of the Dean and Chapter might then purchase out-and-out, and make that property freehold, which they now hold by a tenure so uncertain and so capricious.

Alnwick, 7th Oct., 1832.

From Sunderland I came, early in the morning of the 5th of October, once more (and I hope not for the last time) to Newcastle, there to lecture on the paper-money, which I did, in the evening. But before I proceed further, I must record something that I heard at Sunderland respecting that babbling fellow Trevor! My readers will recollect the part which this fellow acted with regard to the "liberal Whig prosecution;" they will recollect that it was he who first mentioned the thing in the House of Commons, and suggested to the wise Ministers the propriety of prosecuting me; that Lord Althorp and Denman hummed and ha'd about it; that the latter had not read it, and that the former would offer no opinion upon it; that Trevor came on again, encouraged by the works of the curate of Crowhurst, and by the bloody old Times, whose former editor and now printer is actually a candidate for Berkshire, supported by that unprincipled political prattler, Jephthah Marsh, whom I will call to an account as soon as I get back to the South. My readers will further recollect that the bloody old Times then put forth another document as a confession of Goodman, made to Burrell, Tredcroft, and Scawen Blunt, while the culprit was in Horsham jail with a halter actually about his neck. My readers know the result of this affair; but they have yet to learn some circumstances belonging to its progress, which circumstances are not to be stated here. They recollect, however, that from the very first I treated this TREVOR with the utmost disdain; and that at the head of the articles which I wrote about him I put these words, "TREVOR AND POTATOES;" meaning that he hated me because I was resolved, fire or fire not, that working men should not live upon potatoes in my country. Now, mark; now, chopsticks of the South, mark the sagacity, the justice, the promptitude, and the excellent taste of these lads of the North! At the last general election, which took place after the "liberal Whig prosecution" had been begun, Trevor was a candidate for the city of Durham, which is about fourteen miles from this busy town of Sunderland. The freemen of Durham are the voters in that city, and some of these freemen reside at Sunderland. Therefore this fellow (I wish to God you could see him!) went to Sunderland to canvass these freemen residing there; and they pelted him out of the town; and (oh appropriate missiles!) pelted him out with the "accursed root," hallooing and shouting after him--"Trevor and potatoes!" Ah! stupid coxcomb! little did he imagine, when he was playing his game with Althorp and Denman, what would be the ultimate effect of that game!

From Newcastle to Morpeth (the country is what I before described it to be). From Morpeth to this place (Alnwick), the country, generally speaking, is very poor as to land, scarcely any trees at all; the farms enormously extensive; only two churches, I think, in the whole of the twenty miles; scarcely anything worthy the name of a tree, and not one single dwelling having the appearance of a labourer's house. Here appears neither hedging nor ditching; no such thing as a sheep-fold or a hurdle to be seen; the cattle and sheep very few in number; the farm servants living in the farm-houses, and very few of them; the thrashing done by machinery and horses; a country without people. This is a pretty country to take a minister from to govern the South of England! A pretty country to take a Lord Chancellor from to prattle about Poor Laws and about surplus population! My Lord Grey has, in fact, spent his life here, and Brougham has spent his life in the Inns of Court, or in the botheration of speculative books. How should either of them know anything about the eastern, southern, or western counties? I wish I had my dignitary Dr. Black here; I would soon make him see that he has all these number of years been talking about the bull's horns instead of his tail and his buttocks. Besides the indescribable pleasure of having seen Newcastle, the Shieldses, Sunderland, Durham, and Hexham, I have now discovered the true ground of all the errors of the Scotch feelosofers with regard to population, and with regard to poor-laws. The two countries are as different as any two things of the same nature can possibly be; that which applies to the one does not at all apply to the other. The agricultural counties are covered all over with parish churches, and with people thinly distributed here and there.

Only look at the two counties of Dorset and Durham. Dorset contains 1,005 square miles; Durham contains 1,061 square miles. Dorset has 271 parishes; Durham has 75 parishes. The population of Dorset is scattered over the whole of the county, there being no town of any magnitude in it. The population of Durham, though larger than that of Dorset, is almost all gathered together at the mouths of the Tyne, the Wear, and the Tees. Northumberland has 1,871 square miles; and Suffolk has 1,512 square miles. Northumberland has eighty-eight parishes; and Suffolk has five hundred and ten parishes. So that here is a county one third part smaller than that of Northumberland with six times as many villages in it! What comparison is there to be made between states of society so essentially different? What rule is there, with regard to population and poor-laws, which can apply to both cases? And how is my Lord Howick, born and bred up in Northumberland, to know how to judge of a population suitable to Suffolk? Suffolk is a county teeming with production, as well as with people; and how brutal must that man be who would attempt to reduce the agricultural population of Suffolk to that of the number of Northumberland! The population of Northumberland, larger than Suffolk as it is, does not equal it in total population by nearly one-third, notwithstanding that one half of its whole population have got together on the banks of the Tyne. And are we to get rid of our people in the South, and supply the places of them by horses and machines? Why not have the people in the fertile counties of the South, where their very existence causes their food and their raiment to come? Blind and thoughtless must that man be who imagines that all but farms in the South are unproductive. I much question whether, taking a strip three miles each way from the road, coming from Newcastle to Alnwick, an equal quantity of what is called waste ground, together with the cottages that skirt it, do not exceed such strip of ground in point of produce. Yes, the cows, pigs, geese, poultry, gardens, bees and fuel that arise from those wastes, far exceed, even in the capacity of sustaining people, similar breadths of ground, distributed into these large farms in the poorer parts of Northumberland. I have seen not less than ten thousand geese in one tract of common, in about six miles, going from Chobham towards Farnham in Surrey. I believe these geese alone, raised entirely by care and by the common, to be worth more than the clear profit that can be drawn from any similar breadth of land between Morpeth and Alnwick. What folly is it to talk, then, of applying to the counties of the South, principles and rules applicable to a country like this!

To-morrow morning I start for "Modern Athens"! My readers will, I dare say, perceive how much my "antalluct" has been improved since I crossed the Tyne. What it will get to when I shall have crossed the Tweed, God only knows. I wish very much that I could stop a day at Berwick, in order to find some feelosofer to ascertain, by some chemical process, the exact degree of the improvement of the "antalluct." I am afraid, however, that I shall not be able to manage this; for I must get along; beginning to feel devilishly home-sick since I have left Newcastle.

* * * * *

They tell me that Lord Howick, who is just married by-the-by, made a speech here the other day, during which he said, "that the Reform was only the means to an end; and that the end was cheap government." Good! stand to that, my Lord, and, as you are now married, pray let the country fellows and girls marry too: let us have cheap government, and I warrant you that there will be room for us all, and plenty for us to eat and drink. It is the drones, and not the bees, that are too numerous; it is the vermin who live upon the taxes, and not those who work to raise them, that we want to get rid of. We are keeping fifty thousand tax-eaters to breed gentlemen and ladies for the industrious and laborious to keep. These are the opinions which I promulgate; and whatever your flatterers may say to the contrary, and whatever feelosofical stuff Brougham and his rabble of writers may put forth, these opinions of mine will finally prevail. I repeat my anxious wish (I would call it a hope if I could) that your father's resolution may be equal to his sense, and that he will do that which is demanded by the right which the people have to insist upon measures necessary to restore the greatness and happiness of the country; and, if he show a disposition to do this, I should deem myself the most criminal of all mankind, if I were to make use of any influence that I possess to render his undertaking more difficult than it naturally must be; but, if he show not that disposition, it will be my bounden duty to endeavour to drive him from the possession of power; for, be the consequences to individuals what they may, the greatness, the freedom, and the happiness of England must be restored.

END.