The Years of Endurance Read Online Free PDF

islanders, with their guzzling and swilling, were like so many pieces of animated roast beef with their veins full of ale. It appeared a point of pride with them—a mark of their superiority to other starveling nations—to fill themselves up. A farmer at the Wheel at Hackington Fen ate for a wager two dozen penny mutton pies and drank half a gallon of ale in half an hour: then, remarking that he had had but a scanty supper, went on for the sheer love of the thing and consumed a 3 d. loaf, a pound of cheese and a leg of pork. " Sir," said the great Dr. Johnson, the very embodiment of England, " I mind my belly very studiously, for I look upon it that he who will not mind his belly will scarcely mind anything else."
    The foundation of this good living was the wealth of the English soil. Few countries were more blest by nature: in none had nature been turned to such advantage by the cultivator. Since the Revolutionary settlement a succession of remarkable men— aristocrats, hedge squires and farmers—had devoted their lives to the improvement of crops and livestock. Bakewell's new breed of Leicester sheep in the 'sixties and 'seventies were said to have given his country two pounds of mutton where she had one before. In 1776 young Thomas Coke began his great work of transforming the Holkham estate from a sandy desert into the agricultural Mecca of Europe.
     
    It was due to such efforts that England in the grim years ahead
     
    1Ramblin’ Jack (ed. R. R. Bellamy), 204.
     
     
    was able to sustain the long burden of blockade and feed her industrial population.
     
    In the two decades before the war with revolutionary France farming was the first hobby of educated Englishmen. From the King—" Varmer George "—who contributed to the Agricultural Magazine under the pseudonym of Robinson and carried a copy of Arthur Young's Farmer's Letters on all his journeys—to Parson Woodforde, who recorded daily his horticultural activities and his observations on the weather, the pursuit of husbandry gripped their eminently practical minds. Great lords would pay £400 or more for the hire of one of Mr. Bakewell's rams, and yeomen would club together to establish cart-horse and ploughing tests. The country gentleman who did not look after his estate lost as much caste as he who shirked his fences in the hunting field. Practical, hardy, realist, the landowners of England were a source of astonishment to their Continental neighbours, who did not know at which to wonder more: aristocratic absorption in clovers and fat cattle or the intelligence with which farmers and peasants, who abroad would have been regarded as no better than beasts of burden, conversed oil the principles of their calling. 1
    This common passion had one important political consequence. It helped to unify the nation and, by accustoming men of all classes to act together, gave them cohesion in time of trial. It made not for theoretical but for practical equality. It was one of the influences that constantly tempered the aristocratic government of the country. Too many currents of robust popular air broke in on the senate and salons of eighteenth-century England for the atmosphere to remain hot-house.
    They blew not only from the field, but from the jury-box, the hustings and the counting-house. In this land of paradox a lord might find his right to lands or goods questioned by process of law
     
    1 Captain Fremantle drove me in his gig to see Mr. Wenar's farm and his famous fat oxen for which he every year gets two or three prizes—he was not at home, but his daughter as fat as the cattle, tho' a civil girl, did the honours of the mansion which is a very ancient half-ruined house—she showed me the fat beasts which are fed some on oil cake and some on turnips, and look like elephants. It is only in this country that one may see a man like Mr. Wenar, who is visited and courted by Dukes and Peers, dines at their table, and returns their dinners, and all this because he