BOOKS.
ARTHUR YOUNG'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.* OF the long roll of English worthies few are more charac- teristic of the soil than Arthur Young. "A poor little country gentleman," as he calls himself, Young was the friend and correspondent of Sovereigns and statesmen, one of the most profound observers that ever lived, an immense benefactor to mankind, a laborious worker, and a good man. His intellect, if limited, was clear, his judgment sound, his insight remark- able, his moral sense keen and true. We cannot know too much about such a man, and therefore we may well thank Miss Betham-Edwards (herself almost as conscientious a traveller in France as was Young) for giving us this in- teresting autobiography in the present convenient form, just as Young wrote it, and with the letters he sent to his friends on the subjects that lay near to his heart. This truthful portrayal of a life tends to deepen the complexity of what at first seems a very simple character. First, we have the singular paradox that the first agricultural authority that
• The Autobiography of Arthur Young, with Selections from his Correspondence. Edited by H. Betham-Edwards. London: Enettb, Elder, and Co. [12e. &LI
England ever perhaps produced could not make his own farms pay, his whole life being troubled by debt and failure. Next, we find a nature very susceptible to spiritual influences. In his youth Young was democratic and sceptical in opinion, his mind greatly influenced by the thinking of the eighteenth century, of which indeed in his youth he was a characteristic child. Like so many others, he was shocked by the excesses of the French Revolution, and his views on political affairs were greatly modified. But there was much more than this. Domestic sorrow and disappointment turned his thoughts inward, and in the latter period of his life be became not only a deeply religions man, but his mind was so bent on things of the soul, that he became almost morbid and unduly introspective. He was caught up into the great Evangelical movement at the end of the last century, and though he toiled at his special tasks, and even saw something of the great world of politics and fashion, his main concern was with the sermons of the pious Scott and Simeon, and he conversed with Wilberforce and the members of the Clapham sect on the state of his soul.
As Young gave to the world elsewhere the results of his observations in France and Ireland, we hear but little of those important episodes in his life in the autobiography. One interesting fact, however, we do find which is worth recording. Carnot, the great "organiser of victory," while a member of the Directory had Young's works on agriculture published in France,—a fact which did credit to Carnot's perspicacity. It is not so well known, however, that the Travels in France were not only published in that country, but were esteemed a high authority all through the storm of the Revolution. Young was told by Sir J. Sinclair that Sylvestre, the Secretary of the Society of Agriculture, told him that Young had saved his life. "He was in prison, and brought to trial, and told that his life should be saved if he could show that he had ever done anything really useful to the Republic. He replied that be had unquestionably done good, 'for Arthur Young's Travels in France contained much highly important information, and, in order to spread it through the Republic in a cheap form, I published a useful abridgement,' he said, which has been much read, and has had important effects. I was pardoned, and set at liberty ; ' and then, turning to Sir John, he said, Tell your friend, Mr. -Young, that be was thus the means of saving my life.' " Was not this plain Suffolk farmer as truly an "international man" as Cobden himself ? We find, indeed, no little in common between the two men, who both belonged essentially to the same English type. Young was born in 1741, his father being a clergyman who wrote a work called Historical Dissertations on Idolatrous Ccrruptions in Religion which had the honour of being quoted by Voltaire. The father died in debt, and, after an education at Lavenharu, the boy was sent to Lynn for a three years' apprenticeship in a mercantile office. He left Lynn at twenty "without education, profession, or employment," and took the home farm, where he got into debt and was in- volved in trouble. Young seems to have married imprudently ; at any rate be more than once complains of domestic dis- comfort, which may possibly have been partly due to his own financial difficulties. After he had been two years married he thus writes to his wife :—" I had infinitely rather live in a cottage on bread and cheese than drag on the anxious existence I do at present. Whichever way I turn my thoughts I see no remedy, nor know who can advise me what step to take.... If anybody was to knock me on the head it would be a trifling favour done to you all three, for most assuredly no goodwill ever come from my bands." How little do we know our fate or what is in us! Who would have supposed this grcan of despair coming from one of the most resolute and active and wise men whom England has produced ? Young soon found his proper vocation when he made his early agricultural tours in the Eastern Counties, and he speedily saw also how ignorant lad been the chief writers on whom English agriculturists had relied. It is singular to find him combining Parliamentary reporting with farming : "Every Saturday I walked seventeen miles to my farm and back again on the Monday morning." But his life was still wretched ; be had no religious belief, which he now begins to deplore, and he at one time thought of abandoning all and going to America. After his Irish tour he again took up a farm near the old manor house in Suffolk, and enlarged his occupation till he had "between three and four hundred acres
in land, most amply stocked." At this time occurred his first visit to France, which cost him, as he notes, £118 15s. 2d.
He was beginning to be so well known as a writer on agriculture that he was elected at this time a member of the Imperial Economical Society of St. Petersburg, and at the same time he published his Irish Tour. He also began a voluminous correspondence with Priestley, Washing- ton, Lord Bristol, and the Duke of Grafton, and he conducted an agitation against the Protectionist Wool Bill. It was in the very year of the French Revolution that he went over to France, where he heard a debate in the National Assembly, and met Orleans, Sieyes, and others. He then went on to Italy, and as showing the width of his interests, he says that at Florence his time "was divided between agriculture and the Tribuna, that is, between farmers and Vennses." It is worth noting that he was impressed with the excellence of agricul- tural improvements in Italy. He misses nothing, and is deeply interested in the music both of the churches and the opera, on which subject, as on many others, he has corre- spondence with Dr. Barney, the celebrated musician and the father of Madame D'Arblay.
In 1793 Young was appointed Secretary of the new Board of Agriculture, and though he loved the country and hated London, he was compelled to forego rural pleasures, to live much in town, and to eat twenty-five dinners a month with public men and fashionable people. He saw much of Pitt, and thought highly of him. He narrates a conversation with Pitt, in which the great statesman expressed himself strongly against any kind of action which would lead the State to regulate wages. This arose out of the serious condition of the time, whose misery weighed heavily upon Young's heart, though his growing religious feeling made him ascribe it to divine punishment for national sin. The glimpses of society are, indeed, not pleasant. Many of the chief public men are represented as either deists or atheists, and the conversation as frivolous in the extreme. With Burke also Young had no little intercourse, and a painfully interesting visit to the latter is recorded :—
"I was shocked to see him so broken, so low, and with such expressions of melancholy. I almost thought that I was come to see the greatest genius of the age in ruin After break- fast he took me for a sauntering walk for five hours over his farm, and to a cottage where a scrap of land had been stolen from the waste. I was glad to find his farm in good order, and doubly so to hear him remark that it was his only amusement, except the attention which he paid to a school in the vicinity for sixty chil- dren of noble emigrants. His conversation was remarkably desultory, a broken mixture of agricultural observations, French madness, price of provisions, the death of his son, the absurdity of regulating labour, the mischief of our Poor Laws, and the diffi- culty of cottagers keeping cows. An argumentative discussion of any opinion seemed to distress him, and I therefore avoided it."
What a sad contrast to the days when, as Johnson said, Burke " wound into his subject like a serpent !" Young puts forward the singular paradox that Burke was, in a way, the author of the French Revolution ! In the shop of Dodsley the publisher, Young was shown the receipt of Burke for six guineas for the copy of the Vindication of Natural Society. "That book," said Nicholl, "was so much admired in France by D'Alembert, Diderot, &c., &c., that it made them mad, and really produced the Revolution." Nicholl then showed Young Burke's receipt for 111,000 for the Reflections, saying that that was what be received for putting the Revolution out. The later pamphlets were sold for £300.
It was in 1799 that Young's change of mind in regard to religion became marked. He was terribly distressed by the death of his daughter, who, in his judgment, was practically killed by the ignorant medicine of the time, and the thought that she was dissolved into nothingness drove him almost to despair. He took to reading all that could be said for the doctrine of immortality, and it is pathetic to read that he had to fall back on the jejune writings of such divines as Sherlock, Jortin, and the mechanical school of Anglicanism when the English Church was at a low spiritual ebb. By degrees his faith was strengthened, and his mind from that time was mainly absorbed in religious meditation and in taking counsel with the men of the Evangelical school. When in London he always went to bear Scott preach, and marked Wilberforce taking notes of the sermon under the pulpit. He also heard Rowland Hill, and at Cambridge. Simeon, who paid him a kind of religions visit at his Suffolk home. Young also took to the rather dangerous operation of interpreting prophecy, and in 1801 notes the near "expiration of the 1260 years of Daniel and St. John," and speculates as to the destruction of the Turkish Empire as preparing the way for the return of the Jews, the fall of "the ten Kings of Europe," and the final consummation of all things. He found much solace in the poetry of Cowper. He had need of all the comfort he could get, for a sad calamity was coming on him in the form of blindness,—partial at first, then complete. But he worked up to the last, and long after he was sixty we find him still rising at four, while during a long part of his life he plunged into cold water even when the ice was thick on it. A hardy, much-enduring, faithful, up. right, ingenious man. His death took place in London in 1820, when he was within a little of being eighty years old.
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