The population of England and Wales is computed to have increased from 5,066,000 in 1710, to 7,814,000 in 1780.* Of our rising manufactures and manufacturers I have treated in another place.† The agriculturists within that period were far indeed behind-hand if compared to those of the present day. Scarce any great and real progress in their modes of husbandry can be traced until after the accession of George the Third, when they were no doubt much animated by the personal example and predilection of the King in his farms both at Richmond and at Windsor. Until then the accounts from the most opposite quarters tell nearly the same tale of lands either wholly waste, or at least imperfectly tilled. Take, in the first place, the extreme northern county of Caithness. The daughter of Sir John Sinclair, in the biography which she has written of her father, states that when he first began his vigorous improvements, at the age of eighteen, and in the year 1772, the whole district round him presented a scene of most discouraging desolation. Scarce any farmer in the county owned a wheel-cart, and burdens were conveyed on the backs of women, thirty or forty of whom might be seen in a line, carrying heavy wicker-creels. "At that period," continues Miss Sinclair, "females did most of the hard "work-driving the peats or rowing the boats; and it "sometimes occurred that if a man lost a horse or an ox, “he married a wife as the cheapest plan to make up the "difference." If we come to Northumberland, we shall find it alleged by Warburton, who was Somerset Herald to George the Second, and who published his "Vallum "Romanum" in 1753, that "such was the wild and "barren state of this country, even at the time I made 66 my survey, that in those parts now called the wastes, "and heretofore the debateable grounds, I have frequently discovered the vestiges of towns and camps "that seemed never to have been trod upon by any "human creature than myself since the Romans aban"doned them; the traces of streets and the foundations

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*Preface to the first volume of the Population Returns, 1831, p. 45., as derived from Mr. Finlaison's tables.

See vol. v. p. 1-9.

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"of the buildings being still visible, only grown over "with grass." The prevalence of turnip-growing in the place of fallows, which, says Mr. Grey of Dilston, has made a complete revolution in the management and value of land, took place in that county within the memory of living men. No turnip ever grew on a Northumbrian field till between the years 1760 and 1770, although they had been sown and reared in gardens for several years before. * It may be said not only of Northumberland, but of all the counties which are, in fact, what it calls itself -north of Humber-that, at the accession of George the Third, they were still, in great part, uninclosed. As in 1832 I was riding with the late Earl of Harewood, at his seat near Leeds, he pointed out to me the remains of a narrow horse-bridge, with a turnpike beside it. This, he said, was, till his childhood, the sole communication between the Leeds district and the north, and that was the first toll which, on coming into England, the Scottish drovers had need to pay.

But let us pass to Lincolnshire, a county renowned perhaps beyond any other of the present day for its skilful cultivation and luxuriant crops; and let us hear certainly one of the most experienced and able of our living agriculturists. Only a few years since, Mr. Pusey, then the member for Berkshire, was engaged in a critical examination of the farming around Lincoln. As he journeyed onward, his attention was arrested by a column seventy feet high, which stood by the road-side. On inquiry from his companion, Mr. Handley, he learnt that it was a land light-house, built no longer since than the middle of the last century, as a nightly guide for travellers over the dreary waste which still retains the name of Lincoln Heath. But though the name might linger, the scene had wholly changed; the spirit and industry of the people had reared the most thriving homesteads around the column, and spread a mantle of teeming vegetation to its very base. "And it was

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certainly surprising to me," Mr. Pusey adds, "to dis

* See the Essay by Mr. John Grey of Dilston in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, vol. ii. p. 151-193.

66 cover at once the finest farming I had ever seen, and "the only land light-house that was ever raised."*

As a hundred years ago, the lands were too often untilled, so were the cultivators of the land too often untaught. Throughout England, the education of the labouring classes was most grievously neglected, the supineness of the clergy of that age being manifest on this point as on every other. It would be very easy to adduce many cases of deplorable ignorance and consequent credulity at that period both in individuals and in whole villages or parishes. A few will suffice, however, to establish my conclusion. A remarkable man, in after years the chief of a religious sect, — William Huntington,

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describes himself as the son of poor parents in the Weald of Kent. Without any instruction during his first childhood, he found his vacant mind fill with silly fancies. "There was," says he, "in the village an "exciseman, of a stern and hard-favoured countenance, "whom I took notice of for having a stick covered with figures, and an ink-bottle hanging at his button-hole. "This man I imagined to be employed by God Almighty "to take an account of children's sins!" A person of far superior merit and attainments, Hannah More, declares that on first going to the village of Cheddar, near the cathedral city of Wells, "we found more than "two hundred people in the parish, almost all very poor; no gentry; a dozen wealthy farmers, hard, brutal, and "ignorant. We saw but one Bible in all the "parish, and that was used to prop a flower-pot!"

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Traces of ancient superstition were sometimes found to linger in the congenial darkness. Thus, in Northamptonshire, "Miss C. and her cousin, walking, saw a fire "in a field, and a crowd around it. They said, 'what is "the matter? Killing a calf. -What for? To stop

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*Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, vol. iv. p. 287. This column,-the "Dunston Pillar," is now, I believe, the property of the Earl of Ripon.

† Life of William Huntington, S. S. (that is, Sinner Saved), by himself, in his "Kingdom of Heaven taken by Prayer," p. 35. ed. 1793. He adds, "I thought he must have a great deal to do to find "out all the sins of children, and I eyed him as a formidable being, "and the greatest enemy I had in all the world."

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"the murrain.' They went away as quickly as possible. "On speaking to the clergyman, he made inquiries. The "people did not like to talk of the affair, but it appeared "that when there is a disease among the cows, or when "the calves are born sickly, they sacrifice, that is, kill "and burn, one for good luck." *

Pass we next to Suffolk. There, in the village of Wattisham, and in the year 1762, it chanced that six children of one family died in quick succession of a sudden and mysterious illness, their feet having first mortified and dropped off. Professor Henslow, who resides at no great distance from Wattisham, has given much attention to the records of their case, and has made it clear in his excellent Essay on the Diseases of Wheat, that in all probability their death was owing to their imprudent use of deleterious food- the Ergot of Rye. But he adds, that in the neighbourhood, the popular belief was firm, that these poor children had been the victims of sorcery and witchcraft.†

Among the principal means which, under Providence, tended to a better spirit in the coming age, may be ranked the system of Sunday Schools. And of these, the main praise belongs to Robert Raikes. There are indeed some previous claims alleged on behalf of other persons, especially Miss Hannah Ball, at High Wycombe, in 1769. But certainly, at least, the example did not spread at that time. The elder Mr. Raikes being printer and proprietor of the Gloucester Journal, had been brought before the House of Commons, in 1729, for the offence, as it was then considered, of reporting their debates. His son, born in 1735, became in due time his successor in his business. Struck at the noise and riot of the poor boys in his native streets, Raikes the younger established the first of his Sunday Schools in 1781. Thus, in one of his early letters does he explain his views further carried

* Communication addressed to Jacob Grimm, and inserted by him in his Deutsche Mythologie, p. 576. ed. 1843. With his usual learning, he proceeds to show the genuine descent of this practice from a primæval Celtic rite. See also in White's Selborne (p. 295. ed. 1837), the stories of the seamed pollards and shrew-ash.

† Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, vol. ii. p. 16. See the second volume of this History, p. 126.

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"I argue,

out in our own day by Lord Ashley's care: therefore, if you can loiter about without shoes and a "ragged coat, you may as well come to school and learn "what may tend to your good in that footing. All that "I require are clean hands, clean face, and the hair "combed. . . . . I cannot express to you the pleasure I "often receive in discovering genius and innate good dispositions among this little multitude. It is botaniz"ing in human nature."*

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The benevolent exertions of Mr. Raikes were well seconded and widely diffused. His Schools received the early patronage and aid of several eminent Prelates, especially Dr. Porteus, at that time Bishop of Chester. Adam Smith bore his testimony to them in these remarkable words: "No plan has promised to effect a change "of manners with equal ease and simplicity since the "days of the Apostles." Thus it happened that schools on Mr. Raikes's plan soon started up in almost every county. In London they owed their first secure establishment to the zeal of Mr. William Fox, a wholesale draper, assisted by Mr. Jonas Hanway, a gentleman who had first risen into notice by the publication, on a most ample scale, of his Journey to Persia in 1753-who, since that time, had been forward in all works of benevolence, as in the foundation of the Magdalen Charity in 1758 and who will be remembered as a philanthropist long after he is forgotten as a traveller.†

The progress of Agriculture at this period was greatly aided by the exertions of Arthur Young. As a working farmer in his youth he had applied himself with zeal to the improvement of tillage, and what he had begun as a profession ever afterwards continued his pursuit. He first attracted the attention of the public in 1768, by an account of a Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties. The success of that experiment soon produced a Tour to the Northern Counties, in four volumes, and then another, of the same length, to the Eastern. These books were read the rather from their clear and lively

*Robert Raikes to Colonel Townley, November 25. 1783.

+ History of Sunday Schools, by Lewis G. Pray, Boston, U. S. 1847. See especially pp. 133-160.