Part 4

We have ridden to-day, though in the rain for a great part of the time, over the fine farm of Mr. PHILIP PALMER, at this place, and that of Mr. WALTER PALMER, in the adjoining parish of PENCOYD. Everything here is good, arable land, pastures, orchards, coppices, and timber trees, especially the elms, many scores of which approach nearly to a hundred feet in height. Mr. PHILIP PALMER has four acres of Swedes on four-feet ridges, drilled on the 11th and 14th of May. The plants were very much injured by the _fly_; so much, that it was a question whether the whole piece ought not to be ploughed up. However, the gaps in the rows were filled up by transplanting; and the ground was twice ploughed between the ridges. The crop here is very fine; and I should think that its weight could not be less than 17 tons to the acre.--Of Mr. WALTER PALMER'S Swedes, five acres were drilled, on ridges nearly four feet apart, on the 3rd of June; four acres on the 15th of June; and an acre and a half transplanted (after vetches) on the 15th of August. The weight of the first is about twenty tons to the acre; that of the second not much less; and that of the last even, five or six tons. The first two pieces were mauled to pieces by the _fly_; but the gaps were filled up by transplanting, the ground being digged on the tops of the ridges to receive the plants. So that, perhaps, a third part or more of the crop is due to the _transplanting_. As to the last piece, that transplanted on the 15th of August, after vetches, it is clear that there could have been no crop without transplanting; and, after all, the crop is by no means a bad one.--It is clear enough to me that this system will finally prevail all over England. The "loyal," indeed, may be afraid to adopt it, lest it should contain something of "radicalism." Sap-headed fools! They will find something to do, I believe, soon, besides railing against _radicals_. We will din "_radical_" and "_national faith_" in their ears, till they shall dread the din as much as a dog does the sound of the bell that is tied to the whip.

_Bollitree, Monday, 12 Nov._

Returned this morning and rode about the farm, and also about that of Mr. WINNAL, where I saw, for the first time, a plough going _without being held_. The man drove the three horses that drew the plough, and carried the plough round at the ends; but left it to itself the rest of the time. There was a skim coulter that turned the sward in under the furrow; and the work was done very neatly. This gentleman has six acres of _cabbages_, on ridges four feet apart, with a distance of thirty inches between the plants on the ridge. He has weighed one of what he deemed an average weight, and found it to weigh fifteen pounds without the stump. Now, as there are 4,320 upon an acre, the weight of the acres is _thirty tons_ all but 400 pounds! This is a prodigious crop, and it is peculiarly well suited for food for sheep at this season of the year. Indeed it is good for any farm-stock, oxen, cows, pigs: all like these loaved cabbages. For hogs in yard, after the stubbles are gone; and before the tops of the Swedes come in. What masses of manure may be created by this means! But, above all things, for _sheep_ to feed off upon the ground. Common turnips have not half the substance in them weight for weight. Then they are in the ground; they are _dirty_, and in wet weather the sheep must starve, or eat a great deal of dirt. This very day, for instance, what a sorry sight is a flock of fatting sheep upon turnips; what a mess of dirt and stubble! The cabbage stands boldly up above the ground, and the sheep eats it all up without treading a morsel in the dirt. Mr. WINNAL has a large flock of sheep feeding on his cabbages, which they will have finished, perhaps, by January. This gentleman also has some "_radical Swedes_," as they call them in Norfolk. A part of his crop is on ridges _five_ feet apart with _two rows_ on the ridge, a part on _four_ feet ridges with _one_ row on the ridge. I cannot see that anything is gained in weight by the double rows. I think that there may be nearly twenty tons to the acre. Another piece Mr. WINNAL transplanted after vetches. They are very fine; and, altogether, he has a crop that any one but a "_loyal_" farmer might envy him.--This is really the _radical_ system of husbandry. _Radical_ means, _belonging to the root; going to the root_. And the main principle of this system (first taught by _Tull_) is that the _root_ of the plant is to be fed by _deep tillage_ while it is growing; and to do this we must have our _wide distances_. Our system of husbandry is happily illustrative of our system of politics. Our lines of movement are fair and straightforward. We destroy all weeds, which, like tax-eaters, do nothing but devour the sustenance that ought to feed the valuable plants. Our plants are all _well fed_; and our nations of Swedes and of cabbages present a happy uniformity of enjoyments and of bulk, and not, as in the broad-cast system of Corruption, here and there one of enormous size, surrounded by thousands of poor little starveling things, scarcely distinguishable by the keenest eye, or, if seen, seen only to inspire a contempt of the husbandman. The Norfolk boys are, therefore, right in calling their Swedes _Radical Swedes_.

_Bollitree, Tuesday, 13 Nov._

Rode to-day to see a _grove_ belonging to Mrs. WESTPHALIN, which contains the very finest trees, _oaks_, _chestnuts_, and _ashes_, that I ever saw in England. This grove is worth going from London to Weston to see. The Lady, who is very much beloved in her neighbourhood, is, apparently, of the _old school_; and her house and gardens, situated in a beautiful dell, form, I think, the most comfortable looking thing of the kind that I ever saw. If she had known that I was in her grove, I dare say she would have expected it to blaze up in flames; or, at least, that I was come to view the premises previous to confiscation! I can forgive persons like her; but I cannot forgive the Parsons and others who have misled them! Mrs. WESTPHALIN, if she live many years, will find that the best friends of the owners of the land are those who have endeavoured to produce such _a reform of the Parliament_ as would have prevented the ruin of tenants.--This parish of WESTON is remarkable for having a Rector _who has constantly resided for twenty years_! I do not believe that there is an instance to match this in the whole kingdom. However, the "_reverend_" gentleman may be assured that, before many years have passed over their heads, they will be very glad to reside in their parsonage houses.

_Bollitree, Wednesday, 14 Nov._

Rode to the forest of Dean, up a very steep hill. The lanes here are between high banks, and on the sides of the hills the road is a rock, the water having long ago washed all the earth away. Pretty works are, I find, carried on here, as is the case in all the other _public forests_! Are these things _always_ to be carried on in this way? Here is a domain of thirty thousand acres of the finest timber-land in the world, and with coal-mines endless! Is this _worth nothing_? Cannot each acre yield ten trees a year? Are not these trees worth a pound apiece? Is not the estate worth three or four hundred thousand pounds a year? And does it yield _anything to the public_, to whom it belongs? But it is useless to waste one's breath in this way. We must have a _reform of the Parliament_: without it the whole thing will fall to pieces.--The only good purpose that these forests answer is that of furnishing a place of being to labourers' families on their skirts; and here their cottages are very neat, and the people look hearty and well, just as they do round the forests in Hampshire. Every cottage has a pig or two. These graze in the forest, and, in the fall, eat acorns and beech-nuts and the seed of the ash; for these last, as well as the others, are very full of oil, and a pig that is put to his shifts will pick the seed very nicely out from the husks. Some of these foresters keep cows, and all of them have bits of ground, cribbed, of course, at different times, from the forest: and to what better use can the ground be put? I saw several wheat stubbles from 40 rods to 10 rods. I asked one man how much wheat he had from about 10 rods. He said more than two bushels. Here is bread for three weeks, or more perhaps; and a winter's straw for the pig besides. Are these things nothing? The dead limbs and old roots of the forest give _fuel_; and how happy are these people, compared with the poor creatures about Great Bedwin and Cricklade, where they have neither land nor shelter, and where I saw the girls carrying home bean and wheat stubble for fuel! Those countries, always but badly furnished with fuel, the desolating and damnable system of paper-money, by sweeping away small homesteads, and laying ten farms into one, has literally _stripped_ of all shelter for the labourer. A farmer, in such cases, has a whole domain in his hands, and this not only to the manifest injury of the public at large, but in _open violation of positive law_. The poor forger is hanged; but where is the prosecutor of the monopolizing farmer, though the _law_ is as clear in the one case as in the other? But it required this infernal system to render every wholesome regulation nugatory; and to reduce to such abject misery a people famed in all ages for the goodness of their food and their dress. There is one farmer, in the North of Hampshire, who has nearly eight thousand acres of land in his hands; who grows fourteen hundred acres of wheat and two thousand acres of barley! He occupies what was formerly 40 farms! Is it any wonder that _paupers increase_? And is there not here cause enough for the increase of _poor_, without resorting to the doctrine of the barbarous and impious MALTHUS and his assistants, the _feelosofers_ of the Edinburgh Review, those eulogists and understrappers of the Whig-Oligarchy? "This farmer has done nothing _unlawful_," some one will say. I say he has; for there is a law to forbid him thus to monopolize land. But no matter; the laws, the management of the affairs of a nation, _ought to be such as to prevent the existence of the temptation to such monopoly_. And, even now, the evil ought to be remedied, and could be remedied, in the space of half a dozen years. The disappearance of the paper-money would do the thing in time; but this might be assisted by legislative measures.--In returning from the forest we were overtaken by my son, whom I had begged to come from London to see this beautiful country. On the road-side we saw two lazy-looking fellows, in long great-coats and bundles in their hands, going into a cottage. "What do you deal in?" said I, to one of them, who had not yet entered the house. "In the _medical way_," said he. And I find that vagabonds of this description are seen all over the country with _tea-licences_ in their pockets. They vend _tea_, _drugs_, and _religious tracts_. The first to bring the body into a debilitated state; the second to finish the corporeal part of the business; and the third to prepare the spirit for its separation from the clay! Never was a system so well calculated as the present to degrade, debase, and enslave a people! Law, and as if that were not sufficient, enormous subscriptions are made; everything that can be done is done to favour these perambulatory impostors in their depredations on the ignorant, while everything that can be done is done to prevent them from reading, or from hearing of, anything that has a tendency to give them rational notions, or to better their lot. However, all is not buried in ignorance. Down the deep and beautiful valley between Penyard Hill and the Hills on the side of the Forest of Dean, there runs a stream of water. On that stream of water there is a _paper-mill_. In that paper-mill there is a set of workmen. That set of workmen do, I am told, _take the Register_, and have taken it for years! It was to these good and sensible men, it is supposed, that the _ringing of the bells_ of Weston church, upon my arrival, was to be ascribed; for nobody that I visited had any knowledge of the cause. What a subject for lamentation with corrupt hypocrites! That even on this secluded spot there should be a leaven of common-sense! No: _all_ is not enveloped in brute ignorance yet, in spite of every artifice that hellish Corruption has been able to employ; in spite of all her menaces and all her brutalities and cruelties.

_Old Hall, Thursday, 15 Nov._

We came this morning from Bollitree to _Ross-Market_, and, thence, to this place. Ross is an old-fashioned town; but it is very beautifully situated, and if there is little of _finery_ in the appearance of the inhabitants, there is also little of _misery_. It is a good, plain country town, or settlement of tradesmen, whose business is that of supplying the wants of the cultivators of the soil. It presents to us nothing of rascality and roguishness of look which you see on almost every visage in the _borough-towns_, not excepting the visages of the women. I can tell a borough-town from another upon my entrance into it by the nasty, cunning, leering, designing look of the people; a look between that of a bad (for _some_ are good) Methodist Parson and that of a pickpocket. I remember, and I never shall forget, the horrid looks of the villains in Devonshire and Cornwall. Some people say, "O, _poor fellows_! It is not _their_ fault." No? Whose fault is it, then? The miscreants who bribe them? True, that these deserve the halter (and some of them may have it yet); but are not the takers of the bribes _equally_ guilty? If we be so very lenient here, pray let us ascribe to the _Devil_ all the acts of thieves and robbers: so we do; but we _hang_ the thieves and robbers, nevertheless. It is no very unprovoking reflection, that from these sinks of atrocious villany come a very considerable part of the men to fill places of emolument and trust. What a clog upon a Minister to have people, bred in such scenes, forced upon him! And why does this curse continue? However, its natural consequences are before us; and are coming on pretty fast upon each other's heels. There are the landlords and farmers in a state of absolute ruin: there is the Debt, pulling the nation down like as a stone pulls a dog under water. The system seems to have fairly wound itself up; to have tied itself hand and foot with cords of its own spinning!--This is the town to which POPE has given an interest in our minds by his eulogium on the "_Man of Ross_," a portrait of whom is hanging up in a house in which I now am.--The market at Ross was very _dull_. No wheat in demand. No buyers. It must _come down_. Lord Liverpool's _remedy_, a bad harvest, has assuredly failed. Fowls 2_s._ a couple; a goose from 2_s._ 6_d._ to 3_s._; a turkey from 3_s._ to 3_s._ 6_d._ Let a turkey come down to _a shilling_, as in France, and then we shall soon be to rights.

_Friday, 16 Nov._

A whole day most delightfully passed a hare-hunting, with a pretty pack of hounds kept here by Messrs. Palmer. They put me upon a horse that seemed to have been made on purpose for me, strong, tall, gentle and bold; and that carried me either over or through everything. I, who am just the weight of a four-bushel sack of good wheat, actually sat on his back from daylight in the morning to dusk (about nine hours) without once setting my foot on the ground. Our ground was at Orcop, a place about four miles' distance from this place. We found a hare in a few minutes after throwing off; and in the course of the day we had to find four, and were never more than ten minutes in finding. A steep and naked ridge, lying between two flat valleys, having a mixture of pretty large fields and small woods, formed our ground. The hares crossed the ridge forward and backward, and gave us numerous views and very fine sport.--I never rode on such steep ground before; and really, in going up and down some of the craggy places, where the rains had washed the earth from the rocks, I did think, once or twice, of my neck, and how Sidmouth would like to see me.--As to the _cruelty_, as some pretend, of this sport, that point I have, I think, settled in one of the Chapters of my "_Year's Residence in America_." As to the expense, a pack, even a full pack of harriers, like this, costs less than two bottles of wine a day with their inseparable concomitants. And as to the _time_ thus spent, hunting is inseparable from _early rising_: and with habits of early rising, who ever wanted time for any business?

_Oxford, Saturday, 17 Nov._

We left OLD HALL (where we always breakfasted by candle-light) this morning after breakfast; returned to Bollitree; took the Hereford coach as it passed about noon; and came in it through Gloucester, Cheltenham, Northleach, Burford, Whitney, and on to this city, where we arrived about ten o'clock. I could not leave _Herefordshire_ without bringing with me the most pleasing impressions. It is not for one to descend to

## particulars in characterising one's personal friends; and, therefore, I

will content myself with saying, that the treatment I met with in this beautiful county, where I saw not one single face that I had, to my knowledge, ever seen before, was much more than sufficient to compensate to me, personally, for all the atrocious calumnies, which, for twenty years, I have had to endure; but where is my country, a great part of the present hideous sufferings of which will, by every reflecting mind, be easily traced to these calumnies, which have been made the ground, or pretext, for rejecting that counsel by listening to which those sufferings would have been prevented; where is my country to find a compensation?----At _Gloucester_ (as there were no meals on the road) we furnished ourselves with nuts and apples, which, first a handful of nuts and then an apple, are, I can assure the reader, excellent and most wholesome fare. They say that nuts of all sorts are unwholesome; if they had been, I should never have written Registers, and if they were now, I should have ceased to write ere this; for, upon an average, I have eaten a pint a day since I left home. In short, I could be very well content to live on nuts, milk, and home-baked bread.----From _Gloucester_ to _Cheltenham_ the country is level, and the land rich and good. The fields along here are ploughed in ridges about 20 feet wide, and the angle of this species of _roof_ is pretty nearly as sharp as that of some slated roofs of houses. There is no wet under; it is the top wet only that they aim at keeping from doing mischief.--_Cheltenham_ is a nasty, ill-looking place, half clown and half cockney. The town is one street about a mile long; but, then, at some distance from this street, there are rows of white tenements, with green balconies, like those inhabited by the tax-eaters round London. Indeed, this place appears to be the residence of an assemblage of tax-eaters. These vermin shift about between London, Cheltenham, Bath, Bognor, Brighton, Tunbridge, Ramsgate, Margate, Worthing, and other spots in England, while some of them get over to France and Italy: just like those body-vermin of different sorts that are found in different parts of the tormented carcass at different hours of the day and night, and in different degrees of heat and cold.

Cheltenham is at the foot of a part of that chain of hills which form the sides of that _dish_ which I described as resembling the vale of Gloucester. Soon after quitting this resort of the lame and the lazy, the gormandizing and guzzling, the bilious and the nervous, we proceeded on, between stone walls, over a country little better than that from Cirencester to Burlip-hill.----A very poor, dull, and uninteresting country all the way to Oxford.

_Burghclere (Hants), Sunday, 18 Nov._