Part 5

We left Oxford early, and went on, through _Abingdon_ (Berks) to _Market-Ilsley_. It is a saying, hereabouts, that at Oxford they make the living pay for the dead, which is precisely according to the Pitt-System. Having smarted on this account, we were afraid to eat again at an Inn; so we pushed on through Ilsley towards Newbury, breakfasting upon the residue of the nuts, aided by a new supply of apples bought from a poor man, who exhibited them in his window. Inspired, like Don Quixote, by the _sight of the nuts_, and recollecting the last night's bill, I exclaimed: "Happy! thrice happy and blessed, that golden age, when men lived on the simple fruits of the earth and slaked their thirst at the pure and limpid brook! when the trees shed their leaves to form a couch for their repose, and cast their bark to furnish them with a canopy! Happy age; when no Oxford landlord charged two men, who had dropped into a common coach-passenger room, and who had swallowed three pennyworths of food, 'four shillings for _teas_,' and 'eighteen pence for _cold meat_,' 'two shillings for _moulds and fire_' in this common coach-room, and 'five shillings for _beds_!'" This was a sort of grace before meat to the nuts and apples; and it had much more merit than the harangue of Don Quixote; for he, before he began upon the nuts, had stuffed himself well with goat's flesh and wine, whereas we had absolutely _fled_ from the breakfast-table and blazing fire at Oxford.--Upon beholding the masses of buildings at Oxford devoted to what they call "_learning_," I could not help reflecting on the drones that they contain and the wasps they send forth! However, malignant as some are, the great and prevalent characteristic is _folly_: emptiness of head; want of talent; and one half of the fellows who are what they call _educated_ here, are unfit to be clerks in a grocer's or mercer's shop.--As I looked up at what they call _University Hall_, I could not help reflecting that what I had written, even since I left Kensington on the 29th of October, would produce more effect, and do more good in the world, than all that had for a hundred years been written by all the members of this University, who devour, perhaps, not less than _a million pounds a year_, arising from property, completely at the disposal of the "Great Council of the Nation;" and I could not help exclaiming to myself: "Stand forth, ye big-wigged, ye gloriously feeding Doctors! Stand forth, ye _rich_ of that church whose _poor_ have had given them _a hundred thousand pounds a year_, not out of your riches, but out of the _taxes_, raised, in part, from the _salt_ of the labouring man! Stand forth and face me, who have, from the pen of my leisure hours, sent, amongst your flocks, a hundred thousand sermons in ten months! More than you have all done for the last half century!"--I exclaimed in vain. I dare say (for it was at peep of day) that not a man of them had yet endeavoured to unclose his eyes.--In coming thro' Abingdon (Berks) I could not help thinking of that great financier, Mr. John Maberly, by whom this place has, I believe, the honour to be represented in the Collective Wisdom of the Nation.--In the way to Ilsley we came across a part of that fine tract of land, called the _Vale of Berkshire_, where they grow _wheat_ and _beans_, one after another, for many years together. About three miles before we reached Ilsley we came to _downs_, with, as is always the case, chalk under. Between Ilsley and Newbury the country is enclosed; the land middling, a stony loam; the woods and coppices frequent, and neither very good, till we came within a short distance of Newbury. In going along we saw a piece of wheat with cabbage-leaves laid all over it at the distance, perhaps, of eight or ten feet from each other. It was to catch the _slugs_. The slugs, which commit their depredations in the _night_, creep under the leaves in the morning, and by turning up the leaves you come at the slugs, and crush them, or carry them away. But besides the immense daily labour attending this, the slug, in a field sowed with wheat, has a _clod_ to creep under at every foot, and will not go five feet to get under a cabbage-leaf. Then again, if the day be _wet_, the slug works by day as well as by night. It is the sun and drought that he shuns, and not the light. Therefore the only effectual way to destroy slugs is to sow lime, in dust, and _not slaked_. The slug is wet, he has hardly any skin, his _slime_ is his covering; the smallest dust of hot lime kills him; and a few bushels to the acre are sufficient. You must sow the lime at _dusk_; for then the slugs are sure to be out. Slugs come after a crop that has long afforded a great deal of shelter from the sun; such as peas and vetches. In gardens they are nursed up by strawberry beds and by weeds, by asparagus beds, or by anything that remains for a long time to keep the summer-sun from the earth. We got about three o'clock to this nice, snug little farmhouse, and found our host, Mr. Budd, at home.

_Burghclere, Monday, 19 Nov._

A thorough wet day, the only day the greater part of which I have not spent out of doors since I left home.

_Burghclere, Tuesday, 20 Nov._

With Mr. Budd, we rode to-day to see the _Farm of Tull_, at _Shalborne_, in Berkshire. Mr. Budd did the same thing with Arthur Young twenty-seven years ago. It was a sort of _pilgrimage_; but as the distance was ten miles, we thought it best to perform it on horseback.--We passed through the parish of _Highclere_, where they have _enclosed commons_, worth, as tillage land, not one single farthing an acre, and never will and never can be. As a common it afforded a little picking for geese and asses, and in the moory parts of it, a little fuel for the labourers. But now it really can afford nothing. It will all fall to common again by degrees. This madness, this blind eagerness to gain, is now, I hope, pretty nearly over.--At _East Woody_ we passed the house of a Mr. Goddard, which is uninhabited, he residing at Bath.--At _West Woody_ (Berks) is the estate of Mr. Sloper, a very pretty place. A beautiful sporting country. Large fields, small woods, dry soil. What has taken place here is an instance of the workings of the system. Here is a large gentleman's house. But the proprietor _lets it_ (it is, just now, empty), and resides in a _farmhouse_ and farms his own estate. Happy is the landlord who has the good sense to do this in time. This is a fine farm, and here appears to be very judicious farming. Large tracts of turnips; clean land; stubbles ploughed up early; ploughing with oxen; and a very large and singularly fine flock of sheep. Everything that you see, land, stock, implements, fences, buildings; all do credit to the owner; bespeak his sound judgment, his industry and care. All that is wanted here is the _radical husbandry_; because that would enable the owner to keep three times the quantity of stock. However, since I left home, I have seen but very few farms that I should prefer to that of Mr. Sloper, whom I have not the pleasure to know, and whom, indeed, I never heard of till I saw his farm. At a village (certainly named by some _author_) called _Inkpen_, we passed a neat little house and paddock, the residence of a Mr. Butler, a nephew of Dr. Butler, who died Bishop of Oxford, and whom I can remember hearing preach at Farnham in Surrey when I was a very very little boy. I have his features and his wig as clearly in my recollection as if I had seen them but yesterday; and I dare say I have not thought of Doctor Butler for forty years before to-day. The "loyal" (oh, the pious gang!) will say that my memory is good as to the face and wig, but bad as to the Doctor's _Sermons_. Why, I must confess that I have no recollection of them; but, then, do I not _make Sermons myself_?----At about two miles from Inkpen we came to the end of our pilgrimage. The farm, which was Mr. _Tull's_; where he used the first drill that ever was used; where he practised his husbandry; where he wrote that book, which does so much honour to his memory, and to which the cultivators of England owe so much; this farm is on an open and somewhat bleak spot in Berkshire, on the borders of Wiltshire, and within a very short distance of a part of Hampshire. The ground is a loam, mixed with flints, and has the chalk at no great distance beneath it. It is, therefore, free from _wet_; needs no water furrows; and is pretty good in its nature. The house, which has been improved by Mr. Blandy, the present proprietor, is still but a plain farmhouse. Mr. Blandy has lived here thirty years, and has brought up ten children to man's and woman's estate. Mr. Blandy was from home, but Mrs. Blandy received and entertained us in a very hospitable manner.--We returned, not along the low land, but along the top of the downs, and through Lord Caernarvon's park, and got home after a very pleasant day.

_Burghclere, Wednesday, 21 Nov._

We intended to have a hunt; but the foxhounds came across and rendered it impracticable. As an instance of the change which rural customs have undergone since the hellish paper-system has been so furiously at work, I need only mention the fact, that, forty years ago, there were _five_ packs of _foxhounds_ and _ten_ packs of _harriers_ kept within _ten miles_ of Newbury; and that now there is _one_ of the former (kept, too, by _subscription_) and _none_ of the latter, except the few couple of dogs kept by Mr. Budd! "So much the better," says the shallow fool, who cannot duly estimate the difference between a resident _native_ gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost, practicing hospitality without ceremony, from habit and not on calculation; and a gentry, only now-and-then residing at all, having no relish for country-delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and relying for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon the dread of their power. The war and paper-system has brought in nabobs, negro-drivers, generals, admirals, governors, commissaries, contractors, pensioners, sinecurists, commissioners, loan-jobbers, lottery-dealers, bankers, stock-jobbers; not to mention the long and _black list_ in gowns and three-tailed wigs. You can see but few good houses not in possession of one or the other of these. These, with the Parsons, are now the magistrates. Some of the _consequences_ are before us; but they have not all yet arrived. A taxation that sucks up fifty millions a year _must_ produce a new set of proprietors every twenty years or less; and the proprietors, while they last, can be little better than tax-collectors to the government, and scourgers of the people.--I must not quit _Burghclere_ without noticing Mr. Budd's _radical_ Swedes and other things. His is but miniature farming; but it is very good, and very interesting. Some time in May, he drilled a piece of Swedes on four feet ridges. The fly took them off. He had cabbage and mangel-wurzel plants to put in their stead. Unwilling to turn back the ridges, and thereby bring the dung to the top, he planted the cabbages and mangel-wurzel on the ridges where the Swedes had been drilled. This was done in June. Late in July, his neighbour, a farmer Hulbert, had a field of Swedes that he was hoeing. Mr. Budd now put some manure in the furrows between the ridges, and ploughed a furrow over it from each ridge. On this he planted Swedes, taken from farmer Hulbert's field. Thus his plantation consisted of rows of plants _two feet apart_. The result is a prodigious crop. Of the mangel-wurzel (greens and all) he has not less than twenty tons to the acre. He can scarcely have less of the cabbages, some of which are _green savoys_ as fine as I ever saw. And of the Swedes, many of which weigh from five to nine pounds, he certainly has more than twenty tons to the acre. So that here is a crop of, at the very least, _forty tons to the acre_. This piece is not much more than half an acre; but he will, perhaps, not find so much cattle food upon any four acres in the county. He is, and long has been, feeding four milch cows, large, fine, and in fine condition, upon cabbages sometimes, and sometimes on mangel-wurzel leaves. The butter is excellent. Not the smallest degree of bitterness or bad taste of any sort. Fine colour and fine taste. And here, upon not three quarters of an acre of ground, he has, if he manage the thing well, enough food for these four cows to the month of May! Can any system of husbandry equal this? What would he do with these cows, if he had not this crop? He could not keep one of them, except on hay. And he owes all this crop to transplanting. He thinks that the transplanting, fetching the Swede plants and all, might cost him ten or twelve shillings. It was done by women, who had never done such a thing before.----However, he must get in his crop before the hard weather comes; or my Lord Caernarvon's hares will help him. They have begun already; and it is curious that they have begun on the mangel-wurzel roots. So that hares, at any rate, have set the seal of merit upon this root.

_Whitchurch, Thursday (night), 22 Nov._

We have come round here, instead of going by Newbury in consequence of a promise to Mr. BLOUNT at Uphusband, that I would call on him on my return. We left Uphusband by lamp-light, and, of course, we could see little on our way.

_Kensington, Friday, 23 Nov._

Got home by the coach. At leaving Whitchurch we soon passed the mill where the Mother-Bank paper is made! Thank God, this mill is likely soon to want employment! Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to "_'Squire_" Portal, the _paper-maker_. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic shrewdness, call it "_Rag Hall_"!--I perceive that they are planting oaks on the "_wastes_," as the _Agriculturasses_ call them, about _Hartley Row_; which is very good; because the herbage, after the first year, is rather increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and to the _real wealth_ of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of the planter, who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because he plants for his children's children.--The planter here is LADY MILDMAY, who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here. It is impossible to praise this act of hers too much, especially when one considers her _age_. I beg a thousand pardons! I do not mean to say that her Ladyship is _old_; but she has long had grand-children. If her Ladyship had been a reader of old dread-death and dread-devil Johnson, that teacher of moping and melancholy, she never would have planted an oak tree. If the writings of this time-serving, mean, dastardly old pensioner had got a firm hold of the minds of the people at large, the people would have been bereft of their very souls. These writings, aided by the charm of pompous sound, were fast making their way, till light, reason, and the French revolution came to drive them into oblivion; or, at least, to confine them to the shelves of repentant, married old rakes, and those of old stock-jobbers with young wives standing in need of something to keep down the unruly ebullitions which are apt to take place while the "dearies" are gone hobbling to 'Change.----"After _pleasure_ comes _pain_," says Solomon; and after the sight of Lady Mildmay's truly noble plantations, came that of the clouts of the "gentlemen cadets" of the "_Royal Military College of Sandhurst_!" Here, close by the road side, is the _drying-ground_. Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines, covering, perhaps, an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to "_York_ Place" on "_Osnaburg_ Hill." And is there never to be an _end_ of these things? Away to the left, we see that immense building, which contains children _breeding up to be military commanders_! Has this plan cost so little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself this question: Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing, created by money _raised by loan_; will this thing be upheld by means of taxes, _while the interest of the Debt is reduced_, on the ground that the nation is _unable to pay the interest in full_?--Answer that question, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Brougham, or Scarlett.

KENTISH JOURNAL: FROM KENSINGTON TO DARTFORD, ROCHESTER, CHATHAM, AND FAVERSHAM.

_Tuesday, December 4, 1821, Elverton Farm, near Faversham, Kent._

This is the first time, since I went to France, in 1792, that I have been on this side of _Shooters' Hill_. The land, generally speaking, from Deptford to Dartford is poor, and the surface ugly by nature, to which ugliness there has been made, just before we came to the latter place, a considerable addition by the enclosure of a common, and by the sticking up of some shabby-genteel houses, surrounded with dead fences and things called gardens, in all manner of ridiculous forms, making, all together, the bricks, hurdle-rods and earth say, as plainly as they can speak, "Here dwell _vanity_ and _poverty_." This is a little excrescence that has grown out of the immense sums which have been drawn from other parts of the kingdom to be expended on Barracks, Magazines, Martello-Towers, Catamarans, and all the excuses for lavish expenditure which the war for the Bourbons gave rise to. All things will return; these rubbishy flimsy things, on this common, will first be deserted, then crumble down, then be swept away, and the cattle, sheep, pigs and geese will once more graze upon the common, which will again furnish heath, furze and turf for the labourers on the neighbouring lands.--After you leave Dartford the land becomes excellent. You come to a bottom of chalk, many feet from the surface, and when that is the case the land is sure to be good; no _wet_ at bottom, no deep ditches, no water furrows necessary; sufficiently moist in dry weather, and no water lying about upon it in wet weather for any length of time. The chalk acts as a filtering-stone, not as a sieve, like gravel, and not as a dish, like clay. The chalk acts as the soft stone in Herefordshire does; but it is not so congenial to trees that have tap-roots.--Along through Gravesend towards Rochester the country presents a sort of gardening scene. Rochester (the Bishop of which is, or lately was, _tax Collector for London and Middlesex_) is a small but crowded place, lying on the south bank of the beautiful Medway, with a rising ground on the other side of the city. _Stroud_, which you pass through before you come to the bridge, over which you go to enter Rochester; _Rochester_ itself, and _Chatham_, form, in fact, one main street of about two miles and a half in length.--Here I was got into the scenes of my cap-and-feather days! Here, at between sixteen and seventeen, I enlisted for a soldier. Upon looking up towards the fortifications and the barracks, how many recollections crowded into my mind! The girls in these towns do not seem to be _so pretty_ as they were thirty-eight years ago; or, am I not so quick in discovering beauties as I was then? Have thirty-eight years corrected my taste, or made me a hypercritic in these matters? Is it that I now look at them with the solemnness of a "professional man," and not with the enthusiasm and eagerness of an "amateur?" I leave these questions for philosophers to solve. One thing I will say for the young women of these towns, and that is, that I always found those of them that I had the great happiness to be acquainted with, evince a sincere desire to do their best to smooth the inequalities of life, and to give us, "brave fellows," as often as they could, strong beer, when their churlish masters of fathers or husbands would have drenched us to death with small. This, at the out-set of life, gave me a high opinion of the judgment and justice of the female sex; an opinion which has been confirmed by the observations of my whole life.--This Chatham has had some monstrous _wens_ stuck on to it by the lavish expenditure of the war. These will moulder away. It is curious enough that I should meet with a gentleman in an inn at Chatham to give me a picture of the house-distress in that enormous wen, which, during the war, was stuck on to Portsmouth. Not less than fifty thousand people had been drawn together there! These are now dispersing. The coagulated blood is diluting and flowing back through the veins. Whole streets are deserted, and the eyes of the houses knocked out by the boys that remain. The jackdaws, as much as to say, "Our turn to be inspired and to teach is come," are beginning to take possession of the Methodist chapels. The gentleman told me that he had been down to Portsea to sell half a street of houses, left him by a relation; and that nobody would give him anything for them further than as very cheap fuel and rubbish! Good God! And is this "prosperity?" Is this the "prosperity of the war?" Have I not, for twenty long years, been regretting the existence of these unnatural embossments; these white-swellings, these odious wens, produced by _Corruption_ and engendering crime and misery and slavery? We shall see the whole of these wens abandoned by the inhabitants, and, at last, the cannons on the fortifications may be of some use in battering down the buildings.--But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire"? What is to become of that multitude of towns that has been stuck up around it? The village of Kingston was smothered in the town of Portsea; and why? Because taxes, drained from other parts of the kingdom, were brought thither.