five or six per cent who drift off into the
army, the stable, or the kitchen. Why the
English peasantry, the border men excepted,
should be inferior in energy, or in the art
of bettering themselves, to their compeers
in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, has never
yet been satisfactorily explained; unless—
and I do not mean to say that this particular
explanation is wholly satisfactory—it
be from the innate sluggishness of blood.
Whatever may be the cause, there is a lack
of imagination among them that leads to a
lack of enterprise, and that seems somehow
or other to run in the blood of those portions
of the British people that are not of
Celtic origin or intermixture. The peasantry
of Saxon England have produced
among them but two poets, Robert Bloomfield,
the author of the Farmer's Boy, and
John Clare, author of the Village Minstrel;
neither of them a poet with any claims to
the first or even to the second rank, while
Scotland's poets, sprung from the agricultural
and labouring classes, are to be numbered
by scores, including Robert Burns, a
greater than fifty Bloomfields and Clares
rolled into one, and a long bead roll of
genuine bards and minstrels, of whom it is
sufficient to name Allan Ramsay, the barber,
William Ferguson, the sailor, James Hogg,
the shepherd, Robert Tannahill, the weaver,
Hugh Miller, the stonemason, and Jean
Glover, the strolling tinker.

I once endeavoured to make a more intimate
acquaintance with one English peasant,
than squires and parsons and charitable
ladies ever think it worth while to
cultivate with persons of a caste, from
which their own caste is as much removed
as that of the brahmin from the pariah.
The old man was a fair specimen of his
class, neither much better nor much worse,
neither much more intelligent nor much
more apathetic than his fellows. He was
seventy years of age when I knew him
first, and he lived for three years afterwards
in the workhouse, the sole resource
for such as he, when old age comes upon
them. His name was Plant, and the parson
of the rural parish in which he was
born and bred, and in the neighbourhood
of which he had laboured until his limbs
grew stiff and his right hand lost its cunning,
informed me that there had been
people of that name in the parish for five
hundred years; perhaps, he said, offshoots
of the royal house of the Plantagenets,
but, at all events, a very ancient family:
as if all families were not equally ancient,
if we could but trace them! William
Plant married when he was nineteen years
of age, and in the receipt of the not very
magnificent wages of ten shillings a week.
His wife, who was a year older than himself,
was a domestic servant in the family
of the village doctor, and had saved from
her wages at the time when Plant became
enamoured of her no less a sum than seven
pounds, a fortune in the eyes of one who,
as he said, had never before held two
sovereigns in his hand. The seven pounds
went a good way towards furnishing their
little cottage of two rooms; and for two or
three years, as the wife was a handy woman,
and could do plain needlework, wash,
iron, and get up fine linen, their humble
household was happy enough, and Plant
thought he had done a good thing to
marry. " It kept me out of the public-
house," he said, "and out of bad company. It
had been ' my delight of a shiny night in the
season of the year' just to go out for a lark,
but I never did that after I was married.
By-and-by the children came, and twice
the wife had twins. It seemed to me that
the twins brought us good luck, for the
squire's lady was very kind when they
came, and sent clothes, and baby linen,
and a little port wine for the missus. The
vicar's wife was good too, and made as
much fuss over the babies, for a month or
two, as if they were real live angels. And
it so happened that before twelve years
passed over, the missus and I were in
possession of eleven children, and very
hard put to it to find them bread, let
alone clothes. The missus, after her fifth
child, was no longer able to work, and had
more than enough to do to keep the house
in order and mend the rags. My wages
were by this time two shillings a day.
But, Lord love ye! that was nothing, not
enough for two of us, let alone thirteen.
How we managed I don't know. They say
God Almighty always sends bread when
he sends mouths and stomachs. I did not
find it so always, and when one little child
—a poor sickly ailing thing it was—died
of fever, I was, I am afraid, almost wicked
enough not to feel very sorry. It was buried
by the parish, and the missus wept over it,
just as if it had been the dearest treasure
in the world, as no doubt it was to her.
It is very hard to keep the little things.
But very hard to lose them all the same,
especially for the womenkind. We got
helped on a bit by the parish every winter;
and the two elder children—a boy and a
girl—when they were eight years old,
earned a shilling now and then by weeding