66

Encyclopædia" was issued, he was spoken of, almost contemptuously, as "an agricultural writer of some note in his day."

Probably the explanation is not to be sought in one direction only. Something may be due to the fact that from the date that he became a government official (Secretary to the Board of Agriculture), he seems to have lost to a great extent his touch with the popular movements of his time, and to have become an unsympathetic Tory of the old school. The excesses of the French Revolution had no little share in this transformation of so ardent a lover of liberty and of progress as Young had been up to 1792. Perhaps, too, his lack of success as a practical agriculturist led men to distrust his too confidently expressed advice; while the querulousness which marked his tone at the time that he was long and vainly waiting for a public appointment, and even subsequently, may have contributed to the dislike which was certainly at one time entertained towards him in sundry quarters. But beyond this, the literary defects of his work, which are very noticeable in this Irish Tour, are doubtless partly responsible for the neglect that his writings have suffered. On the one hand Young is certainly an author whom no one can read without acquiring a sense of his great personal worth-a sense that can hardly fail to develop into admiration and even affection as one proceeds. His pen is vigorous as well as fluent; but his style ("lively, dogmatical, disorderly," as described by Sir James Mackintosh), is too artless to allow his works a place in literature as such. His phrases are careless and inexact, and he is apt to intercalate, even into his most brilliant passages, statistics relating to such homely details as manures, and the like. Nevertheless there is a certain distinction about his writings, and there are to be detected flashes of humour and the pulsations of a great human heart, which serve to make all that he wrote extremely pleasant and instructive reading. Young has often been described as a very prejudiced man; but surely his freedom from prejudices of the ordinary kind is remarkable. He was prejudiced against small farms, against industrial villages, and against teadrinking; but in his readiness to see and describe things

as they really were, and not as he would have wished them to be, his freedom from prejudice is really remarkable; and Miss Edgeworth was doubtless right when she described his book on Ireland as "the first faithful portrait of its inhabitants." Taken as a whole, and especially if viewed as literature, Young's "Tour in Ireland" is doubtless inferior to his "Travels in France," which appeared twelve years later. McCulloch indeed described them as both excellent" and "Young's most valuable publications;" but the want of popular support accorded to his "Irish Tour" induced him to adopt a different method of dealing with the notes he took in France, and to throw the narrative portion, together with his reflections thereon, into the first volume, leaving the statistics to form a second volume, which would not indeed have been published at all but for the immediate success obtained by the first. In a prefatory note to the French "Travels " Young relates what a friend said to him on the importance of keeping the narrative portion of his journal intact :

"Depend on it, Young, that those notes you wrote at the moment are more likely to please than what you will now produce coolly, with the idea of reputation in your head: whatever you strike out will be what is most interesting, for you will be guided by the importance of the subject; and, believe me, it is not this consideration that pleases, so much as a careless and easy mode of thinking and writing, which every man exercises most when he does not compose for the press. That I am right in this opinion you yourself afford a proof. Your Tour in Ireland' (he was pleased to say) is one of the best accounts of the country I have read; yet it had no great success. Why? because the chief part of it is a farming diary, which, however valuable it may be to consult, nobody will read. If, therefore, you print your journal at all, print it so as to be read; or reject the method entirely and confine yourself to set dissertations."

·

I owe it to the liberality of the publishers that I am able in this edition to present Young's work on Ireland intact. It had been their first idea-and to anyone who turns over the pages of Part I. the idea will be intelligible enoughthat the book should be sternly cut down and compressed

into a single volume. No doubt there is matter in both parts of the Tour that the majority of readers will skip, and that is in fact of no intrinsic value. But, on the other hand, there is none that is not of interest to the dwellers on the spots described, and none that does not serve to illustrate the zeal and patience of the author; while, beyond this, we have his own express condemnation of abridgments. He had been grumbling at the paucity of subscribers to the "Annals of Agriculture," when a friend suggested that at some later time an abridgment of them might be put forth. His reply was characteristic and almost Johnsonian in its vigour:-"No abridgment I ever met with, if made by any person but the original author, was worth regarding.... I had rather see the 'Annals' annihilated than abridged." 991 To this it may be added that a book which claims to be a standard reproduction of a work that has long been out of print, and is now scarce, ought certainly to be a complete edition.

In editing this work my aim has been chiefly to secure a text that shall be accurate as well as complete, such that scholars may quote with confidence as authentic, and to add only such notes as the subject-matter seemed really to demand. In the main I have adhered to Young's orthography and punctuation, though I have of course held myself free to correct obvious mistakes, some of which were of such a kind as to lead to the conclusion that the author did not correct his proofs. Such spelling as is merely archaic I have retained, and I have extended this indulgence to Young's "cabbins" and "turneps," though in the latter case I have had my doubts, as throughout the year 1777 he spelt the word "turnips." The names of places have also sometimes given trouble, and in a few cases I have been unable to identify the spots. Travelling in days when guide-books and directories were unknown, Young commonly entered in his diary the name just as it sounded in his ears; and he is not eveu uniform in his spelling of the same name. I have usually given in a footnote the modern spelling, together with the county; but yet there remain a few names which probably could only

"Annals," vol. xv. p. 185.

be identified by the local inhabitants; and this applies especially to farmsteads dignified as "towns;" for what was "Smithstown" when Young visited it may be "Brownstown" to-day.

The inclusion in this edition of all that Young subsequently wrote on Ireland brings into prominence the singular fact that after the year 1797 he kept silence about Ireland altogether. The explanation of this may perhaps be found in the offence which he took at the Irish Parliament having profited by his advice to put an end to the bounty on the inland carriage of corn without making any return to him for his suggestions. Yet it is not easy to see by what right he could have looked for any remuneration for advice which cost him nothing; while his overfrank criticism of certain acts of the Dublin Society, which he described as “absurd" and "ridiculous," was bound to cause offence on the other side. That Young's silence should have continued throughout the time that the Union was being carried is certainly remarkable, It was a policy that he himself had advocated nearly five and twenty years earlier; yet, with the pages of the "Annals of Agriculture" at his service-pages in which, as the bibliography appended to this edition shows, he wrote with frequency and with the keenest interest on political affairs as well as on agricultural topics-he had nothing to say on the subject. It may have been that he regarded with disfavour those corrupt methods by which the Union was actually carried; or perhaps the form that the Union ultimately took was displeasing to him. We know from his own statement' that he had looked for an Union under which the Irish Parliament at Dublin would have remained "for the civil protection of the kingdom,"-a plan proposed by the Earl of Shelburne, who has also put on record the fact that the elder Pitt was opposed to the Union for the reason, of special interest at the date of the publication of this new edition, "that the British Legislature should not be deluged by an addition of Irish peers and commoners." Young's position, in fact, as a frank and unselfish unionist before the Union, is in welcome contrast with the spirit that so largely prevailed

1 Vol. ii. p. 251.

། །

later, the false and sordid temper of which has recently been unsparingly unveiled. He desired the Union in the interests of Ireland. He was convinced that the country had everything to gain and nothing of importance to lose by the proposed political arrangement; and, of the advantages which Ireland was bound to secure by being freed from the hostile tariffs of England, there could of course be no doubt. It should surely do something to remove the bitterness with which so many Irishmen have regarded and still regard the policy of the Union, to read in Young's pages how one typical Englishman-and doubtless there were scores of the same mind with him-desired it honestly for the sake of Ireland.

As a political economist it must be confessed that Young is now very much out of date. He had definitely taken up his position on the lines laid down by Sir James Steuart before Adam Smith's epoch-making "Wealth of Nations" had been published-it was in fact published in 1776, the year that Young first set foot in Ireland—and many of his ideas are now obsolete. Perhaps he may be best described as an English physiocrate. In his judgment it was only by agriculture, by mining, and to some extent by fisheries that a nation reaped a harvest; commerce and manufactures as sources of wealth seemed to him contemptible; and the possession of colonies only resulted in weakness to the mother country. His opinion that, as a rule, farming on a large scale has alone a fair prospect of success, can indeed hardly be said to be obsolete, since it has been recently revived in our own day under quite altered conditions; while his other (not quite consistent) belief in peasant proprietorship-a belief that was much strengthened by his travels in France, where he saw the system of small freeholds worked by their owners widely established even before the Revolution-has also many supporters at the present time; but of course the new doctrine, that the State should by rights be the sole and universal landlord, had never so much as entered Young's head.

And similarly his political ethics savour wholly of the old régime. Most of us have indeed something to learn from his broad and kindly treatment of social and religious questions; yet there is occasionally a touch of contempt in