But whatever may be thought of the respective merits of Miss More’s nineteen volumes and Sir Walter’s ninety-eight, there is no doubt that Barley Wood was as much infested with visitors as ever was Abbotsford.  Eighty a week!

’From twelve o’clock until three each day a constant stream of carriages and pedestrians filled the evergreen bordered avenue leading from the Wrington village road.’

Among them came Lady Gladstone and W.E.G., aged six, the latter carrying away with him the Sacred Dramas, to be preserved during a long life.

Miss More was a vivacious and agreeable talker, who certainly failed to do herself justice with her pen.  Her health was never good, yet, as she survived thirty-five of her prescribing physicians, her vitality must have been great.  Her face in Opie’s portrait is very pleasant.  If I was rude to her ten years ago, I apologize and withdraw; but as for her books, I shall leave them where they are—­buried in a cliff facing due north, with nothing between them and the Pole but leagues upon leagues of a wind-swept ocean.

ARTHUR YOUNG

The name of Arthur Young is a familiar one to all readers of that history which begins with the forebodings of the French Revolution.  Thousands of us learnt to be interested in him as the ‘good Arthur,’ ‘the excellent Arthur,’ of Thomas Carlyle, a writer who had the art of making not only his own narrative, but the sources of it, attractive.  Even ‘Carrion-Heath,’ in the famous introductory chapter to the Cromwell, is invested with a kind of charm, whilst in the stormy firmament of the French Revolution the star of Arthur Young twinkles with a mild effulgency.  The autobiography of such a man could hardly fail to be interesting.[A] The ‘good Arthur’ was born in 1741, the younger son of a small ‘squarson’ who inherited from his father the manor of Bradfield Combust, in Suffolk, but held the living of Thames Ditton.  Here he made the acquaintance of the Onslow family, and Speaker Onslow was one of Arthur’s godfathers.  The Rev. Dr. Young died in 1759, much in debt.  The Bradfield property had been settled for life on his wife, who had brought her husband some fortune, and to the manor-house she retired to economize.

 [Footnote A:  The Autobiography of Arthur Young.  Edited by M. Betham
 Edwards.  Smith, Elder and Co.]

Arthur’s education had been muddled; and an attempt to make a merchant of him having fallen through, he found himself, on his father’s death, aged eighteen, ‘without education, profession, or employment,’ and his whole fortune, during his mother’s life, consisting of a copyhold farm of 20 acres, producing as many pounds.  In these circumstances, to think of literature was well-nigh inevitable, and, in 1762, the autobiography tells us: