In 1765 Young married the wrong woman, and started upon a career of profound matrimonial discomfort, and even misery; a blunt, truthful writer, he makes no bones about it.  It was an unhappy marriage from its beginning in 1765 to its end in 1815.  Young himself, though by no means vivacious in this autobiography, where he frankly complains of himself as having no more wit than a fig, was a very popular person with all classes and both sexes.  He was an enormous diner-out, and his authority as an agriculturist, united to his undeniable charm as a companion, threw open to him all the great places in the country.  But his finances were a perpetual trouble.  On carrot seeds and cabbages he was an authority, but from 1766-1775 his income never exceeded L300 a year.  He had an excellent mother, whom he dearly loved, and who with the characteristic bluntness of the family bade him think less about carrots and more about his Creator.  ’You may call all this rubbish if you please, but a time will come when you will be convinced whose notions are rubbish, yours or mine.’  And the old lady was quite right, as mothers so frequently turn out to be.  In 1778 Young went over to Ireland as agent to Lord Kingsborough.  He got L500 down, and was to have an annual salary of L500 and a house.  Young soon got to work, and became anxious to persuade his employer to let his lands direct to the occupying cottar, and so get rid of the middlemen.  This did not suit a certain Major Thornhill, a relative and leaseholder, and thereupon a pretty plot was hatched.  Lady K. had a Catholic governess, a Miss Crosby, upon whom it was thought my lord occasionally cast the eye of partiality, whilst Arthur himself got on very well with her ladyship, who was heard to pronounce him to be, as he was, ’one of the most lively, agreeable fellows.’  Out of these materials the Major and his helpmeet concocted a double plot—­namely, to make the lord jealous of the steward, and the lady jealous of the governess, and to cause both lord and lady respectively to believe that the steward was deeply engaged both in abetting the amour of the lord and the governess, and in prosecuting his own amour with the lady.  The result was that both governess and steward got notice to quit; but—­and this is very Irish—­both went off with life annuities, the governess with one of L50 per annum, and the steward with one of L72, and, what is still more odd, we find Young at the end of his life in receipt of his annuity.  They were an expensive couple, these two.

In 1780 Young published his Irish Tour, which was immediately successful and popular in both kingdoms.  In it he attacked the bounty paid on the land-carriage of corn to Dublin.  The bounty was, in the session of Parliament next after the publication of Young’s book, reduced by one-half, and soon given up entirely.  Young maintains that this saved Ireland L80,000 a year.  Nobody seems to have said ’Thank you.’