In May, 1783, was born the child ‘Bobbin,’ whose death, fourteen years later, was to change the current of Young’s life.  The following year Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, confining himself, however, to Calais and its neighbourhood, and in the same year his mother died, and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, ’this patch of landed property,’ as Young calls Bradfield, descended upon him.  His first famous journey in France was made between May and November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small sum of L118 15s. 2d.  His second and third French journeys were made in July, 1788, and in June, 1789.  The third was the longest, and extended into 1790.  Three years later Young was appointed, by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board of Agriculture.  A melancholy account is given by Young of a visit he paid Burke at Gregory’s in 1796.  Young drove there in the chariot of his fussy chief, Sir John Sinclair, to discover what Burke’s intentions might be as to an intended publication of his relating to the price of labour.  The account, which occupies four pages, is too long for quotation.  It concludes thus: 

’I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant gifts of any penman of the age in which he lived.  Whose conversation has often fascinated me, whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have delighted and instructed the world; whose name will without question descend to the latest posterity.  But to behold so great a genius, so deepened with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the grave under accumulated misery—­to see all this in a character I venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as low-spirited as himself.’

But Young himself was soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow, not so much of Death as of Joyless Life.  His beloved and idolized Bobbin died on July 14, 1797.  She seems to have been a wise little maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and not scrupling to speak of the child’s mother in a disagreeable manner.  Bobbin replies with delightful composure to these worrying letters: 

’I have just got six of the most beautiful little rabbits you ever saw; they skip about so prettily you can’t think, and I shall have some more in a few weeks.  Having had so much physic, I am right down tired of it.  I take it still twice a day—­my appetite is better.  What can you mind politics so for?  I don’t think about them.—­Well, good-bye, and believe me, dear papa, your dutiful Daughter.’

After poor little Bobbin’s death, it happened to Arthur Young even as his mother foretold.  Carrots and crops and farming tours hastily retreat, and we find the eminent agriculturist busying himself,