Passing towards England we may for a moment look to Wales, and then, if we desire to find the effects of centralization and its consequent absenteeism, in neglected schools, ignorant teachers, decaying and decayed churches, and drunken clergymen with immoral flocks, our object will be accomplished by studying the pages of the “Edinburgh Review” [2] In such a state of things as is there described there can be little tendency to the development of intellect, and little of either ability or inclination to reward the authors of books.  In my next, I will look to England herself.

   [Footnote 2:  April, 1853, art.  “The Church in the Mountains.”]

LETTER IV.

Arrived in England, we find there everywhere the same tendency towards centralization.  Of the 200,000 small landed proprietors of the days of Adam Smith but few remain, and of even those the number is gradually diminishing.  Great landed estates have everywhere absentees for owners, agents for managers, and day laborers for workmen.  The small landowner was a resident, and had a personal interest in the details of the neighborhood, not now felt by either the owner or the laborer.  This state of things existed to a considerable extent five-and-thirty years ago, but it has since grown with great rapidity.  At that time Great Britain could exhibit to the world perhaps as large a body of men and women of letters, with world-wide reputation, as ever before existed in any country or nation, as will be seen from the following list:—­

Byron,           Wilson,      Clarkson,
Moore,           Hallam,      Landor,
Scott,           Roscoe,      Wellington,[1]
Wordsworth,      Malthus,     Robert Hall,
Rogers,          Ricardo,     Taylor,
Campbell,        Mill,        Romilly,
Joanna Baillie,  Chalmers,    Edgeworth,
Southey,         Coleridge,   Hannah More,
Gifford,         Heber,       Dalton,
Jeffrey,         Bentham,     Davy,
Sydney Smith,    Brown,       Wollaston,
Brougham,        Mackintosh,  The Herschels,
Horner,          Stewart,     Dr. Clarke.

   [Footnote 1:  Wellington’s dispatches place him in the first rank of
    historians.]

DeQuincey was then just coming on the stage.  Crabbe, Shelley, Keats, Croly, Hazlitt, Lockhart, Lamb, Hunt, Galt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford, Horace Smith, Hook, Milman, Miss Austen, and a host of others, were already on it.  Many of these appear to have received rewards far greater than fall now to the lot of some of the most distinguished literary men.  Crabbe is said to have received 3,000 guineas, or $15,000, for his “Tales of the Hall,” and Theodore Hook 2,000 guineas for “Sayings and Doings,” and, if the facts were so, they prove that poets and novelists were far more valued then than now.  At that time, Croker, Barrow, and numerous other men of literary reputation co-operated with Southey and Gifford in providing for the pages of the “Quarterly.”  All these, men and women, were the product of the last century, when the small landholders of England yet counted by hundreds of thousands.