Will the reader pardon me the transcript of a passage or two?  “It is a perilous thing to try experiments on the farmer.  The farmer’s capital (except in a few persons, and in a very few places) is far more feeble than is commonly imagined.  The trade is a very poor trade; it is subject to great risks and losses.  The capital, such as it is, is turned but once in the year; in some branches it requires three years before the money is paid; I believe never less than three in the turnip and grass-land course ...It is very rare that the most prosperous farmer, counting the value of his quick and dead stock, the interest of the money he turns, together with his own wages as a bailiff or overseer, ever does make twelve or fifteen per centum by the year on his capital.  In most parts of England which have fallen within my observation, I have rarely known a farmer who to his own trade has not added some other employment traffic, that, after a course of the most remitting parsimony and labor, and persevering in his business for a long course of years, died worth more than paid his debts, leaving his posterity to continue in nearly the same equal conflict between industry and want in which the last predecessor, and a long line of predecessors before him, lived and died.”

In confirmation of this last statement, I may mention that Samuel Ireland, writing in 1792, ("Picturesque Views on the River Thames,”) speaks of a farmer named Wapshote, near Chertsey, whose ancestors had resided on the place ever since the time of Alfred the Great; and amid all the chances and changes of centuries, not one of the descendants had either bettered or marred his fortunes.  The truthfulness of the story is confirmed in a number of the “Monthly Review” for the same year.

Mr. Burke commends the excellent and most useful works of his “friend Arthur Young,” (of whom I shall have somewhat to say another time,) but regrets that he should intimate the largeness of a farmer’s profits.  He discusses the drill-culture, (for wheat,) which, he says, is well, provided “the soil is not excessively heavy, or encumbered with large, loose stones, and provided the most vigilant superintendence, the most prompt activity, which has no such day as to-morrow in its calendar,[O] combine to speed the plough; in this case I admit,” he says, “its superiority over the old and general methods.”  And again he says,—­“It requires ten times more of labor, of vigilance, of attention, of skill, and, let me add, of good fortune also, to carry on the business of a farmer with success, than what belongs to any other trade.”

May not “A Farmer” take a little pride in such testimony as this?

One of his biographers tells us, that, in his later years, the neighbors saw him on one occasion, at his home of Beaconsfield, leaning upon the shoulder of a favorite old horse, (which had the privilege of the lawn,) and sobbing.  Whereupon the gossiping villagers reported the great man crazed.  Ay, crazed,—­broken by the memory of his only and lost son Richard, with whom this aged saddle-horse had been a special favorite,—­crazed, no doubt, at thought of the strong young hand whose touch the old beast waited for in vain,—­crazed and broken,—­an oak, ruined and blasted by storms.  The great mind in this man was married to a great heart.