Rural Rides Part 33

PROGRESS IN THE NORTH.

_Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 23rd September, 1832._

From Bolton, in Lancas.h.i.+re, I came, through Bury and Rochdale, to Todmorden, on the evening of Tuesday, the 18th September. I have formerly described the valley of Todmorden as the most curious and romantic that was ever seen, and where the water and the coal seemed to be engaged in a struggle for getting foremost in point of utility to man. On the 19th I staid all day at Todmorden to write and to sleep. On the 20th I set off for Leeds by the stage coach, through Halifax and Bradford; and as to _agriculture_, certainly the poorest country that I have ever set my eyes on, except that miserable _Nova Scotia_, where there are the towns.h.i.+ps of Horton and of Wilmot, and whither the sensible suckling statesman, Lord Howick, is wanting to send English country girls, lest they should breed if they stay in England! This country, from Todmorden to Leeds, is, however, covered over with population, and the two towns of Halifax and Bradford are exceedingly populous. There appears to be nothing produced by the earth but the natural gra.s.s of the country, which, however, is not bad. The soil is a sort of yellow-looking, stiffish stuff, lying about a foot thick, upon a bed of rocky stone, lying upon solid rock beneath. The gra.s.s does not seem to burn here; nor is it bad in quality; and all the gra.s.s appears to be wanted to rear milk for this immense population, that absolutely covers the whole face of the country. The only grain crops that I saw were those of very miserable oats; some of which were cut and carried; some standing in _shock_, the sheaves not being more than about a foot and a half long; some still standing, and some yet _nearly green_. The land is very high from Halifax to Bradford, and proportionably cold.

Here are some of those "Yorks.h.i.+re Hills" that they see from Lancas.h.i.+re and Ches.h.i.+re.

I got to Leeds about four o'clock, and went to bed at eight precisely.

At five in the morning of the 21st, I came off by the coach to Newcastle, through Harrowgate, Ripon, Darlington, and Durham. As I never was in this part of the country before, and can, therefore, never have described it upon any former occasion, I shall say rather more about it now than I otherwise should do. Having heard and read so much about the "Northern Harvest," about the "Durham ploughs," and the "Northumberland system of husbandry," what was my surprise at finding, which I verily believe to be the fact, that there is not as much corn grown in the North-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re, which begins at Ripon, and in the whole county of Durham, as is grown in the Isle of Wight alone. A very small part, comparatively speaking, is _arable_ land; and all the outward appearances show that that which is arable was formerly pasture. Between Durham and Newcastle there is a pretty general division of the land into gra.s.s fields and corn fields; but, even here, the absence of _homesteads_, the absence of barns, and of labourers' cottages, clearly show that agriculture is a sort of novelty; and that nearly all was pasturage not many years ago, or at any rate only so much of the land was cultivated as was necessary to furnish straw for the horses kept for other purposes than those of agriculture, and oats for those horses, and bread corn sufficient for the graziers and their people. All along the road from Leeds to Durham I saw hardly any wheat at all, or any wheat stubble, no barley, the chief crops being oats and beans mixed with peas. These everywhere appeared to be what we should deem most miserable crops. The oats, tied up in sheaves, or yet uncut, were scarcely ever more than two feet and a half long, the beans were about the same height, and in both cases the land so full of gra.s.s as to appear to be _a pasture_, after the oats and the beans were cut.

The land appears to be divided into very extensive farms. The corn, when cut, you see put up into little stacks of a circular form, each containing about _three_ of our southern wagon-loads of sheaves, which stacks are put up round about the stone house and the buildings of the farmer. How they thrash them out I do not know, for I could see nothing resembling a barn or a barn's door. By the corn being put into such small stacks, I should suppose the thras.h.i.+ng places to be very small, and capable of holding only one stack at a time. I have many times seen one single rick containing a greater quant.i.ty of sheaves than fifteen or twenty of these stacks; and I have seen more than twenty stacks, each containing a number of sheaves equal to, at least, fifteen of these stacks; I have seen more than twenty of these large stacks, standing at one and the same time, in one single homestead in Wilts.h.i.+re. I should not at all wonder if Tom Baring's farmers at Micheldever had a greater bulk of wheat-stacks standing now than any one would be able to find of that grain, especially, in the whole of the North-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re, and in one half of Durham.

But this by no means implies that these are beggarly counties, even exclusive of their waters, coals, and mines. They are not _agricultural_ counties; they are not counties for the producing of bread, but they are counties made for the express purpose of producing meat; in which respect they excel the southern counties, in a degree beyond all comparison. I have just spoken of the _beds of gra.s.s_ that are everywhere seen after the oats and the beans have been out. Gra.s.s is the natural produce of this land, which seems to have been made on purpose to produce it; and we are not to call land _poor_ because it will produce nothing but meat. The size and shape of the fields, the sort of fences, the absence of all homesteads and labourers' cottages, the thinness of the country churches, everything shows that this was always a country purely of pasturage. It is curious, that, belonging to every farm, there appears to be a large quant.i.ty of turnips. They are sowed in drills, cultivated between, beautifully clean, very large in the bulb, even now, and apparently having been sowed early in June, if not in May.

They are generally the white globe turnip, here and there a field of the Swedish kind. These turnips are not fed off by sheep and followed by crops of barley and clover, as in the South, but are raised, I suppose, for the purpose of being carried in and used in the feeding of oxen, which have come off the gra.s.s lands in October and November. These turnip lands seem to take all the manure of the farm; and, as the reader will perceive, they are merely an adjunct to the pasturage, serving, during the winter, instead of hay, wherewith to feed the cattle of various descriptions.

This, then, is not a country of farmers, but a country of graziers; a country of pasture, and not a country of the plough; and those who formerly managed the land here were not husbandmen, but herdsmen.

Fortescue was, I dare say, a native of this country; for he describes England as a country of shepherds and of herdsmen, not working so very hard as the people of France did, having more leisure for contemplation, and, therefore, more likely to form a just estimate of their rights and duties; and he describes them as having, at all times, in their houses, plenty of flesh to eat, and plenty of woollen to wear. St. Augustine, in writing to the Pope an account of the character and conduct of his converts in England, told him that he found the English an exceedingly good and generous people; but they had one fault, their fondness for flesh-meat was so great, and their resolution to have it so determined, that he could not get them to abstain from it, even on the fast-days; and that he was greatly afraid that they would return to their state of horrible heathenism, rather than submit to the discipline of the church in this respect. The Pope, who had more sense than the greater part of bishops have ever had, wrote for answer: "Keep them within the pale of the church, at any rate, even if they slaughter their oxen in the churchyards: let them make shambles of the churches, rather than suffer the devil to carry away their souls." The taste of our fathers was by no means for the potato; for the "nice _mealy_ potato." The Pope himself would not have been able to induce them to carry "cold potatoes in their bags" to the plough-field, as was, in evidence before the special commissions, proved to have been the common practice in Hamps.h.i.+re and Wilts.h.i.+re, and which had been before proved by evidence taken by unfeeling committees of the boroughmonger House of Commons. Faith! these old papas of ours would have burnt up not only the stacks, but the ground itself, rather than have lived upon miserable roots, while those who raised none of the food were eating up all the bread and the meat.

Brougham and Birkbeck, and the rest of the Malthusian crew, are constantly at work preaching _content to the hungry and naked_. To be sure, they themselves, however, are not content to be hungry and naked.

Amongst other things, they tell the working-people that the working-folks, especially in the North, used to have no bread, except such as was made of oats and of barley. That was better than potatoes, even the "nice mealy ones;" especially when carried cold to the field in a bag. But these literary impostors, these deluders, as far as they are able to delude; these vagabond authors, who thus write and publish for the purpose of persuading the working-people to be quiet, while they sack luxuries and riches out of the fruit of their toil; these literary impostors take care not to tell the people, that these oatcakes and this barley-bread were always a.s.sociated with great lumps of flesh-meat; they forget to tell them this, or rather these half-mad, perverse, and perverting literary impostors suppress the facts, for reasons far too manifest to need stating.

The cattle here are the most beautiful by far that I ever saw. The sheep are very handsome; but the horned cattle are the prettiest creatures that my eyes ever beheld. My sons will recollect that when they were little boys I took them to see the "Durham Ox," of which they drew the picture, I dare say, a hundred times. That was upon a large scale, to be sure, the model of all these beautiful cattle: short horns, strait back, a taper neck, very small in proportion where it joins on the small and handsome head, deep dewlap, small-boned in the legs, hoop-ribbed, square-hipped, tail slender. A great part of them are white, or approaching very nearly to white: they all appear to be half fat, cows and oxen and all; and the meat from them is said to be, and I believe it is, as fine as that from Lincolns.h.i.+re, Herefords.h.i.+re, Romney Marsh, or Pevensey Level; and I am ready, at any time, to swear, if need be, that one pound of it fed upon this gra.s.s is worth more, to me at least, than any ten pounds or twenty pounds fed upon oil-cake, or the stinking stuff of distilleries; aye, or even upon turnips. This is all _gra.s.s-land_, even from Staffords.h.i.+re to this point. In its very nature it produces gra.s.s that fattens. The little producing-land that there is even in Lancas.h.i.+re and the West-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re, produces gra.s.s that would fatten an ox, though the land be upon the tops of hills. Everywhere, where there is a sufficiency of gra.s.s, it will fatten an ox; and well do we Southern people know that, except in mere vales and meadows, we have no land that will do this; we know that we might put an ox up to his eyes in our gra.s.s, and that it would only just keep him from growing worse: we know that we are obliged to have turnips and meal and cabbages and parsnips and potatoes, and then, with some of our hungry hay for them to _pick their teeth with_, we make s.h.i.+ft to put fat upon an ox.

Yet, so much are we like the beasts which, in the fable, came before Jupiter to ask him to endow them with faculties incompatible with their divers frames and divers degrees of strength, that we, in this age of "_waust improvements, Ma'um_," are always hankering after laying fields down in pasture, in the South, while these fellows in the North, as if resolved to rival us in "improvement" and perverseness, must needs break up their pasture-lands, and proclaim defiance to the will of Providence, and, instead of rich pasture, present to the eye of the traveller half-green starveling oats and peas, some of them in blossom in the last week of September. The land itself, the earth, of its own accord, as if resolved to vindicate the decrees of its Maker, sends up gra.s.s under these miserable crops, as if to punish them for their intrusion; and, when the crops are off, there comes a pasture, at any rate, in which the gra.s.s, like that of Herefords.h.i.+re and Lincolns.h.i.+re, is not (as it is in our Southern countries) mixed with weeds; but, standing upon the ground as thick as the earth can bear it, and fattening everything that eats of it, it forbids the perverse occupier to tear it to pieces. Such is the land of this country; all to the North of Ches.h.i.+re, at any rate, leaving out the East-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re and Lincolns.h.i.+re, which are adapted for corn in some spots and for cattle in others.

These Yorks.h.i.+re and Durham cows are to be seen in great numbers in and about London, where they are used for the purpose of giving milk, of which I suppose they give great quant.i.ties; but it is always an observation that if you have these cows you must _keep them exceedingly well_: and this is very true; for, upon the food which does very well for the common cows of Hamps.h.i.+re and Surrey, they would dwindle away directly and be good for nothing at all; and these sheep, which are as beautiful as even imagination could make them, so round and so loaded with flesh, would actually perish upon those downs and in those folds where our innumerable flocks not only live but fatten so well, and with such facility are made to produce us such quant.i.ties of fine mutton and such bales of fine wool. There seems to be something in the soil and climate, and particularly in the soil, to create everywhere a sort of cattle and of sheep fitted to it; Dorsets.h.i.+re and Somersets.h.i.+re have sheep different from all others, and the nature of which it is to have their lambs in the fall instead of having them in the spring. I remember when I was amongst the villages on the Cotswold-hills, in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, they showed me their sheep in several places, which are a stout big-boned sheep. They told me that many attempts had been made to cross them with the small-boned Leicester breed, but that it had never succeeded, and that the race always got back to the Cotswold breed immediately.

Before closing these rural remarks, I cannot help calling to the mind of the reader an observation of LORD JOHN SCOTT ELDON, who, at a time when there was a great complaint about "agricultural distress" and about the fearful increase of the poor-rates, said, "that there was no such distress _in Northumberland_, and no such increase of the poor-rates:"

and so said my dignitary, Dr. Black, at the same time: and this, this wise lord, and this not less wise dignitary of mine, ascribed to "the bad practice of the farmers o' the Sooth paying the labourers their wages out of the poor-rates, which was not the practice in the North." I thought that they were telling what the children call _stories_; but I now find that these observations of theirs arose purely from that want of knowledge of the country which was, and is, common to them both. Why, Lord John, there are no such persons here as we call farmers, and no such persons as we call farm-labourers. From Ches.h.i.+re to Newcastle, I have never seen _one single labourer's cottage by the side of the road_!

Oh, Lord! if the good people of this country could but see the endless strings of vine-covered cottages and flower-gardens of the labourers of Kent, Suss.e.x, Surrey, and Hamps.h.i.+re; if they could go down the vale of the Avon in Wilts.h.i.+re, from Marlborough Forest to the city of Salisbury, and there see _thirty_ parish churches in a distance of thirty miles; if they could go up from that city of Salisbury up the valley of Wylly to Warminster, and there see one-and-thirty churches in the s.p.a.ce of twenty-seven miles; if they could go upon the top of the down, as I did, not far (I think it was) from St. Mary Cotford, and there have under the eye, in the valley below, _ten parish churches within the distance of eight miles_, see the downs covered with innumerable flocks of sheep, water meadows running down the middle of the valley, while the sides rising from it were covered with corn, sometimes a hundred acres of wheat in one single piece, while the stack-yards were still well stored from the previous harvest; if John Scott Eldon's countrymen could behold those things, their quick-sightedness would soon discover why poor-rates should have increased in the South and not in the North; and, though their liberality would suggest an apology for my dignitary, Dr. Black, who was freighted to London in a smack, and has ever since been impounded in the Strand, relieved now and then by an excursion to Blackheath or Clapham Common; to find an apology for their countryman, Lord John, would be putting their liberality to an uncommonly severe test; for he, be it known to them, has chosen his country abode, not in the Strand like my less-informed dignitary, Dr. Black, nor in his native regions in the North; but has, in the beautiful county of Dorset, amidst valleys and downs precisely like those of Wilts.h.i.+re, got as near to the sun as he could possibly get, and there, from the top of his mansion he can see a score of churches, and from his lofty and ever-green downs, and from his fat valleys beneath, he annually sends his flocks of long-tailed ewes to Appleshaw fair, thence to be sold to all the southern parts of the kingdom, having L. E. marked upon their beautiful wool; and, like the two factions at Maidstone, all tarred with the same brush. It is curious, too, notwithstanding the old maxim, that we all try to get as nearly as possible in our old age to the spot whence we first sprang. Lord John's brother William (who has some t.i.tle that I have forgotten) has taken up his quarters on the healthy and I say beautiful Cotswold of Gloucesters.h.i.+re, where, in going in a postchaise from Stowe-in-the-Wold to Cirencester, I thought I should never get by the wall of his park; and I exclaimed to Mr. Dean, who was along with me, "Curse this Northumbrian s.h.i.+p-broker's son, he has got one half of the county;" and then all the way to Cirencester I was explaining to Mr.

Dean _how the man had got his money_, at which Dean, who is a Roman Catholic, seemed to me to be ready to cross himself several times.

No, there is no apology for Lord John's observations on the difference between the poor-rates of the South and the North. To go from London to his country-houses he must go across Surrey and Hamps.h.i.+re, along one of the vales of Wilts.h.i.+re, and one of the vales of Dorsets.h.i.+re, in which latter county he has many a time seen in one single large field _a hundred wind-rows_ (stacks made in the field in order that the corn may get quite dry before it be put into great stacks); he has many a time seen, on one farm, two or three hundred of these, each of which was very nearly as big as the stacks which you see in the stack-yards of the North Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re and of Durham, where a large farm seldom produces more than ten or a dozen of these stacks, and where the farmer's property consists of his cattle and sheep, and where little, very little, agricultural labour is wanted. Lord John ought to have known the cause of the great difference, and not to have suffered such nonsense to come out of a head covered with so very large a wig.

I looked with particular care on the sides of the road all the way through Yorks.h.i.+re and Durham. The distance, altogether, from Oldham in Lancas.h.i.+re, to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is about a hundred and fifty miles; and, leaving out the _great_ towns, I did not see so many churches as are to be seen in any twenty miles of any of the valleys of Wilts.h.i.+re.

All these things prove that these are by nature counties of pasturage, and that they were formerly used solely for that purpose. It is curious that there are none of those lands here which we call "meadows." The rivers run in _deep beds_, and have generally very steep sides; no little rivulets and occasional overflowings that make the meadows in the South, which are so very beautiful, but the gra.s.s in which is not of the rich nature that the gra.s.s is in these counties in the North: it will produce milk enough, but it will not produce beef. It is hard to say which part of the country is the most valuable gift of G.o.d; but every one must see how perverse and injurious it is to endeavour to produce in the one that which nature has intended to confine to the other. After all the unnatural efforts that have been made here to ape the farming of Norfolk and Suffolk, it is only _playing at farming_, as stupid and "loyal" parents used to set their children _to play at soldiers during the last war_.

If any of these sensible men of Newcastle were to see the farming in the South Downs, and to see, as I saw in the month of July last, four teams of large oxen, six in a team, all ploughing in one field in preparation for wheat, and several pairs of horses, in the same field, dragging, harrowing, and rolling, and had seen on the other side of the road from five to six quarters of wheat standing upon the acre, and from nine to ten quarters of oats standing alongside of it, each of the two fields from fifty to a hundred statute acres; if any of these sensible men of Newcastle could see these things, they would laugh at the childish work that they see going on here under the name of farming; the very sight would make them feel how imperious is the duty on the law-giver to prevent distress from visiting the fields, and to take care that those whose labour produced all the food and all the raiment, shall not be fed upon potatoes and covered with rags; contemplating the important effects of their labour, each man of them could say as I said when this mean and savage faction had me at my trial, "I would see all these labourers hanged, and be hanged along with them, rather than see them live upon potatoes."

_Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 24th September, 1832._

Since writing the above I have had an opportunity of receiving information from a very intelligent gentleman of this county, who tells me, that in Northumberland there are some lands which bear very heavy crops of wheat; that the agriculture in this county is a great deal better than it is farther south; that, however, it was a most lamentable thing that the paper-money price of corn tempted so many men to break up these fine pastures; that the turf thus destroyed cannot be restored probably in a whole century; that the land does not now, with present prices, yield a clear profit, anything like what it would have yielded in the pasture; and that thus was destroyed the _goose with the golden eggs_. Just so was it with regard to the _downs_ in the south and the west of England, where there are hundreds of thousands of acres, where the turf was the finest in the world, broken up for the sake of the paper-money prices, but now left to be _downs again_; and which will not be _downs_ for more than a century to come. Thus did this accursed paper-money cause even the fruitful qualities of the earth to be antic.i.p.ated, and thus was the soil made _worth less_ than it was before the accursed invention appeared! This gentleman told me that this breaking up of the pasture-land in this country had made the land, though covered again with artificial gra.s.ses, unhealthy for sheep; and he gave as an instance the facts, that three farmers purchased a hundred and fifty sheep each, out of the same flock; that two of them, who put their sheep upon these recently broken-up lands, lost their whole flocks by the rot, with the exception of four in the one case and four in the other, out of the three hundred: and that the third farmer, who put his sheep upon the old pastures, and kept them there, lost not a single sheep out of the hundred and fifty! These, ever accursed paper-money, are amongst thy destructive effects!

I shall now, laying aside for the present these rural affairs, turn to the politics of this fine, opulent, solid, beautiful, and important town; but as this would compel me to speak of particular transactions and particular persons, and as this _Register_ will come back to Newcastle before I am likely to quit it, the reader will see reasons quite sufficient for my refraining to go into matters of this sort, until the next _Register_, which will in all probability be dated from Edinburgh.

While at Manchester, I received an invitation to lodge while here at the house of a friend, of whom I shall have to speak more fully hereafter; but every demonstration of respect and kindness met me at the door of the coach in which I came from Leeds, on Friday, the 21st September. In the early part of Sat.u.r.day, the 22nd, a deputation waited upon me with _an address_. Let the readers, in my native county and parish, remember that I am now at the end of thirty years of calumnies poured out incessantly upon me from the poisonous mouths and pens of three hundred mercenary villains, called newspaper editors and reporters; that I have written and published more than a hundred volumes in those thirty years; and that more than a thousand volumes (chiefly paid for out of the taxes) have been written and published for the sole purpose of impeding the progress of those truths that dropped from my pen; that my whole life has been a life of sobriety and labour; that I have invariably shown that I loved and honoured my country, and that I preferred its greatness and happiness far beyond my own; that, at four distinct periods, I might have rolled in wealth derived from the public money, which I always refused on any account to touch; that, for having thwarted this Government in its wastefulness of the public resources, and particularly for my endeavours to produce that Reform of the Parliament which the Government itself has at last been compelled to resort to; that, for having acted this zealous and virtuous part, I have been twice stripped of all my earnings by the acts of this Government; once lodged in a felon's jail for two years, and once driven into exile for two years and a half; and that, after all, here I am on a spot within a hundred miles of which I never was before in my life; and here I am receiving the unsolicited applause of men amongst the most intelligent in the whole kingdom, and the names of some of whom have been p.r.o.nounced accompanied with admiration, even to the southernmost edge of the kingdom.

_Hexham, 1st Oct., 1832._

I left Morpeth this morning pretty early, to come to this town, which lies on the banks of the Tyne, at thirty-four miles distant from Morpeth, and at twenty distant from Newcastle. Morpeth is a great market-town, for cattle especially. It is a solid old town; but it has the disgrace of seeing an enormous new jail rising up in it. From cathedrals and monasteries we are come to be proud of our jails, which are built in the grandest style, and seemingly as if to imitate the Gothic architecture.

From Morpeth to within about four miles of Hexham, the land is but very indifferent; the farms of an enormous extent. I saw in one place more than a hundred corn-stacks in one yard, each having from six to seven Surrey wagon-loads of sheaves in a stack; and not another house to be seen within a mile or two of the farmhouse. There appeared to be no such thing as barns, but merely a place to take in a stack at a time, and thrash it out by a machine. The country seems to be almost wholly dest.i.tute of people. Immense tracks of corn-land, but neither cottages nor churches. There is here and there a spot of good land, just as in the deep valleys that I crossed; but, generally speaking, the country is poor; and its bleakness is proved by the almost total absence of the oak tree, of which we see scarcely one all the way from Morpeth to Hexham. Very few trees of any sort, except in the bottom of the warm valleys; what there are, are chiefly the _ash_, which is a very hardy tree, and will live and thrive where the _oak_ will not grow at all, which is very curious, seeing that it comes out into leaf so late in the spring, and sheds its foliage so early in the fall. The trees which stand next in point of hardiness are the _sycamore_, the _beech_, and the _birch_, which are all seen here; but none of them fine. The _ash_ is the most common tree, and even it flinches upon the hills, which it never does in the South. It has generally become yellow in the leaf already; and many of the trees are now bare of leaf before any frost has made its appearance.

The cattle all along here are of a coa.r.s.e kind; the cows swag-backed and badly shaped; Kiloe oxen, except in the dips of good land by the sides of the bourns which I crossed. Nevertheless, even here, the fields of turnips, of both sorts, are very fine. Great pains seem to be taken in raising the crops of these turnips: they are all cultivated in rows, are kept exceedingly clean, and they are carried in as winter food for all the animals of a farm, the horses excepted.

As I approached Hexham, which, as the reader knows, was formerly the seat of a famous abbey, and the scene of a not less famous battle, and was, indeed, at one time the _see_ of a bishop, and which has now churches of great antiquity and cathedral-like architecture; as I approached this town, along a valley down which runs a small river that soon after empties itself into the Tyne, the land became good, the ash trees more lofty, and green as in June; the other trees proportionably large and fine; and when I got down into the vale of Hexham itself, there I found the _oak_ tree, certain proof of a milder atmosphere; for the _oak_, though amongst the hardest _woods_, is amongst the tenderest of plants known as natives of our country. Here everything a.s.sumes a different appearance. The Tyne, the southern and northern branches of which meet a few miles above Hexham, runs close by this ancient and celebrated town, all round which the ground rises gradually away towards the hills, crowned here and there with the remains of those castles which were formerly found necessary for the defence of this rich and valuable valley, which, from tip of hill to tip of hill, varies, perhaps, from four to seven miles wide, and which contains as fine corn-fields as those of Wilts.h.i.+re, and fields of turnips, of both kinds, the largest, finest, and best cultivated, that my eyes ever beheld. As a proof of the goodness of the land and the mildness of the climate here, there is, in the grounds of the gentleman who had the kindness to receive and to entertain me (and that in a manner which will prevent me from ever forgetting either him or his most amiable wife); there is, standing in his ground, _about an acre of my corn_, which will ripen perfectly well; and in the same grounds, which, together with the kitchen-garden and all the appurtenances belonging to a house, and the house itself, are laid out, arranged, and contrived, in a manner so judicious, and to me so original, as to render them objects of great interest, though, in general, I set very little value on the things which appertain merely to the enjoyments of the rich. In these same grounds (to come back again to the climate), I perceived that the rather tender evergreens not only lived but throve perfectly well, and (a criterion infallible) the _biennial stocks_ stand the winter without any covering or any pains taken to shelter them; which, as every one knows, is by no means always the case, even at Kensington and Fulham.

At night I gave a lecture at an inn, at Hexham, in the midst of the domains of that impudent and stupid man, Mr. Beaumont, who, not many days before, in what he called a speech, I suppose, made at Newcastle, thought proper, as was reported in the newspapers, to utter the following words with regard to me, never having, in his life, received the slightest provocation for so doing. "The liberty of the press had nothing to fear from the Government. It was the duty of the administration to be upon their guard to prevent extremes. There was a crouching servility on the one hand, and an excitement to disorganization and to licentiousness on the other, which ought to be discountenanced. The company, he believed, as much disapproved of that political traveller who was now going through the country--he meant Cobbett--as they detested the servile effusions of the Tories."

Beaumont, in addition to his native stupidity and imbecility, might have been drunk when he said this, but the servile wretch who published it was not drunk; and, at any rate, Beaumont was my mark, it not being my custom to snap at the stick, but at the cowardly hand that wields it.

Such a fellow cannot be an object of what is properly called _vengeance_ with any man who is worth a straw; but, I say, with SWIFT, "If a _flea_ or a _bug_ bite me, I will kill it if I can;" and, acting upon that principle, I, being at Hexham, put my foot upon this contemptible creeping thing, who is offering himself as a candidate for the southern division of the county, being so eminently fitted to be a maker of the laws!

The newspapers have told the whole country that Mr. John Ridley, who is a tradesman at Hexham, and occupies some land close by, has made a stand against the demand for t.i.thes; and that the t.i.the-owner recently broke open, in the night, the gate of his field, and carried away what he deemed to be the t.i.the; that Mr. Ridley applied to the magistrates, who could only refer him to a court of law to recover damages for the trespa.s.s. When I arrived at Hexham, I found this to be the case. I further found that Beaumont, that impudent, silly and slanderous Beaumont, is the _lay-owner_ of the t.i.thes in and round about Hexham; he being, in a right line, doubtless, the heir or successor of the abbot and monks of the Abbey of Hexham; or, the heir of the donor, Egfrid, _king of Northumberland_. I found that Beaumont had leased out his t.i.thes to _middle men_, as is the laudable custom with the pious bishops and clergy of the law-church in Ireland.

_North s.h.i.+elds, 2nd Oct., 1832._

These sides of the Tyne are very fine: corn-fields, woods, pastures, villages; a church every four miles, or thereabouts; cows and sheep beautiful; oak trees, though none very large; and, in short, a fertile and beautiful country, wanting only the gardens and the vine-covered cottages that so beautify the counties in the South and the West. All the buildings are of stone. Here are coal-works and railways every now and then. The working people seem to be very well off; their dwellings solid and clean, and their furniture good; but the little gardens and orchards are wanting. The farms are all large; and the people who work on them either live in the farmhouse, or in buildings appertaining to the farmhouse; and they are all well fed, and have no temptation to acts like those which sprang up out of the ill-treatment of the labourers in the South. Besides, the mere country people are so few in number, the state of society is altogether so different, that a man who has lived here all his life-time, can form no judgment at all with regard to the situation, the wants, and the treatment of the working people in the counties of the South.

They have begun to make a railway from Carlisle to Newcastle; and I saw them at work at it as I came along. There are great _lead mines_ not far from Hexham; and I saw a great number of little one-horse carts bringing down the _pigs of lead_ to the point where the Tyne becomes navigable to Newcastle; and sometimes I saw loads of these _pigs_ lying by the road-side, as you see parcels of timber lying in Kent and Suss.e.x, and other timber counties. No fear of their being stolen: their weight is their security, together with their value compared with that of the labour of carrying. Hearing that Beaumont was, somehow or other, connected with this lead-work, I had got it into my head that he was a pig of lead himself, and half expected to meet with him amongst these groups of his fellow-creatures; but, upon inquiry, I found that some of the lead-mines belonged to him; descending, probably, in that same right line in _which the t.i.thes descended to him_; and as the Bishop of Durham is said to be the owner of great lead-mines, Beaumont and the bishop may possibly be in the _same boat_ with regard to the subterranean estate as well as that upon the surface; and if this should be the case, it will, I verily believe, require all the piety of the bishop, and all the wisdom of Beaumont, to keep the boat above water for another five years.

_North s.h.i.+elds, 3rd Oct., 1832._

I lectured at South s.h.i.+elds last evening, and here this evening. I came over the river from South s.h.i.+elds about eleven o'clock last night, and made a very firm bargain with myself never to do the like again. This evening, after my lecture was over, some gentlemen presented an address to me upon the stage, before the audience, accompanied with the valuable and honourable present of the late Mr. Eneas Mackenzie's _History of the County of Northumberland_; a very interesting work, worthy of every library in the kingdom.

From Newcastle to Morpeth; from Morpeth to Hexham; and then all the way down the Tyne; though everywhere such abundance of fine turnips, and in some cases of mangel-wurzel, you see scarcely any _potatoes_: a certain sign that the working people do not live like hogs. This root is raised in Northumberland and Durham, to be used merely as garden stuff; and, used in that way, it is very good; the contrary of which I never thought, much less did I ever say it. It is the using of it as a _subst.i.tute_ for bread and for meat, that I have deprecated it; and when the Irish poet, Dr. Drennen, called it "the lazy root, and the root of misery," he gave it its true character. Sir Charles Wolseley, who has travelled a great deal in France, Germany and Italy, and who, though Scott-Eldon scratched him out of the commission of the peace, and though the sincere patriot Brougham will not put him in again, is a very great and accurate observer as to these interesting matters, has a.s.sured me that, in whatever proportion the cultivation of potatoes prevails in those countries, in that same proportion the working-people are wretched.

From this degrading curse; from sitting round a dirty board, with potatoes trundled out upon it, as the Irish do: from going to the field with cold potatoes in their bags, as the working-people of Hamps.h.i.+re and Wilts.h.i.+re _did_, but which they have not done since the appearance of certain _coruscations_, which, to spare the feelings of the "Lambs, the Broughams, the Greys, and the Russells," and their dirty bill-of-indictment-drawer Denman, I will not describe, much less will I eulogize; from this degrading curse the county of Northumberland is yet happily free!

_Sunderland, 4th Oct., 1832._

This morning I left North s.h.i.+elds in a post-chaise, in order to come hither through Newcastle and Gateshead, this affording me the only opportunity that I was likely to have of seeing a plantation of Mr.

Annorer Donkin, close in the neighbourhood of Newcastle; which plantation had been made according to the method prescribed in my book, called the "Woodlands;" and to see which plantation I previously communicated a request to Mr. Donkin. That gentleman received me in a manner which will want no describing to those who have had the good luck to visit Newcastle. The plantation is most advantageously circ.u.mstanced to furnish proof of the excellence of my instructions as to planting.

The predecessor of Mr. Donkin also made plantations upon the same spot, and consisting precisely of the same sort of trees. The two plantations are separated from each other merely by a road going through them. Those of the predecessor have been made _six-and-twenty years_; those of Mr.

Donkin _six years_; and, incredible as it may appear, the trees in the latter are full as lofty as those in the former; and, besides the equal loftiness, are vastly superior in point of shape, and, which is very curious, retain all their freshness at this season of the year, while the old plantations are brownish and many of the leaves falling off the trees, though the sort of trees is precisely the same. As a sort of reward for having thus contributed to this very rational source of his pleasure, Mr. Donkin was good enough to give me an elegant copy of the fables of the celebrated Bewick, who was once a native of Newcastle and an honour to the town, and whose books I had had from the time that my children began to look at books, until taken from me by that sort of rapine which I had to experience at the time of my memorable flight across the Atlantic, in order to secure the use of that long arm which I caused to reach them from Long Island to London.

In Mr. Donkin's kitchen-garden (my eyes being never closed in such a scene) I saw what I had never seen before in any kitchen-garden, and which it may be very useful to some of my readers to have described to them. _Wall-fruit_ is, when destroyed in the spring, never destroyed by _dry-cold_; but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, by wet-frosts, which descend always perpendicularly, and which are generally fatal if they come between the expansion of the blossom and the setting of the fruit; that is to say, if they come after the bloom is quite open, and before it has disentangled itself from the fruit. The great thing, therefore, in getting _wall-fruit_, is to keep off these frosts. The French make use of boards, in the neighbourhood of Paris, projecting from the tops of the walls and supported by poles; and some persons contrive to have curtains to come over the whole tree at night and to be drawn up in the morning. Mr. Donkin's walls have a top of stone; and this top, or cap, projects about eight inches beyond the face of the wall, which is quite sufficient to guard against the wet-frosts which always fall perpendicularly. This is a country of stone to be sure; but those who can afford to build walls for the purpose of having wall-fruit, can afford to cap them in this manner: to rear the wall, plant the trees, and then to save the expense of the cap, is really like the old proverbial absurdity, "of losing the s.h.i.+p for the sake of saving a pennyworth of tar."

At Mr. Donkin's I saw a portrait of Bewick, which is said to be a great likeness, and which, though imagination goes a great way in such a case, really bespeaks that simplicity, accompanied with that genius, which distinguished the man. Mr. Wm. Armstrong was kind enough to make me a present of a copy of the last performance of this so justly celebrated man. It is ent.i.tled "_Waits for Death_," exhibiting a poor old horse just about to die, and preceded by an explanatory writing, which does as much honour to the heart of Bewick as the whole of his designs put together do to his genius. The sight of the picture, the reading of the preface to it, and the fact that it was the last effort of the man; altogether make it difficult to prevent tears from starting from the eyes of any one not uncommonly steeled with insensibility.

You see nothing here that is pretty; but everything seems to be abundant in value; and one great thing is, the working people live well. Theirs is not a life of ease to be sure, but it is not a life of hunger. The pitmen have twenty-four s.h.i.+llings a week; they live rent-free, their fuel costs them nothing, and their doctor cost them nothing. Their work is terrible, to be sure; and, perhaps, they do not have what they ought to have; but, at any rate, they live well, their houses are good and their furniture good; and though they live not in a beautiful scene, they are in the scene where they were born, and their lives seem to be as good as that of the working part of mankind can reasonably expect.