Born: Queen Elizabeth
of England, 1533, Greenwich; Thomas Erpenins,
celebrated orientalist, 1584, Gorcum, Holland; Louis
de Bourbon, Prince de Cond�, great commander, 1621,
Paris; George Louis, Count de Buffon, distinguished
naturalist, 1707, Montbard, Burgundy; Dr. Samuel
Johnson, lexicographer and author, 1709, Lichfield;
Arthur Young, agricultural writer, 1741.
Died: Emperor Frederick
IV of Germany, 1493, Vienna; Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, historical writer,
1644, Rome; Captain
Porteous, murdered by the Edinburgh mob, 1736; Dr.
John Armstrong, author of The Art of Preserving
Health, 1779, London; Leonard Euler, eminent
mathematician, 1783, St. Petersburg; Mrs. Hannah More,
religious and moral writer, 1833, Clifton.
Feast Day: St. Regina
or Reine, virgin and martyr, 3rd century. St. Evurtius,
bishop of Orleans, confessor, about 340. St. Grimonia
or Germana, virgin and martyr. St. Eunan, first bishop
of Raphoe, in Ireland. St. Cloud, confessor, 560. St.
Madelberte, virgin, about 705. Saints Alchmund and
Tilberht, confessors, 8th century.
ARTHUR YOUNG
The most popular and prolific
of writers on rural affairs was Arthur Young. No great
discovery or improvement in agriculture bears his
name: his merit consists in the fact, that he was an
agitator. He had a passion for novelties, and such was
the vigour of his mind, that he succeeded in affecting
the most stolid and conservative of classes with
something of his own enthusiasm. He set land-lords
thinking, enticed and drove them into experiments, and
persuaded farmers everywhere to break from the dull
routine of centuries. More than any man, England owes
to Arthur Young that impulse which, within the last
hundred years, has transformed her wastes into rich
pastures and fruitful fields, and multiplied the
produce of her harvests by many fold.
Young was the son of a Suffolk
clergyman, and was born in 1741. He was apprenticed to
a merchant in Lynn, but an inordinate taste for
reading and scribbling interfered sadly with his
mercantile progress. At the age of seventeen, he wrote
a pamphlet on the war against the French in America,
for which a publisher gave him ten pounds' worth of
books. He next started a periodical, called the
Universal Museum, which, by the advice of Dr. Johnson,
he discontinued at the sixth number. Four novels,
about the same time, flowed from his facile pen. At
his father's death, in 1769, he wished to enter the
army, but at his mother's entreaty refrained, and
turned farmer instead, without any practical knowledge
of husbandry, and, as he afterwards confessed, with
his head bursting with wild notions of improvements.
Farming supplied matter and direction for his literary
activity, and in 1770 he published, in two thick
volumes quarto, A Course of Experimental Agriculture,
containing an exact Register of the Business
transacted during five years on near 300 acres of
various Soils. A few years before, he had printed A
Tour through the Southern Counties of England, which
proved so popular that he was led to under-take
similar surveys in the east, west, and north, and
Ireland. These tours excited the liveliest interest in
all connected with agriculture: soils, methods of
culture, crops, farm-buildings, cattle, plantations,
roads, were all discussed in a most vivacious style,
and praised or blamed with bluff honesty.
Between 1766 and 1775, he
relates that he realized �3000 by his agricultural
writings, a large sum for works of that order in those
times. His own farming was far from profitable, and
the terms in which he describes a hundred acres he
rented in Hertfordshire, may be taken as a fair
specimen of his outspoken manner: 'I know not what
epithet to give this soil; sterility falls short of
the idea; a hungry vitriolic gravel�I occupied for
nine years the jaws of a wolf. A nabob's fortune would
sink in the attempt to raise good arable crops in such
a country: my experience and knowledge had increased
from travelling and practice; but all was lost when
exerted on such a spot. I hardly wonder at a losing
account, after fate had fixed me on land calculated to
swallow, without return, all that folly or imprudence
could bestow upon it.' Finding that his income was
barely sufficient to meet his expenditure, he engaged
to report the parliamentary debates for the Morning
Post. This he continued to perform for several years;
and after the labours of the week, he walked every
Saturday evening to his wretched farm, a distance of
seventeen miles from London, from which he as
regularly returned every Monday morning. This was the
most anxious and laborious part of his life. 'I
worked,' he writes, like a coal-heaver, though without
his reward.'
In 1784, he commenced a
periodical work under the title of the Annals of
Agriculture, which he continued through forty-five
volumes. He admitted no papers unless signed by the
author, a regulation which added alike to the interest
and authority of the publication. The rule was
relaxed, however, in the case of the king, George III,
who contributed to the seventh volume a description of
the farm of Mr. Ducket at Petersham, under the
signature of 'Ralph Robinson of Windsor.'
Young's English Tours possess
considerable historic interest, which will increase
with the lapse of years; but their present, and
probably future, value in that respect is thrown into
the shade by his Agricultural Survey of France,
made on horseback, in 1788. The French admit that
Young was the first who opened their eyes to the very
low condition of their husbandry, but his observations
on the social and political state of the peasantry,
their poverty and hardships, are of peculiar and
unique importance, as made on the very verge of the
revolution; and no student of the circumstances which
led up to that tremendous catastrophe, will ever
neglect Arthur Young's Survey. In his French travel he
displays a liberal and reforming spirit, but the
excesses and atrocities of the revolutionists drove
Young, as it did
Burke and a host of others, into Toryism, and a pamphlet he
published in 1793, entitled
The Example of France a Warning to Britain, had
a great sale, and attests the depth of his horror and
disgust.
The fame of Young as an
agriculturist was greater even abroad than at home,
and many were the tokens of admiration he received.
The French Directory, in 1801, ordered the translation
of all his agricultural writings, and in twenty
volumes they were published in Paris, under the title
of Le Cultivateur Anglais. The Empress Catherine sent
three young Russians to be instructed by him, and made
him the present of a gold snuff-box, with rich ermine
cloaks for his wife and daughter. His son, too, was
employed by the Czar Alexander, in 1805, to make an
agricultural survey around Moscow, and was rewarded
with a sum which enabled him to purchase an estate of
10,000 acres of very fertile land in the Crimea, where
he settled. Pupils flocked to Arthur Young from all
parts of the world. The Duke of Bedford one morning,
at his breakfast-table, counted representatives from
France, Poland, Austria, Russia, Italy, Portugal, and
America.
Sir John Sinclair, in 1793,
persuaded the government to establish a Board of
Agriculture, of which Young was appointed secretary,
with a free house and a salary of �400 a year. It was
a post for which he was admirably suited, and was the
means of preserving him from a very hazardous
speculation�a tract of Yorkshire moorland he purposed
cultivating. 'What a change in the destination of a
man's life!' he exclaims. 'Instead of entering, as I
proposed, the solitary lord of 4000 acres, in the keen
atmosphere of lofty rocks and mountain torrents, with
a little creation rising gradually around me, making
the desert smile with cultivation, and grouse give way
to industrious population, active and energetic,
though remote and tranquil, and every instant of my
existence making two blades of grass to grow where not
one was found before�behold me at a desk in the fog,
the smoke, the din of Whitehall!'
About 1808, his sight grew
dim, terminating in blindness, but his busy career did
not close until the 12th of April 1820, when he had
nearly reached his eightieth year.
OLD SAYINGS AS TO
CLOTHES
It is lucky to put on any
article of dress, particularly stockings, inside out:
but if you wish the omen to hold good, you must
continue to wear the reversed portion of your attire
in that condition, till the regular time comes for
putting it off�that is, either bedtime or 'cleaning
yourself.' If you set it right, you will 'change the
luck.' It will be of no use to put on anything with
the wrong side out on purpose.
It is worthy of remark, in
connection with this superstition, that when William
the Conqueror, in arming himself for the battle of
Hastings, happened to put on his shirt of mail with
the hind-side before, the bystanders seem to have been
shocked by it, as by an ill omen, till William claimed
it as a good one, betokening that he was to be changed
from a duke to a king. The phenomenon of the
hind-side before' is so closely related to that of
'inside out,' that one can hardly understand their
being taken for contrary omens.
The clothes of the dead will
never wear long - When a person dies, and his or
her clothes are given away to the poor, it is
frequently remarked: Ah, they may look very well, but
they won't wear; they belong to the dead.'
If a mother gives away all the
baby's clothes she has (or the cradle), she will be
sure to have another baby, though she may have thought
herself above such vanities.
If a girl's petticoats are
longer than her frock, that is a sign that her father
loves her better than her mother does�perhaps because
it is plain that her mother does not attend so much to
her dress as she ought to do, whereas her father may
love her as much as you please, and at the same time
be very ignorant or unobservant of the rights and
wrongs of female attire.
If you would have good-luck,
you must wear something new on 'Whitsun-Sunday'
(pronounced Wissun-Sunday). More generally, Easter Day
is the one thus honoured, but a glance round a church
or Sunday-school in Suffolk, on Whitsunday, shews very
plainly that it is the one chosen for beginning to
wear new 'things.'
While upon the subject of
clothes, I may mention a ludicrous Suffolk phrase
descriptive of a person not quite so sharp as he might
be: he is spoken of as 'short of buttons,' being, I
suppose, considered an unfinished article.
MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS
It is unlucky to enter a
house, which you are going to occupy, by the
back-door:
I knew of a family who had
hired a house, and went to look over it, accompanied
by an old. Scotch servant. The family, innocently
enough, finding the front-door 'done up,' went in at
the back-door, which was open; but great was their
surprise to see the servant burst into tears, and sit
down on a stone out-side, refusing to go in with them.
If I recollect rightly (the circumstance happened
several years ago), she had the front-door opened, and
went in at that herself, hoping, I suppose, that the
spell would be dissolved, if all the family did not go
in at the back-door.
The Cross was made of
elder-wood:
Speaking to some little
children one day about the danger of taking shelter
under trees during a thunder-storm, one of them said
that it was not so with all trees, 'For,' said he,
'you will be quite safe under an eldern-tree, because
the cross was made of that, and so the lightning never
strikes it.'
With this may be contrasted a
superstition mentioned by Dean Trench in one of the
notes to his Sacred Latin Poetry, and accounting for
the trembling of the leaves of the aspen-tree, by
saying that the cross was made of its wood, and that,
since then, the tree has never ceased to shudder.
Hot cross-buns, if properly
made, will never get mouldy:
To make them properly, you
must do the whole of the business on the Good-Friday
itself; the materials must be mixed, the dough made,
and the buns baked on that day, and this, I think,
before a certain hour; but whether this hour is
sunrise or church-time, I cannot say. Perhaps the
spice which enters into the composition of hot
cross-buns, has as much to do with the result as
anything, but, experto crede, you may keep them for
years without their getting mouldy.
In the appendix to Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, are
given several local
superstitions. One of them, regarding the cutting of
the nails, is such a very elaborate one, that I give
entire the formula in which it is embodied. The
version that I have heard is nearly word for word the
same as that which he has printed, and is as follows:
Cut 'em on Monday, you cut 'em
for health;
Cut 'em on Tuesday, you cut 'em for wealth;
Cut 'em on Wednesday, you cut 'em for news;
Cut 'em on Thursday, a new pair of shoes;
Cut 'em on Friday, you cut 'em for sorrow;
Cut 'em on Saturday, you'll see your true love
tomorrow
Cut 'em on Sunday, and you'll have the devil with
you all the week.'
I must confess that I cannot
divine the origin of any of these notions, but of the
last two. Sunday is, of course, the chief day for
courting among the labouring-classes, and what can be
more natural than that the
cutting of the nails on a
Saturday, should be followed by the meeting of
true-lovers on the next day? the most likely one for
such an event, whether the nails had been cut or not.
The last, again, seems to have
arisen from considering the cutting of nails to be a
kind of work, and so to be a sin, which would render
the breaker of the Sabbath more liable to the attacks
of the devil. This view is strengthened by the fact of
the Sunday being placed not at the beginning, but at
the end of the week, and thus identified with the
Jewish Sabbath. Indeed, I have found that among poor
people generally, it is reckoned as the seventh day,
and that on the Sunday, they speak of the remainder of
the week as the next week.
Superstitions
with respect to
the cutting of the nails are of very ancient date. We
find one in Hesiod's Works and Day (742-3),
where he tells you: 'Not to cut from the five-branched
with glittering iron the dry from the quick in the
rich feast of the gods,' a direction which may be
compared with the warning against Sunday nail-cutting
in the East-Anglian saw given above.
Mushrooms will not grow after
they have been seen. Very naturally, the first person
that sees them, gathers them.
The price of corn rises and
falls with Barton Mere�an eccentric piece of water,
which varies in size from twelve or fourteen acres to
a small pond, and is some-times entirely dried up. It
lies about four miles from Bury St. Edmunds, and a
worthy old farmer, now deceased, used frequently to
ride to Barton Mere to observe the state of the water
there, before proceeding to Bury market. I do not know
of any one who does this now, but it is an observed
fact that the price of corn, and the height of the
water, frequently do vary together: for instance, corn
is now (October 1862) very low, and the mere is nearly
dry. Probably the character of the weather may affect
both in common, and in this manner the notion can be
explained, as the saying that: 'If the rain-drops
hang on the window, more will come to join them,' may
be accounted for by the fact, that it is a sign of
slow evaporation, of the presence of abundant
moisture, which will be likely to precipitate itself
in the form of more rain.
If, when you are fishing, you
count what you have taken, you will not catch any
more.
This may be paralleled with
the prejudice against counting lambs, mentioned in a
former paper. It is a western superstition, and was
communicated to me by a gentleman, who, when out with
professional fishermen, has been prevented by them
from counting the fish caught till the day's sport was
over.
The same gentleman also told
me a method which he had seen practiced in the same
locality to discover the body of a person who had been
drowned in a river. An apple was sent down the stream
from above the spot where the body was supposed to be,
and it was expected that the apple would stop above
the place where the corpse lay. He could not,
however, take upon himself to say that the expedient
was a successful one.
