Rural Rides

Bollitree, Tuesday, 13 Nov.

Rode to-day to see a grove belonging to Mrs. Westphalin, which contains the very finest trees, oaks, chestnuts, and ashes, that I ever saw in England. This grove is worth going from London to Weston to see. The Lady, who is very much beloved in her neighbourhood, is, apparently, of the old school; and her house and gardens, situated in a beautiful dell, form, I think, the most comfortable looking thing of the kind that I ever saw. If she had known that I was in her grove, I dare say she would have expected it to blaze up in flames; or, at least, that I was come to view the premises previous to confiscation! I can forgive persons like her; but I cannot forgive the Parsons and others who have misled them! Mrs. Westphalin, if she live many years, will find that the best friends of the owners of the land are those who have endeavoured to produce such a reform of the Parliament as would have prevented the ruin of tenants.—This parish of Weston is remarkable for having a Rector who has constantly resided for twenty years! I do not believe that there is an instance to match this in the whole kingdom. However, the “reverend” gentleman may be assured that, before many years have passed over their heads, they will be very glad to reside in their parsonage houses.

Bollitree, Wednesday, 14 Nov.

Rode to the forest of Dean, up a very steep hill. The lanes here are between high banks, and on the sides of the hills the road is a rock, the water having long ago washed all the earth away. Pretty works are, I find, carried on here, as is the case in all the other public forests! Are these things always to be carried on in this way? Here is a domain of thirty thousand acres of the finest timber-land in the world, and with coal-mines endless! Is this worth nothing? Cannot each acre yield ten trees a year? Are not these trees worth a pound apiece? Is not the estate worth three or four hundred thousand pounds a year? And does it yield anything to the public, to whom it belongs? But it is useless to waste one’s breath in this way. We must have a reform of the Parliament: without it the whole thing will fall to pieces.—The only good purpose that these forests answer is that of furnishing a place of being to labourers’ families on their skirts; and here their cottages are very neat, and the people look hearty and well, just as they do round the forests in Hampshire. Every cottage has a pig or two. These graze in the forest, and, in the fall, eat acorns and beech-nuts and the seed of the ash; for these last, as well as the others, are very full of oil, and a pig that is put to his shifts will pick the seed very nicely out from the husks. Some of these foresters keep cows, and all of them have bits of ground, cribbed, of course, at different times, from the forest: and to what better use can the ground be put? I saw several wheat stubbles from 40 rods to 10 rods. I asked one man how much wheat he had from about 10 rods. He said more than two bushels. Here is bread for three weeks, or more perhaps; and a winter’s straw for the pig besides. Are these things nothing? The dead limbs and old roots of the forest give fuel; and how happy are these people, compared with the poor creatures about Great Bedwin and Cricklade, where they have neither land nor shelter, and where I saw the girls carrying home bean and wheat stubble for fuel! Those countries, always but badly furnished with fuel, the desolating and damnable system of paper-money, by sweeping away small homesteads, and laying ten farms into one, has literally stripped of all shelter for the labourer. A farmer, in such cases, has a whole domain in his hands, and this not only to the manifest injury of the public at large, but in open violation of positive law. The poor forger is hanged; but where is the prosecutor of the monopolizing farmer, though the law is as clear in the one case as in the other? But it required this infernal system to render every wholesome regulation nugatory; and to reduce to such abject misery a people famed in all ages for the goodness of their food and their dress. There is one farmer, in the North of Hampshire, who has nearly eight thousand acres of land in his hands; who grows fourteen hundred acres of wheat and two thousand acres of barley! He occupies what was formerly 40 farms! Is it any wonder that paupers increase? And is there not here cause enough for the increase of poor, without resorting to the doctrine of the barbarous and impious Malthus and his assistants, the feelosofers of the Edinburgh Review, those eulogists and understrappers of the Whig-Oligarchy? “This farmer has done nothing unlawful,” some one will say. I say he has; for there is a law to forbid him thus to monopolize land. But no matter; the laws, the management of the affairs of a nation, ought to be such as to prevent the existence of the temptation to such monopoly. And, even now, the evil ought to be remedied, and could be remedied, in the space of half a dozen years. The disappearance of the paper-money would do the thing in time; but this might be assisted by legislative measures.—In returning from the forest we were overtaken by my son, whom I had begged to come from London to see this beautiful country. On the road-side we saw two lazy-looking fellows, in long great-coats and bundles in their hands, going into a cottage. “What do you deal in?” said I, to one of them, who had not yet entered the house. “In the medical way,” said he. And I find that vagabonds of this description are seen all over the country with tea-licences in their pockets. They vend tea, drugs, and religious tracts. The first to bring the body into a debilitated state; the second to finish the corporeal part of the business; and the third to prepare the spirit for its separation from the clay! Never was a system so well calculated as the present to degrade, debase, and enslave a people! Law, and as if that were not sufficient, enormous subscriptions are made; everything that can be done is done to favour these perambulatory impostors in their depredations on the ignorant, while everything that can be done is done to prevent them from reading, or from hearing of, anything that has a tendency to give them rational notions, or to better their lot. However, all is not buried in ignorance. Down the deep and beautiful valley between Penyard Hill and the Hills on the side of the Forest of Dean, there runs a stream of water. On that stream of water there is a paper-mill. In that paper-mill there is a set of workmen. That set of workmen do, I am told, take the Register, and have taken it for years! It was to these good and sensible men, it is supposed, that the ringing of the bells of Weston church, upon my arrival, was to be ascribed; for nobody that I visited had any knowledge of the cause. What a subject for lamentation with corrupt hypocrites! That even on this secluded spot there should be a leaven of common-sense! No: all is not enveloped in brute ignorance yet, in spite of every artifice that hellish Corruption has been able to employ; in spite of all her menaces and all her brutalities and cruelties.

Old Hall, Thursday, 15 Nov.

We came this morning from Bollitree to Ross-Market, and, thence, to this place. Ross is an old-fashioned town; but it is very beautifully situated, and if there is little of finery in the appearance of the inhabitants, there is also little of misery. It is a good, plain country town, or settlement of tradesmen, whose business is that of supplying the wants of the cultivators of the soil. It presents to us nothing of rascality and roguishness of look which you see on almost every visage in the borough-towns, not excepting the visages of the women. I can tell a borough-town from another upon my entrance into it by the nasty, cunning, leering, designing look of the people; a look between that of a bad (for some are good) Methodist Parson and that of a pickpocket. I remember, and I never shall forget, the horrid looks of the villains in Devonshire and Cornwall. Some people say, “O, poor fellows! It is not their fault.” No? Whose fault is it, then? The miscreants who bribe them? True, that these deserve the halter (and some of them may have it yet); but are not the takers of the bribes equally guilty? If we be so very lenient here, pray let us ascribe to the Devil all the acts of thieves and robbers: so we do; but we hang the thieves and robbers, nevertheless. It is no very unprovoking reflection, that from these sinks of atrocious villany come a very considerable part of the men to fill places of emolument and trust. What a clog upon a Minister to have people, bred in such scenes, forced upon him! And why does this curse continue? However, its natural consequences are before us; and are coming on pretty fast upon each other’s heels. There are the landlords and farmers in a state of absolute ruin: there is the Debt, pulling the nation down like as a stone pulls a dog under water. The system seems to have fairly wound itself up; to have tied itself hand and foot with cords of its own spinning!—This is the town to which Pope has given an interest in our minds by his eulogium on the “Man of Ross,” a portrait of whom is hanging up in a house in which I now am.—The market at Ross was very dull. No wheat in demand. No buyers. It must come down. Lord Liverpool’s remedy, a bad harvest, has assuredly failed. Fowls...