Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/144

 five or six per cent who drift off into the army, the stable, or the kitchen. Why the English peasantry, the border men excepted, should be inferior in energy, or in the art of bettering themselves, to their compeers in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, has never yet been satisfactorily explained; unless—and I do not mean to say that this particular explanation is wholly satisfactory—it be from the innate sluggishness of blood. Whatever may be the cause, there is a lack of imagination among them that leads to a lack of enterprise, and that seems somehow or other to run in the blood of those portions of the British people that are not of Celtic origin or intermixture. The peasantry of Saxon England have produced among them but two poets, Robert Bloomfield, the author of the Farmer's Boy, and John Clare, author of the Village Minstrel; neither of them a poet with any claims to the first or even to the second rank, while Scotland's poets, sprung from the agricultural and labouring classes, are to be numbered by scores, including Robert Burns, a greater than fifty Bloomfields and Clares rolled into one, and a long bead roll of genuine bards and minstrels, of whom it is sufficient to name Allan Ramsay, the barber, William Ferguson, the sailor, James Hogg, the shepherd, Robert Tannahill, the weaver, Hugh Miller, the stonemason, and Jean Glover, the strolling tinker.

I once endeavoured to make a more intimate acquaintance with one English peasant, than squires and parsons and charitable ladies ever think it worth while to cultivate with persons of a caste, from which their own caste is as much removed as that of the brahmin from the pariah. The old man was a fair specimen of his class, neither much better nor much worse, neither much more intelligent nor much more apathetic than his fellows. He was seventy years of age when I knew him first, and he lived for three years afterwards in the workhouse, the sole resource for such as he, when old age comes upon them. His name was Plant, and the parson of the rural parish in which he was born and bred, and in the neighbourhood of which he had laboured until his limbs grew stiff and his right hand lost its cunning, informed me that there had been people of that name in the parish for five hundred years; perhaps, he said, offshoots of the royal house of the Plantagenets, but, at all events, a very ancient family: as if all families were not equally ancient, if we could but trace them! William Plant married when he was nineteen years of age, and in the receipt of the not very magnificent wages of ten shillings a week. His wife, who was a year older than himself, was a domestic servant in the family of the village doctor, and had saved from her wages at the time when Plant became enamoured of her no less a sum than seven pounds, a fortune in the eyes of one who, as he said, had never before held two sovereigns in his hand. The seven pounds went a good way towards furnishing their little cottage of two rooms; and for two or three years, as the wife was a handy woman, and could do plain needlework, wash, iron, and get up fine linen, their humble household was happy enough, and Plant thought he had done a good thing to marry. "It kept me out of the public-house," he said, "and out of bad company. It had been 'my delight of a shiny night in the season of the year' just to go out for a lark, but I never did that after I was married. By-and-by the children came, and twice the wife had twins. It seemed to me that the twins brought us good luck, for the squire's lady was very kind when they came, and sent clothes, and baby linen, and a little port wine for the missus. The vicar's wife was good too, and made as much fuss over the babies, for a month or two, as if they were real live angels. And it so happened that before twelve years passed over, the missus and I were in possession of eleven children, and very hard put to it to find them bread, let alone clothes. The missus, after her fifth child, was no longer able to work, and had more than enough to do to keep the house in order and mend the rags. My wages were by this time two shillings a day. But, Lord love ye! that was nothing, not enough for two of us, let alone thirteen. How we managed I don't know. They say God Almighty always sends bread when he sends mouths and stomachs. I did not find it so always, and when one little child—a poor sickly ailing thing it was—died of fever, I was, I am afraid, almost wicked enough not to feel very sorry. It was buried by the parish, and the missus wept over it, just as if it had been the dearest treasure in the world, as no doubt it was to her. It is very hard to keep the little things. But very hard to lose them all the same, especially for the womenkind. We got helped on a bit by the parish every winter; and the two elder children—a boy and a girl—when they were eight years old, earned a shilling now and then by weeding