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 already crossed over to Calais for a few days in 1784, ‘just to enable him to say that he had been in France.’ In the survey of agriculture which he had taken in England and Ireland of about seven thousand miles he ‘had calculated from facts the rent, produce, and resources of those kingdoms, and had often reflected on the importance of knowing the real situation of France, the effect of government, the states of the farmers, of the poor, the state and extent of their manufactures, with a hundred other inquiries certainly of political importance.’ Yet he could not find this in any French book written from actual observation. Accordingly he crossed from Dover with his mare on 15 May 1787, and returned in November, concluding his journal with the words ‘Have more pleasure in giving my little girl a French doll than in viewing Versailles.’ Soon after his return Sir J. Sinclair persuaded him to try the experiment of clothing shorn sheep with a covering of oilskin and canvas. He maliciously records: ‘I did so, and the rest of the flock took them, I suppose, for beasts of prey and fled in all directions till the clothed sheep, jumping hedges and ditches, soon derobed themselves.’

Early in 1788 Young was deputed by the wool-growers of Suffolk to support a petition against the wool bill. Sir Joseph Banks was associated with him as a deputy for Lincoln. Young saw Fox on the subject, was examined at the bar of both houses, and published two pamphlets on the bill, ‘The Question of Wool truly stated,’ London, 8vo. But the bill passed, and Young was burned in effigy at Norwich by its supporters. This business enabled him to hear the speeches at the trial of Warren Hastings. On 30 July he set out for a second journey in France. After travelling a hundred miles his mare fell blind, but he persevered and brought her safely back to Bradfield at the end of October. After riding her three thousand seven hundred miles ‘humanity did not allow him to sell her.’ He brought back from Lyons some chicory seed, which he sowed at Bradfield, and ultimately grew over a hundred acres of it. In 1789 he made his third and last journey to France, this time in a postchaise to carry remarkable soils, manufactures, wools, &c., and pushed on to Italy—Turin, Milan, Lodi, Bergamo, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Bologna, Florence—returning home over Mont Cenis and via Lyons, 30 Jan. 1790. He was an eye-witness at Paris and Versailles of the moving scenes which ushered in the French revolution, and describes them vividly. His letters from France to Bobbin (some six years old) show a remarkable estimate of her intelligence, e.g.: ‘Moulins, Aug. 7, 1789 … What do you think of the French at such a moment as this with a free press? Yet in this capital of a great province there is not (publickly) one newspaper to be seen; at a coffee-house where twenty tables for company not one! What blessed ignorance! The Paris m— have done the whole, and are the only enlightened part of the k—.’

In October 1790, when he was preparing his French travels for the press, a violent fever brought him to the brink of death. On his recovery he wrote what he calls ‘a melancholy review of his past life’ in the ‘Annals,’ 1791, xv. 152–97. In these ‘memoirs of the last 30 years of the editor's farming life’ he states that the ‘Annals’ are ‘greatly praised but not bought. … Still I have not lost by it.’ There was a regular sale of three hundred and fifty. But he concludes sadly that he is being driven out of England by taxation, and must go to France or America to live. ‘Men of large fortunes and the poor have reason to think the government of this country the first in the world. The middle classes bear the brunt.’ As to his tour in France, the manuscript when finished will, he expects, find no bookseller to purchase it, and will ‘rest on the shelf.’

In 1791 Washington and Lafayette entered into correspondence with him, and the king presented him with a Spanish merino ram. In 1792 appeared the ‘Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789’ (Bury St. Edmunds, 2 vols. 4to; 2nd edit. London, 1794, 2 vols. 4to). Young had abridged his manuscript by one-half, but had not entirely sacrificed the ‘personal incidents’ and enlivening gossip, the loss of which had been felt in his Irish tour. In May of this year he proposed to ‘arm the property of the kingdom in a sort of horse militia.’ He repeated the suggestion in the ‘Annals,’ 1792, xviii. 495, and embodied it in his ‘Example of France a Warning to Britain’ (London, 1793, 8vo; 2nd and 3rd edits. Bury St. Edmunds, 1793, 8vo; 4th edit. London, 1794, 8vo), which gave great comfort to Pitt and his party and to Burke, and speedily ran through four large editions. He promptly set an example by enrolling himself in a yeomanry corps at Bury. On a hint of Lord Loughborough he now bought four thousand four hundred acres of Yorkshire moor, but almost immediately after this (1793) Pitt created the board of agriculture and appointed Young secretary at a salary of 400l. a year and a house. He at once