Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/385

 advertised his Yorkshire estate for sale, and after twelve months found a purchaser. We soon find him complaining of the patronising and thwarting conduct of Sir John Sinclair [q. v.], president of the board, and of his inept and precipitate appointments of incompetent persons to write the reports of agriculture in several counties. Young did not himself write a ‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Sussex’ (London, 1793, 4to), often attributed to him instead of to his son, Arthur Young; but he was responsible for the ‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Suffolk’ (London, 1794, 4to). In 1794 he founded the Farmers' Club. His daughter Elizabeth, who had married the Rev. John Hoole, died in the same year. In 1795 he published ‘The Constitution Safe without Reform’ (Bury St. Edmunds, 8vo) and ‘An Idea of the Present State of France’ (London, 8vo; 2nd edit. same year, London, 8vo). In 1796 he had another interview with Pitt, and sounded him on the ‘propriety of regulation by parliament of the price of labour.’ He found Pitt, like Burke, as was to be expected in students of Adam Smith, hostile to the idea. This year he made a tour in Devonshire and Cornwall, returning by Somerset, and published an account of it in the ‘Annals.’

In 1797 he wrote ‘National Danger and the Means of Safety’ (London, 8vo), but the current of his thoughts was soon to change. The black year of his life was now come. Bobbin died in her fourteenth year. Her correspondence with her father is very touching. ‘One of the sweetest tempers,’ he writes, ‘and, for her years, one of the best understandings that I ever met with. … I buried her in my pew, fixing the coffin so that when I kneel it will be between her head and her dear heart. This I did as a means of preserving the grief I feel, and hope to feel while the breath is in my body. It turns all my views to an hereafter. …’

From this time Young was a broken man. Like his mother and his grandfather, he carried his bereavement ever with him. A settled gloom deepened into religious fanaticism. He gave up society, abridged his correspondence, left his journal blank for four months, and brooded over sermons, to which his thoughts and reading almost exclusively turned. He continued, however, to prosecute his duties at the board of agriculture, where Sinclair was superseded as president by Lord Somerville in 1798. Young printed a letter to his friend William Wilberforce, entitled ‘Enquiry into the State of the Public Mind amongst the Lower Classes’ (London, 1798, 8vo), and published ‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Lincoln’ (London, 1799, 8vo); ‘The Question of Scarcity plainly stated’ (London, 1800, 8vo); ‘Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Waste Lands to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor’ (London, 1801, 8vo); ‘Essay on Manures’ (London, 1804, 8vo); ‘General View of the Agriculture of Hertfordshire’ (London, 1804, 8vo); ‘General View of the Agriculture of Norfolk’ (London, 1804, 8vo); ‘General View of the Agriculture of the County of Essex’ (London, 1807, 2 vols. 8vo); ‘General Report on Inclosures’ (London, 1807, 8vo); and a paper ‘On the Advantages which have resulted from the Establishment of the Board of Agriculture’ (London, 1809, 8vo). His ‘View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire’ (London, 1809, 8vo) was to be almost the last of his official writings, for his eyesight, long failing, now almost entirely deserted him. In 1811 he was couched for cataract. A week after the operation Wilberforce came to his darkened bedside, told him of the death of the Duke of Grafton, and painted so vivid a picture of the loss sustained by agriculture that Young burst into tears and destroyed the last hope of recovering the use of his eyes. It is only necessary to mention his few subsequent publications: ‘On the Husbandry of the Three Celebrated Farmers, Bakewell, Arbuthnot, and Ducket’ (London, 1811, 8vo); ‘Inquiry into the Progressive Value of Money’ (London, 1812, 8vo); ‘Inquiry into the Rise of Prices in Europe’ (London, 1815, 8vo)—these two as separate parts of vol. xlvi. (1809) of the ‘Annals’—and two compilations of religious pieces, ‘Baxteriana’ (London, 1815, 12mo), and ‘Oweniana’ (London, 1817, 12mo). He died of the stone at his official residence in Sackville Street, London, on 20 April 1820, and was buried at Bradfield. His family became extinct on the death at Bradfield in 1896 of his grandson, Mr. Arthur Young, only son of the Rev. Arthur Young, the son of the great agriculturist.

Young's manuscript remains include an autobiography, edited by Miss M. Betham-Edwards (London, 1898), and materials for a great work on agriculture, commenced in 1808, of which a transcription in ten folio volumes by his secretary, W. de St. Croix, is in the British Museum (Addit. MSS. 34821–34854), together with a collection of his correspondence, chiefly letters addressed to himself, together with a few replies (Addit. MSS. 31820, 35126–33). This work, entitled ‘The Elements and Practice of Agriculture,’ he states to be ‘on the basis of fifty years' experience, much of the labour of more than