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Rh Young was a man of limited means; but his enterprise and determination made up for all defects. He set out completely alone, furnished with a trusty English mare and a moderate purse of money; and in this way traversed the whole of France three times, besides extending his journey by along tour in Spain and Italy. In all parts of these journeys he made the minutest observations on the state of the country and the manners and condition of the people; but if this had been all, his work would scarcely have been accounted extraordinary. Its chief value lay in the immense amount of facts which he collected almost entirely from personal inquiry on the nature of crops, rent, course of husbandry, wages of labour, population, commerce, size of farms, profits of farming, and an almost infinite variety of kindred subjects. Traversing the kingdom on the western side, then through the centre, and finally along the eastern frontier, scarcely a province was left by him unexplored; and the result was the publication, in two quarto volumes, of such a body of original information on these points as had probably never before been collected by one person in any country, and which even royal commissions and liberal aid from the state have in other countries failed to obtain.

Young's narrative was by no means a dry and technical one. It abounded in shrewd observations of life, and graphic pictures of manners and scenery, with here and there some interesting adventures. His travels were undertaken in the years 1787, 1788, and 1789, when the political ferment which resulted in the great tempest of the French Revolution was commencing, and he was present in Paris during the stormy meeting of