Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/222

 own country could be as desolate as a Scottish moor. Young, however, approved what Cobbett has begun to dread, the application to agriculture of the same spirit which was creating the manufacturing system. His ideal was the improving landlord. He accepts Gulliver's maxim that the man who could make two blades of grass grow where one had grown before, could deserve more of his country than all the politicians put together. Young had, as he said, passed his life up to fifty in trying to fulfil that duty; and he was not less energetic afterwards. It sums up his whole code of conduct. Every political and economical project was to be estimated by its tendency to increase the produce of agriculture. Other ends are secondary. The sight of land which might bear corn and only produced ling vexes his very soul. He regarded Enfield Chase as a simple 'nuisance'—a scandal to the Government of the country,—and he calculates that Salisbury Plain might be made to grow food for the whole population. For sympathy, again, he looked to the country gentleman. Not one farmer in five thousand, he complains, ever read a book; he is not foolish enough to waste his missionary zeal upon them; but the country happily abounds