Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/229

 with an imitation of the French accent. He could certainly make a speech under pressure, for he describes how he once pacified a suspicious mob, which thought that the inquisitive traveller must be devising schemes for taxation. He pointed out that in his own country the rich were taxed for the poor,—there was some good in the poor-laws, after all! But a further explanation is suggested by his lamentation over the surprising ignorance of their own affairs in the provinces. There were no newspapers and no political talk, even at the exciting times of the Revolution. Petty English tradesmen, he declares, were talking about the last news from France all over the country, before any interest in the matter had spread to the people directly affected. In English counties the newspaper circulated from the squire's hall to the farmer or the small artisan; but the French seigneurs formed no centres of superior enlightenment. They crowded into the towns and spent their rents upon the theatres; they only visited the country when they were banished; and then they turned great districts into mere wildernesses to be roamed over by boars, wolves, and deer. They made one blade grow where two had grown before. Young