‘P.S. Will Honeycomb says if you would know anything of a lady’s meaning (always providing she has any) when she writes to you, look at her postscript. Now pray, dear sir, how came you ever to imagine what you are pleased to blazon to the world with all the confidence of self-belief, that you think farming the only thing worth manly attention? You, who, if taste rather than circumstance had been your guide, might have found wreaths and flowers almost any way you had turned, as fragrant as those of Ceres.’
My reply:—
‘You, “the willing advocate of every feeling I excommunicate from my bosom,” knew you had thrown so bitter a potion into your letter that you could not (kind creature!) help a little sweetening in the postscript; but must there in your sweets be some alloy? Could you not conclude without falling foul of poor Ceres?
‘Your letter, or rather your profession of faith, is one of the worst political creeds I remember to have read; you see no merit but beneath a diadem. In government a professed aristocrat, in political economy a monopolist, who commends manufactures, not as a market for the farmer, but for the much nobler purpose of contributing to adorn your outside; and who can attain not one better idea of the immortal plough than that of giving some sustenance to your inside. But, by the way, is not that inside of yours an equivoque? Do you mean your real or your metaphorical inside, your ribs or your feelings? If you allude to your brains, they are by your own account a wool-gathering. Do you mean your heart, and that the philosophical contemplation of so pure an engine as the plough is the sustenance of your best emotions? How will that agree with the panegyrist of a court and the satirist of a farm? Or is it that this inside of yours is a mere bread and cheese cupboard, which, certes, the plough can furnish? Or is it a magic lanthorn full of gay delusions, lighted by tallow from the belly of a sheep? Till you have settled these doubts, I know not which you prefer, manufactures for improving your complection, or agriculture for farming your heart. Nor must you wonder at such questions arising while you use terms that leave one in doubt whether you mean your head or your tail. I know something of the one; the other is a metaphor. Though there is high treason against the plough in almost every line of your letter, yet the words If I can I will are not in the spirit that contains the Eleusinian mysteries; they bring balm to my wounded feelings.’
CHAPTER X
THE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE, 1793
The Board of Agriculture—Secretaryship—Residence in London—Twenty-five dinners a month—The King’s bull—The Marquis de Castries—‘The Example of France’—Encomiums thereof—Correspondence.
The most remarkable event of this year was the establishment of the Board of Agriculture.[[152]] I found that Mr. Pitt had determined that I should be secretary, and Mr. Le Blanc, of Caversham, informed me that this new board was established with a view of rewarding me for my ‘Example of France.’ In a conversation with Lord Loughborough on the attendance required, he remarked, ‘You may do what suits yourself best, I conceive, for we all consider ourselves so much obliged to you that you cannot be rewarded in a manner too agreeably.’ If the appointment of secretary be considered, as it has been by many, a reward for what I had effected, it was not a magnificent one; the salary, 400l. per annum, would have been desirable had it left me more time in Suffolk, but when I found a very strict attendance attached to it, with no house to assemble in except Sir John Sinclair’s, and in a room common to the clerks and all comers, I was much disposed to throw it up and go back in disgust to my farm; but the advice of others and the apprehension of family reproaches kept me to the annoyance of a situation not ameliorated till Sir John was turned out of the Presidentship by Mr. Pitt, and the Board procured a house for itself.
My letter to Mr. Pitt, asking for the secretaryship of the new Board of Agriculture:—
‘Bradfield Hall: May 20, 1793.
‘Sir,—I am informed by Lord Sheffield and Sir John Sinclair that the establishment of a Board of Agriculture is determined.