"Your son was perfect, as far as human nature can be so: so much self-denial, tenderness to the feelings of others, such strict attention to his religious duties, whatever pleasures might be offered him, I never met with in any character; and in so young a man, at a distance from all who had a right to control him, it was most extraordinary, and bespoke a mind whose every feeling was governed by religion. Could you have heard the general regret for his loss, and the remarks made on his conduct and manners by all who knew him, you would have been gratified; but you have a higher source of comfort," &c.
I will cite another testimony; that of the priest who was his director during his visit to his native land:—"I was much affected by the news of the death of the amiable Henry Kenelm; and yet I cannot but regard it as a great mercy in Almighty God to snatch him in his innocence from the horrid corruptions and impieties of the world. Now he is gone, it is not unlawful for me to say that I thought him one of the most innocent, watchful, and mortified souls I had ever met with of his age."
On the morrow of his return he began a drawing of an infant Jesus from an engraving of a picture by Raphael in the Palazzo Pitti: it was to be finished in the French style, with much exactness and labour. He said, "the infant shall be ready for his birth-day;" and in effect he concluded his work on Christmas eve. I saw the features of this infant Jesus with an astonishment, the motive of which I explained to Kenelm; it is not yet time to reveal it to the reader.
This winter Kenelm took lessons in fencing, and, after having acquired some skill in the noble science of defence, he engaged a sous-officier to come daily to the house to teach him the manual exercise. He had learned dancing in his college, where masters attended for that purpose. During his first winter at Avignon he refused to take dancing lessons, from scruples suggested to him by a devout person, who also endeavoured to engage me to forbid my children to learn to dance, supporting his opinion of its unlawfulness by the usual topics. I replied, "I should be ashamed for my children, if I thought they could not dance without finding in it a proximate occasion of sin: the thing is innocent in itself; let those who find it, or make it otherwise, avoid it." In his second winter Kenelm surmounted the scruples of our devout friend, and resumed his dancing lessons, and now continued them, not so much out of a desire to perfect himself, as for the sake of joining in the amusement of the family party.
The summer which Kenelm passed in England had been excessively hot in the south of France. I was in the habit of observing my thermometer at midnight, and, during July and August, usually found it, at that hour, at 84 Fahrenheit. The autumn was very mild: we were to give a ball on new year's day, and there was no ice in the town, as the master of the café, who was to furnish ice creams, announced to me in a tone of due despondency. He proposed to send a cart to Mont Ventoo, a lofty and remarkable mountain fifteen miles off, where there was ice at all times; this carriage would cost thirty francs. I asked him if he would bear a part of the expense, as the ice would be of use to him for his other customers. He said, if it should freeze, his share of the load would become useless; moreover that, if there should be ice of the thickness of a ten-sous piece, that would be enough for my purpose. That very night, the last of the year 1820, a frost set in, so severe, that almost all the olive-trees of Provence and of the east of Languedoc were destroyed to the root. The preceding open weather had sustained the sap; so that this sudden and violent check was fatal. It was a great calamity: the government came in aid of the more indigent of the sufferers; but four years must pass ere the olive-trees could be in full bearing as before.
Besides the "fatness" of the olive, they reckon in this country four other récoltes or harvests: the hay of the artificial grasses, of which lucerne is the chief; with this hay they fatten cattle and make a great deal of manure: indeed I saw at Avignon a symptom of covetousness of dung, much to the credit of their agricultural management; those who sweep the streets bring straw, cut into little bits about three inches long, which they throw into the kennels and dirty puddles to suck up the fertilizing moisture. Manure must be in great demand, and an article of the first necessity in a country, where, besides extensive gardens, they intercule, after the wheat, reaped usually at the end of June, a crop of haricots or French beans,—a standing dish, during the winter, at all tables. I remembered at how high a price I had formerly bought a few of these beans for seed, that I might have this vegetable, young and green, as a side-dish or in pickle: yet these haricots secs, or the dried grain of the French bean, is the cheapest food at Avignon, cheaper even than bread; and it was without cause that I was alarmed at my own extravagance, when I saw them spread in such abundance on the table in my kitchen. Garrence, or madder, is another récolte, and a source of great wealth. Add to these harvests, their wine, which, by the help of the climate and good manipulation, is, in my opinion, the best in the world, except perhaps that of Xeres and Madeira. Melons and pastecs, or water-melons, are here delicious, and the food of the common people. Bread is excellent, light, white, and nutritious; many degrees whiter than that which I made of my own wheat in England, though not so white nor so quickly dry and tasteless as the adulterated bread of London.
I consider French agriculture, as far as I was able to observe it in the south, to be in a flourishing condition. They have not the grand cultivation: the subdivision of property and the nature of the products forbid it. They have no "expensive plans For deluging their dripping-pans." They would regard almost as thrown away, a rich plot of land given up to the fattening sheep and bullocks. In the southern moiety of France, indeed, they have no choice: there are water meadows, where irrigation is possible, but no pastures. Their cattle are fed on the mountains and hills and poorest lands, during summer, and brought home in winter.
The end of agriculture is to obtain the greatest value of produce from land at the least expense, and that for ever; and in this end the French, the spirit of calculation coming in aid of their soil and climate, succeed in a great degree. The chattels (the word is French), the stock, both live and dead, belongs to the proprietor; he superintends; the land is not worse managed on that account. Indeed, as Pythagoras or Plato said, that states would never be well governed, till philosophers were kings or kings were philosophers; so it may be said, that land will never be well cultivated, till proprietors shall be farmers or farmers shall be proprietors: their interests are opposite, and not to be reconciled by leases or conditions of obligation; one desires immediate, the other continued, profit: but the interest that a French proprietor has in his share of the produce, is not great enough to induce him to diminish his capital by deteriorating the land, which the tenant always will do if he can: even the matériel of the farm, no unimportant part of its value, is better cared for by the landlord than by a tenant. In short, France, in the southern part of it, is rapidly advancing towards garden culture, the perfection of all cultivation; since the more a farm is cultivated like a garden, the more will the management of it be applauded, and the greater will be its produce in proportion to its extent. The spade and hoe are very much used in fields, especially where, as is often the case, these fields are traversed by rows of mulberry or other trees; and the vines trimmed into the form of bushes, and the garence, and haricots, and lucerne in rows and drills, and the slight fences, occupying the least possible space, and set rather as limits than as guards, give, to a rich tract, as much of the appearance as it really has of the nature of a garden.
The silk-worm, though silk is a most valuable récolte of this country, has no connexion with agriculture, except that this worm feeds on the leaves of the mulberry tree. These leaves are plucked as soon as they have attained their full spread, and before they are at all dried or even hardened by the sun. While nature is preparing the food of the silk-worm, art is forcing into existence the worm itself. The eggs are hatched by artificial warmth, and, from the time that the worm can eat till it becomes a cocon, this savoury food is administered. The mulberry is of the white sort; but the fruit is hardly known to the Avignonais; it is of course destroyed by plucking off the leaves. I surprised my friends by telling them I had eaten excellent black mulberries in England, and, as is usual in such cases, they gave no credence to my word. These trees look very miserable without leaves under so fine a sky: by the end of summer a second crop of leaves is plucked off, and given to cattle.