very rare in these times: “He was a hearty old yeoman of about eighty-six, and occupied the farm in which he lived and died, about fifty-five years. Sociable, hospitable, friendly; a liberal master to his labourers, a kind neighbour, and a right merry companion within the limits of becoming mirth; in politics a staunch Whig; in his theological creed as sturdy a Dissenter; yet with no more party spirit in him than a child. He and I belonged to the same book club for about forty years. He entered it about fifteen years before I came into these parts, and was really a pillar in our literary temple, not that he greatly cared about books or was deeply read in them, but he loved to meet his neighbours and get them round him on any occasion or no occasion at all. As a fine specimen of the true English yeoman I have met few to equal, hardly any to surpass him, and he looked the character as well as he acted it, till within a very few years, when the strong man was bowed with infirmity. About twenty-six years ago, in his dress costume of a blue coat and yellow buckskins, a finer sample of John Bullism you would rarely see. It was the whole study of his long life to make the few who revolved about him in his little orbit as happy as he always seemed to be himself; yet I was gravely queried with, when I happened to say that his children had asked me to write a few lines to his memory, whether
I could do so in keeping with the general tenor of my poetry. The speaker doubted if he was a decidedly pious character. He had at times been known in his altitudes to vociferate at the top of his voice a song, the chorus of which was not certainly teetotalish:—
Sing, old Rose, and burn the bellows,
Drink and drive dull care away.”
Can anything be finer than this picture of a Suffolk yeoman? Is it not a pity that such men are no more to be seen? High farming was unknown when the old Suffolk yeoman lived. I claim for Bernard Barton that this sketch of the Suffolk yeoman is the best thing he ever wrote. Bernard Barton’s daughter married the great Oriental scholar, Edward Fitzgerald, the friend of Carlyle and correspondent of Fanny Kemble, who lived in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge, and whose fame now he is no more is far greater than when he lived. Little could he have anticipated that in after years literary men would assemble in the quiet churchyard of Boulge to erect his monument over his grave, or to found a society to perpetuate his name.
As I lean back for another glance, my eyes, as Wordsworth writes, are filled with childish tears—
My heart is idly stirred.
I see the dear old village where I was born,
almost encroaching on Sir Thomas Gooch’s park, at Benacre Hall; I see the old baronet, a fine old bigoted Tory, who looked the picture of health and happiness, as he ambled past on his chestnut cob, wearing a blue coat, a white hat and trousers, in summer; his only regret being that things were not as they were—his only consolation the fact that, wisely, the Eternal Providence that overrules all human affairs had provided snug rectories for his kith and kin, however unworthy of the sacred calling; and had hung up the sun, moon and stars so high in the heavens that no reforming ass
Could e’er presume to pluck them down, and light the world with gas.
Then comes the village medico, healthy and shrewd and kindly, with a firm belief—alas! that day is gone now—in black draught and blue pill. I see his six sunny daughters racing down the village street, guarded by a dragon of a governess, and I get out of their way, for I am a rustic, and have all the rustic’s fear of what the East Anglian peasant was used to term “morthers”; and then comes the squire of the next parish, in as shabby a trap as you ever set eyes on, and the fat farmer, who hails me for a walk, and going to the end of a field, joyously, or as joyously as his sluggish nature will permit, exclaims, “There, Master James,