The next name I come upon, in this rainy-day service, starts a pleasant picture to my mind,—not offset by a British landscape, but by one of our own New-England hills. A group of heavy, overgrown chestnuts stand stragglingly upon a steep ascent of pasture; they are flanked by a wide reach of velvety turf covering the same swift slope of hill; gray boulders of granite, scattered here and there, show gleaming spangles of mica; clumps of pokeweed lift sturdily a massive luxuriance of stems and a great growth of purple berries; occasional stumps are cushioned over with mosses, green and gray; and, winding among stumps and rocks, there comes trending down the green hill-side a comely flock of great, long-woolled sheep: they nibble at stray clover-blossoms; they lift their heads and look,—it is only the old dog who is by me,—they know him; they straggle on. I strew the salt here and there upon a stone; "Dandie" pretends to sleep; and presently the woolly company is all around me,—the "Bakewell" flock.
Robert Bakewell,[C] who gave the name to this race of sheep, (afterward known as New-Leicesters,) lived at Dishley, upon the highway from Leicester to Derby, and not very far from that Ashby de la Zouche where Scott plants the immortal scene of the tournament in "Ivanhoe." He was a farmer's son, with limited education, and with limited means; yet, by due attention to crosses, he succeeded in establishing a flock which gained a world-wide reputation. His first letting of bucks at some fifteen shillings the season was succeeded in the year 1774 by lettings at a hundred guineas a head; and there were single animals in his flock from which he is reported to have received, in the height of his fame, the sum of twelve hundred pounds.
Nor was Bakewell less known for his stock of neat-cattle, for his judicious crosses, and for a gentleness of management by which he secured the utmost docility. A writer in the "Gentleman's Magazine" of his date says,—"This docility seemed to run through the herd. At an age when most of his brethren are either foaming or bellowing with rage and madness, old 'Comely' had all the gentleness of a lamb, both in his look and action. He would lick the hand of his feeder; and if any one patted or scratched him, he would bow himself down almost on his knees."
The same writer, describing Mr. Bakewell's hall, says,—"The separate joints and points of each of the more celebrated of his cattle were preserved in pickle, or hung up there side by side,—showing the thickness of the flesh and external fat on each, and the smallness of the offal. There were also skeletons of the different breeds, that they might be compared with each other, and the comparative difference marked."
Arthur Young, in his "Eastern Tour," says, "All his bulls stand still in the field to be examined; the way of driving them from one field to another, or home, is by a little switch; he or his men walk by their side, and guide them with the stick wherever they please; and they are accustomed to this method from being calves."
He left no book for future farmers to maltreat,—not even so much as a pamphlet; and the sheep that bore his name are now refined by other crosses, or are supplanted by the long-woolled troop of "New-Oxfordshire."
On the way from Leicestershire to London, one passed, in the old coach-days, through Northampton; and from Northampton it is one of the most charming of drives for an agriculturist over to the town of Newport-Pagnell. I lodged there, at the Swan tavern, upon a July night some twenty years gone; and next morning I rambled over between the hedge-rows and across meadows to the little village of Weston, where I lunched at the inn of "Cowper's Oak." The house where the poet had lived with good Mrs. Unwin was only next door, and its front was quite covered over with a clambering rose-tree. The pretty waitress of the inn showed me the way, and a wheezing old man—half gardener and half butler—introduced me to the rooms where Cowper had passed so many a dreary hour, and where he had been cheered by the blithe company of Cousin Lady Hesketh.
My usher remembered the crazy recluse, and, when we had descended to the garden, told me how much he, with other village-boys, stood in awe of him,—and how the poet used to walk up and down the garden-alleys in dressing-gown and white-tasselled cotton cap, muttering to himself; but what mutterings some of them were!