AN OLD IRISH TOUR.
It was the long vacation in Dublin, 186-. Summer reigned supreme over the Irish capital. The long, bright afternoons, still and drowsy, seemed never to have an end. The soft azure overhead, so different from our deep blue skies, was whole days without a cloud—rare phenomenon in Irish weather. It was hot. The leaves drooped and the insects hummed, till I, a solitary American student, holding my chambers in college for a couple of weeks after all others had left—waiting for some friends to make up a party for the seaside—began to think of the fierce blaze of the Broadway pavement in July. The four o’clock promenade on Grafton and Westmoreland streets seemed almost abandoned by the tall, fresh-colored Dublin belles; and even the military band on Wednesday afternoons in Merrion square drew few listeners. It was dull as well as hot.
Taking down volume after volume at a venture from the shelves of the house library, I happened on Arthur Young’s Tour in Ireland in 1776-9. I opened it at the account of his visit to the Dargle. I had not yet visited the glen, and was interested by his description. “What!” said I, laying the book open on my knee, “shall I stay here broiling for another week? I will run down to Bray and Wicklow for a day or two, and have a look at the lions.” From my windows every morning I used to look out at the distant hills, till they seemed to me like old acquaintances. The next day I started. The trip is still a pleasant one in my memory; but it is not of my own short Wicklow tour I am going to write, although in these fast days it also might now be called ancient.
This was my first acquaintance with Arthur Young’s celebrated Tour. Not long ago I met with his work again. It was a copy of the second edition, “printed by H. Goldney for T. Cadell in the Strand, MDCCLXXX.” I recognized my old friend at a glance. The quaint engraving of the “Waterfall at Powerscourt, I. Taylor, sculp.,” renewed old associations, and led to a second and more attentive reading.
Although Young’s works are still the standard authority on the agricultural condition of England and Ireland, one hundred years ago, recognized in those countries, he is not so well known on this side of the water, and a few facts concerning his life and writings may be given. He was born in 1741. He was the son of the Rev. Arthur Young, rector of Bradford, and sometime chaplain to Speaker Onslow. His father was noted for some fierce blasts against “Popery,” but our author, in many passages of a just and humane spirit, shows that he did not imbibe the iconoclast zeal of Arthur Young the elder. His works are voluminous, comprised in twenty volumes. They relate almost exclusively to the state of agriculture in the two kingdoms and in France. His Travels in the East, West, and North of England, in Wales, in Ireland, and in France, and his Political Economy, are the chief titles. But Arthur Young was more than a practical farmer, honorable as that vocation is. He was a man of liberal education and cultivated taste, and his works often rise above the dull level of the fields and are pervaded with a true Virgilian flavor. They have been warmly praised by such widely different authorities as McCulloch, De Tocqueville, and the Times Commissioner in 1869; and Miss Edgeworth, herself now grown a little antiquated, says of his Tour in Ireland: “It was the first faithful portrait of its inhabitants.” Arthur Young died in 1820. An extended but not complete list of his works will be found in Allibone.
Young had a high but well-grounded idea of the place that agriculture holds in the economy of the state.
“The details,” he says, “of common management are dry and unentertaining; nor is it easy to render them interesting by ornaments of style. The tillage with which the peasant prepares the ground; the manner with which he fertilizes it; the quantities of the seed of the several species of grain which he commits to it; and the products that repay his industry, necessarily in the recital run into chains of repetition which tire the ear, and fatigue the imagination. Great, however, is the structure raised on this foundation; it may be dry, but it is important, for these are the circumstances upon which depend the wealth, prosperity, and power of nations. The minutiæ of the farmer’s management, low and seemingly inconsiderable as he is, are so many links of a chain which connect him with the state. Kings ought not to forget that the splendor of majesty is derived from the sweat of industrious and too often oppressed peasants. The rapacious conqueror who destroys and the great statesman who protects humanity, are equally indebted for their power to the care with which the farmer cultivates his fields. The monarch of these realms must know, when he is sitting on his throne at Westminster, surrounded by nothing but state and magnificence, that the poorest, the most oppressed, the most unhappy peasant, in the remotest corner of Ireland, contributes his share to the support of the gaiety that enlivens and the splendor that adorns the scene.”
Our author, it will be seen, lived close enough to the great Dr. Johnson to catch something of the swelling and sonorous rotundity of style which he impressed upon the Georgian era. And, in truth, there is a weighty and nervous energy about the prose writing of that age which contrasts, not to our advantage, with the extenuated and sharply accented style of our day.