There was little knowledge of the various sorts of grasses at this time, and to Young is due the credit of introducing the cocksfoot, and crested dog’s tail.

In 1790 he contemplated retiring to France or America, so heavy was taxation in England.  ‘Men of large fortune and the poor’, he said, in words which many to-day will heartily endorse, ’have reason to think the government of this country the first in the world; the middle classes bear the brunt.’  Perhaps to-day ‘men of large fortune’ have altered their opinion and only ‘the poor’ are satisfied.  However, he only visited France, and gave us his vivid picture of that country before the great revolution.

In 1793 the Board of Agriculture was formed, and Young was made secretary with a salary of L400 a year.

About 1810 he wrote that the preceding half-century had been by far the most interesting in the progress of agriculture, and ascribes the increase of interest in it to the publication of his Tours.  George III told him he always took with him the Farmer’s Letters.  The improvement, Young said, had been largely due to individual effort, for commerce had been predominant in Parliament and agriculture had begun to be neglected; a statement which, seeing that Parliament was then almost entirely composed of landowners, must be accepted with some reserve.

Young died in 1820, having been totally blind for some time, a misfortune which did not prevent him working hard.  In his well-known Tours he often had much difficulty in obtaining information, and confesses that he was forced to make more than one farmer drunk before he got anything out of him.

The exodus from the country to the towns then, as so often in history, was noted by thinking people, but Young says it was merely a natural consequence of the demand for profitable employment and was not to be regretted; but he wrote in a time when the country population was still numerous, and there was little danger of England becoming, what she is to-day, a country without a solid foundation, with no reservoir of good country blood to supply the waste of the towns.

When Young began to write, the example of Townshend and his contemporaries was being followed on all sides, and this good movement was stimulated by Young’s writings.  Farming was the reigning taste of the day.  There was scarce a nobleman without his farm, most of the country gentlemen were farmers, and attended closely to their business instead of leaving it to stewards, ’who governed in matters of wheat and barley as absolutely as in covenants of leases,’ and the squire delighted in setting the country a staring at the novelties he introduced.  Even the stable and the kennel were ousted by farming from rural talk,[442] and citizens who breathed the smoke of London five days a week were farmers the other two, and many young fellows of small fortune who had been brought up in the country took farms, and the