small landowner was
a resident, and had a personal interest in the details of the
neighborhood, not now felt by either the owner or the laborer. This state
of things existed to a considerable extent five-and-thirty years ago, but
it has since grown with great rapidity. At that time Great Britain could
exhibit to the world perhaps as large a body of men and women of letters,
with world-wide reputation, as ever before existed in any country or
nation, as will be seen from the following list:--

Byron, Wilson, Clarkson,
Moore, Hallam, Landor,
Scott, Roscoe, Wellington,[1]
Wordsworth, Malthus, Robert Hall,
Rogers, Ricardo, Taylor,
Campbell, Mill, Romilly,
Joanna Baillie, Chalmers, Edgeworth,
Southey, Coleridge, Hannah More,
Gifford, Heber, Dalton,
Jeffrey, Bentham, Davy,
Sydney Smith, Brown, Wollaston,
Brougham, Mackintosh, The Herschels,
Horner, Stewart, Dr. Clarke.

[Footnote 1: Wellington's dispatches place him in the first rank of
historians.]

DeQuincey was then just coming on the stage. Crabbe, Shelley, Keats,
Croly, Hazlitt, Lockhart, Lamb, Hunt, Galt, Lady Morgan, Miss Mitford,
Horace Smith, Hook, Milman, Miss Austen, and a host of others, were
already on it. Many of these appear to have received rewards far greater
than fall now to the lot of some of the most distinguished literary men.
Crabbe is said to have received 3,000 guineas, or $15,000, for his "Tales
of the Hall," and Theodore Hook 2,000 guineas for "Sayings and Doings,"
and, if the facts were so, they prove that poets and novelists were far
more valued then than now. At that time, Croker, Barrow, and numerous
other men of literary reputation co-operated with Southey and Gifford in
providing for the pages of the "Quarterly." All these, men and women, were
the product of the last century, when the small landholders of England yet
counted by hundreds of thousands.

Since then, centralization has made great progress. The landholders now
amount, as we are informed, to only 30,000, and the gulf which separates
the great proprietor from the cultivator has gradually widened, as the one
has become more an absentee and the other more a day laborer. The greater
the tendency towards the absorption of land by the wealthy banker and
merchant, or the wealthy cotton