great man of system did not omit to send
to his farm-manager the most minute directions in respect to the
disposition of the newly arrived seeds.

Of those directions, and of the farm-method at the home of Washington, I
may possibly have something to say at another time: I have named the
circumstance only to show that Arthur Young had a world-wide reputation
as an agriculturist at this day, (1786-7,) although he lived for more
than thirty years beyond it.

Arthur Young was born at a little village near to Bury St. Edmund's,
(evermore famous as the scene of Pickwickian adventure,) in the year
1741. He had his schooling like other boys, and was for a time in a
counting-room at Lynn, where he plunged into literature at the unfledged
age of seventeen, by writing a tract on the American war; and this he
followed up with several novels, among which was one entitled "The Fair
American."[A] I greatly fear that the book was not even with the title:
it has certainly slipped away from the knowledge of all the
bibliographers.

At twenty-two, he undertook the management of the farm upon which his
mother was living, and of which the lease was about expiring: here, by
his own account, he spent a great deal more than he ever reaped. A
little later, having come to the dignity of a married man, he leased a
farm in Essex, (Samford Hall,) consisting of some three hundred acres.
This, however, he abandoned in despair very shortly,--giving a
brother-farmer a hundred pounds to take it off his hands. Thereupon he
advertises for another venture, gallops through all the South of England
to examine those offered to his notice, and ends with renting a
hundred-acre farm in Hertfordshire, which proved of "a hungry vitriolic
gravel," where, he says, "for nine years, I occupied the jaws of a
wolf."

Meantime, however, his pen has not been idle; for, previously to 1773,
he had written and published no less than sixteen octavo volumes
relating mostly to agricultural subjects, besides two ponderous quartos
filled with tabular details of "Experiments on the Cultivation of all
Sorts of Grain and Pulse, both in the Old and New Methods."

This last was the most pretentious of his books, the result of most
painstaking labor, and by far the most useless and uninteresting; it
passed long ago into the waste-paper shops of London. A very full
synopsis of it, however, may be found in four or five consecutive
numbers of the old "Monthly Review" for 1771.