in prosecuting his own amour with the lady. The result was that both
governess and steward got notice to quit; but--and this is very
Irish--both went off with life annuities, the governess with one of
L50 per annum, and the steward with one of L72, and, what is still
more odd, we find Young at the end of his life in receipt of his
annuity. They were an expensive couple, these two.

In 1780 Young published his _Irish Tour_, which was immediately
successful and popular in both kingdoms. In it he attacked the bounty
paid on the land-carriage of corn to Dublin. The bounty was, in the
session of Parliament next after the publication of Young's book,
reduced by one-half, and soon given up entirely. Young maintains that
this saved Ireland L80,000 a year. Nobody seems to have said 'Thank
you.'

In May, 1783, was born the child 'Bobbin,' whose death, fourteen years
later, was to change the current of Young's life. The following year
Arthur Young paid his first visit to France, confining himself,
however, to Calais and its neighbourhood, and in the same year his
mother died, and, by an arrangement with his eldest brother, 'this
patch of landed property,' as Young calls Bradfield, descended upon
him. His first famous journey in France was made between May and
November, 1787, and cost the marvellously small sum of L118 15s. 2d.
His second and third French journeys were made in July, 1788, and in
June, 1789. The third was the longest, and extended into 1790. Three
years later Young was appointed, by Pitt, Secretary of the then Board
of Agriculture. A melancholy account is given by Young of a visit he
paid Burke at Gregory's in 1796. Young drove there in the chariot of
his fussy chief, Sir John Sinclair, to discover what Burke's
intentions might be as to an intended publication of his relating to
the price of labour. The account, which occupies four pages, is too
long for quotation. It concludes thus:

'I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I
hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant gifts of any penman
of the age in which he lived. Whose conversation has often
fascinated me, whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have
delighted and instructed the world; whose name will without
question descend to the latest posterity. But to behold so great a
genius, so deepened with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of
body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to th