f England, where they give him a cottage and his food,
and keep no more of his species than will just do the work, letting all
the rest march off to the Tyne collieries; he is a very patient
creature; and if they did not show him books, would not wince at all. So
in the fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdon, and on many
a fat and clayey level of England, where there are no resident gentry,
and but here and there a farm-house, you may meet, the English peasant
in his most sluggish and benumbed condition. He is then a long-legged,
staring creature, considerably "lower than the angels," who, if you ask
him a question, gapes like an Indian frog, which, when its mouth is
open, has its head half off; and neither understands your language, nor,
if he did, could grasp your ideas. He is there a walking lump, a thing
with members, but very little membership with the intellectual world;
but with a soul as stagnant as one of his own dykes. All that has been
wanted in him has been cultivated, and is there--good sturdy limbs, to
plow and sow, reap and mow, and feed bullocks; and even in those
operations, his sinews have been half-superseded by machinery. There
never was any need of his mind; and, therefore, it never has been
minded.

This is the English peasant, where there is nobody to breathe a soul
into the clod. But what is he where there are thousands of the wealthy
and the wise? What is he round London--the great, the noble, and the
enlightened? Pretty much the same, and from pretty much the same causes.
Few trouble themselves about him. He feels that he is a mere serf, among
the great and free; a mere machine in the hands of the mighty, who use
him as such. He sees the sunshine of grandeur, but he does not feel its
warmth. He hears that the great folks are wise; but all he knows is,
that their wisdom does not trouble itself about his ignorance. He asks,
with "The Farmer's Boy,"

Whence comes this change, ungracious, irksome, cold?
Whence this new grandeur that mine eyes behold?--
The widening distance that I daily see?
Has wealth done this? Then wealth's a foe to me!
Foe to my rights, that leaves a powerful few
The paths of emulation to pursue.

Beneath the overwhelming sense of his position, that he belongs to a
neglected, despised caste, he is, in the locality alluded to, truly a
dull fellow. That the peasant there is not an ass or a sheep, you only
know by his standing on end. You