ures that have passed over
every district, even the most favored; or why all these emigrations, and
why all these parish-unions? What, then, is not the English peasant what
he was? If I went among them where I used to go, should I not find the
same merry groups seated among the sheaves, or under the hedgerows, full
of laughter, and full of droll anecdotes of all the country round?
Should I not hear of the farmer who never wrote but one letter in his
life, and that was to a gentleman forty miles off; who, on opening it,
and not being able to puzzle out more than the name and address of his
correspondent, mounted his horse in his vexation, and rode all the way
to ask the farmer to read the letter himself; and he could not do
it--could not read his own writing? Should I not hear Jonathan Moore,
the stout old mower, rallied on his address to the bull, when it pursued
him till he escaped into a tree? How Jonathan, sitting across a branch,
looked down with the utmost contempt on the bull, and endeavored to
convince him that he was a bully and a coward? "My! what a vaporing
coward art thou! Where's the fairness, where's the equalness of the
match? I tell thee, my heart's good enough; but what's my strength to
thine?"

Should I not once more hear the hundred-times-told story of Jockey
Dawes, and the man who sold him his horse? Should I not hear these, and
scores of such anecdotes, that show the simple life of the district, and
yet have more hearty merriment in them than much finer stories in much
finer places? Hard times and hard measures may have, quenched some of
the ancient hilarity of the English peasant, and struck a silence into
lungs that were wont to "crow like chanticleer;" yet I will not believe
but that, in many a sweet and picturesque district, on many a brown
moor-land, in many a far-off glen and dale of our wilder and more
primitive districts, where the peasantry are almost the sole
inhabitants--whether shepherds, laborers, hewers of wood, or drawers of
waters--

The ancient spirit is not dead,

that homely and loving groups gather round evening fires, beneath low
and smoky rafters, and feel that they have labor and care enough, as
their fathers had, but that they have the pride of homes, hearts, and
sympathies still.

Let England take care that these are the portion of the English peasant,
and he will never cease to show himself the noblest peasant on the face
of the earth. Is he not that, in his patienc