d the passion for agricultural theory and practice which
marked his whole life, even when in his later years (he lived till 1820)
he fell under the influence of religious crotchets. His French travels
were published in 1792-94, and form by far his most attractive book,
though his surveys of England and Ireland contain much that is good.
Young was a keen, though not a very consistent or clear-sighted
politician, especially on the side of political economy. But, like other
men of his time, he soon fell away from his first love for the French
Revolution. In the literary, historical, and antiquarian associations of
the places he visited, he seems to have felt no interest whatever.

Helen Maria Williams, with Young and Moore, is our chief English witness
for the state of France and Paris just before and during the early years
of the Revolution. She was one of Johnson's girl pets in his latest
years, but Boswell is certainly justified in suggesting that if the sage
had lived a little longer he would certainly not have repeated his
elegant compliment: "If I am so ill when you are near, what should I be
when you are away?" She outlived this phase also of her life, and did
not die till 1828, being then sixty-five. Even in the early days she had
been a Girondist, not a Jacobin; but she happened to live in Paris
during the outbreak of the Revolution, wrote _Letters from France_,
which had a great popularity, and was hand in glove with most of the
English and Irish revolutionary leaders. Wolfe Tone in his diary speaks
of her as "Miss Jane Bull completely," but neither prudery nor
patriotism would have struck persons less prejudiced than the leader of
the United Irishmen as the leading points of Helen Maria. Her poems,
published in 1786, during her pre-revolutionary days, are dedicated to
Queen Charlotte, and nearly half the first of the two pretty little
volumes (which have a horrific frontispiece of the Princes in the Tower,
by Maria Cosway) is occupied by a stately list of subscribers, with the
Prince of Wales at their head. They have little merit, but are not
uninteresting for their "signs of the times": sonnets, a tale called
_Edwin and Eltruda_, an address to Sensibility, and so forth. But the
longest, _Peru_, is in the full eighteenth century couplet with no sign
of innovation. The _Letters from France_, which extend to eight volumes,
possess, besides the interest of their subject, the advantage of a more
than fair proficiency