descended in the family to his elder brother, and he proposed to
cultivate this upon the principle of sharing the profits. His brother,
though not very sanguine on the result, readily agreed to the
experiment; and when in no long time Captain Pellew complained that he
found it impossible to keep the accounts so as to make a fair division,
he was allowed to rent it on his own terms. It will not occasion
surprise that the undertaking was anything but profitable.

Indeed, farming is almost always a very losing employment to a
gentleman, and especially to a sailor. Nothing can be more incorrect
than the conclusion that education ought to excel, because ignorance
succeeds; for success depends upon attention to a multiplicity of petty
details, which inexperience will be likely to overlook, and talent may
find it irksome to attend to. If the small farmer, who cultivates his
little ground by the labour of his own family, and the more considerable
one, who devotes to his estate skill, capital, and undivided attention,
so often fail, what can he hope for, who depends upon labourers whose
mistakes he cannot correct, and whose indolence, and even dishonesty, he
is scarcely able to check? The failure of crops which depend for their
success upon the knowledge and activity of the principal; and the
necessary and constant outlay, which is great beyond the conception of a
novice, may ruin even him who farms his own land, when the care of it is
only a secondary object; and this it will generally be to a professional
man.

The expected pleasures of fanning will be likely to disappoint, even
more than its profits. When the fields are waving with abundance,
nothing appears more delightful than to direct the labours they require;
but the enjoyments of the harvest month, when all the weary toil of
preparation is forgotten, will be found a poor compensation for the
daily annoyances of the year. To be excelled in management by the
uneducated, and over-reached by the cunning: to study systems of
agriculture, to be thwarted in carrying them into effect, and when they
fail, to become an object of contemptuous pity to the ignorant but
successful followers of the old routine: to find that all around take
advantage of his ignorance: that servants, the best with other masters,
become careless and unfaithful with him: to become involved in petty
disputes with low neighbours, and to be unable to avoid them except by a
forbearance which encourages aggr