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Well: but it had been tolerable had the mischief stopped here; but it did not. Such was the value of land, and such the numbers who had made money by trade, by manufactures, by government contracts, &c., &c, that the pressure on the small proprietors became like an overwhelming flood, and in a great measure swept them from the face of the earth, and English poverty became what we see it now—the most frightful poverty in existence. The

of the Continent is the poverty of men who have all their little portions of land and nothing more. They and theirs by industry can with frugality live on this land. It is a constant support, a constant sheet-anchor ; and though they have poverty they have no fear. That horrible condition of total destitution, of total dependence on the employment by others—the total dependence on the labour of their hands—which, when that employment is not given, drops them at once into the bottomless pit of pauperism, and makes the lives of millions one great heart-ache, one great agony of the vultures of necessity and uncertainty gnawing at their vitals, is only known in the midst of this land of luxury and unexampled wealth.

With what monstrous strides has this great English Revolution stalked on since the impulse of the French Revolution, which gave a tenfold life to our manufacturing and to all sorts of jobbing and speculation ! The men who had made large sums by government contracts, stock-jobbing, lotteries, corn-dealing, and by the legal operations which all these things brought into play, were all looking out for landed investments, especially in old-fashioned places, where land was still cheap ; and where, therefore, a large tract could be purchased for a trifle, and a great house be built and a park laid out. In many cases, nay in few, could these swelling fellows find a piece of earth large enough for them, and soon began to cast greedy eyes on all the little inclosures around them; and in a wonderfully short space of time did their great Aaron's rod money manage to swallow

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all the rods and roods of their lesser neighbours. Oh, many a piteous tale of huge oppression, chicanery and violent or treacherous wrong, could the history of these things unfold !

The little proprietors were, like the ancient Danites, men who had lived on with much ease and little knowledge. They knew little of the arts of life. They knew little of lawyers and of mortgages and foreclosings. What little town is there yet of four or five thousand inhabitants which does not still possess its people

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who can remember when it could maintain but one lawyer; and who, by-the-bye, was half starved ? But the moment there came another, both flourished, and now there is a perfect swarm. There needs no other evidence of rapid change of property, by fair and foul means, by one thing and another, and nothing more than the growing pride and lust of accumulation and rascality of the age has effected. There are plenty of people who can well enough remember the old dormant, the old petrified state of things, and know the time when scarcely a drop of tea was drunk in the village; who know what a stir the introduction of umbrellas made ; how effeminate they were deemed ; how the men marched about in whole days' rains, in oilskin-covered hats and caps ; and women even rode long journeys on pillions and in oilskin hoods. There are plenty who recollect the introduction of parasols, and how the old people contemptuously called them “cabbage-leaves." “There go the women with their cabbage-leaves hoisted, as if the sun would make them worse favoured than their mothers were.”

But of all the new-fangled introductions, none has been so sweeping as that frightful legerdemain by which the old cottages have vanished--whole hamlets of them-to make room for solitary ponds, and parks, and long winding carriage approaches to them, by which the common and the very village green has been swallowed up; by which all the old hedges of a thousand years

have been stubbed up—the old trees have been hurled down, and gay great houses have risen where once a score of thatched cottages covered as many contented families. Some of the arts by which this laying of field to field and house to house have been managed, we may trace in the story of Sampson Hooks, and his man Joe Ling:

The village of old Squire Fletcher and Dick Redfern was exactly one of the old-world kind, of which I have spoken. In their day no single change had come. No manufacture was carried on there, and none of the new species of honey-laden bees, the stock-jobber, the London great soap-boiler, or sugarbaker, the war-contractor, the great spinner who had spun a golden cone around him of a most marvellous size, nor the lawyer who had fattened on each and all of them, had yet found their way thither with a desire to suck good mouthfuls from the simple inhabitants, and to build their gaudy nests on the old hereditary lands.

Where Hooks sprung from, and what he had been, I am utterly ignorant of; one thing, however, is certain, that though

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the race of phrenologists had not arisen to proclaim the fact, he had the organs of acquisitiveness and constructiveness very large. He purchased the house and lands of old Squire Fletcher, who died without issue ; and, as the place was considered so out of the way, purchased it for what is called "

an old song ;' that is, he purchased it at what a host of such estates have been got for, before the days when there was such a sharp look-out for eligible investments—a price which the mere thinnings out of the timber at once paid for.

The old hall was what is called an old rambling place. It was low, with low rooms, every one of which had a step up or a step down into it. The buildings, stables, kennels, barns, and so

. forth, occupied a much larger space than the house itself, and the whole set of premises were buried in a perfect wood of gigantic trees, especially elms and walnuts, and around lay a multiplicity of little fields with great, tall, wild hedges, and huge hedgerow trees.

What light did Sampson Hooks speedily let into it! First, down toppled the great trees which, as we have said, were doomed to pay for the house and lands. Then, down went whole troops of others to build up the new house. Well do I remember when those fine elms, and fine rows and avenues of limes strewed the ground; and what fine fun we found it to play at Robin Hood and his merrymen, with cross-bows and tobacco-pipe bolts amongst their arching boughs! Then, as rapidly disappeared scores of lines of old hedges, and what was so shortly before a labyrinth of little crofts ; opened itself into a fair lawn, and God wot, a great park. Then came a fine fellow, a landscape gardener and layer out of grounds, and before his magic touch the old garden, with its clipped yew-hedges and pleached alleys, disappeared. A lofty wall inclosed a much larger space, and shut out the whole view of the place from the village. Great iron gates rearea themselves here and there, through which alone the passers-by could catch a glimpse of what used to lie open to the pleasant view of every one. Woods and hedge-row trees danced, as it were, into shape as groups and single spreading trees. A lofty new hall, with stone vases on the top, exalted itself above the highest trees, and sunk fences, and winding gravel walks, and glittering greenhouses, and pleasant fountains, made a wonderful spot One thing, however, the villagers took notice of: the bees fled out of their hives when the old garden was destroyed, and the

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rooks out their favourite wood just by; and this, they declared, boded no good. Fresh bees were purchased, and seemed to do tolerably well, but never could they lure the rooks back, though they tied wisps of straw and artificial nests, for several successive springs, in the trees.

Every trace of old Squire Fletcher was obliterated, but the village remained the same—nay, as it seemed, only the more doggedly, for the dislike felt to the changes at the hall. All round the village was a wilderness of crofts and great wild hedges, with their thatched cottages

and old ample weedy gardens, such as I have above alluded to. Scarce a new house or even a new piece of wall was to be seen in the whole hamlet. Every family was just where it had been for generations ; but Sampson Hooks had his eye upon it, and it was doomed to feel the effect of his necromantic power.

I remember him well—a large, stately-looking man, riding on a large old roadster. No one could say that he was à violent and arbitrary or tyrannical person ; on the contrary, he was particularly polite to all his neighbours, very mild, and ready to inquire, as he met his poor neighbours on the road, how they and all their families went on, and to offer them his advice, not officiously, but with the utmost suavity, for the better management of their land. His wife too everybody declared to be a perfect lady ; so graceful, so smiling, so kind to every one, at least in words, and often in little attentions when ill, and wonderful for her admiration and bland affection for her dear Sampson Hooks. But as mildness is proverbially insinuating, so it was soon seen that by some means or other Sampson Hooks had obtained possession of this cottage and that croft, which had been in the same family for ages. People wondered how it was that their neighbours should sell the property of their fathers to a stranger ; but it was, in fact, no wonder in itself. Plenty of these neighbours had been living on their little estates without any thought or exertion more than was practised by the bird that lived in their old hedges, or the owls in their barns. Their fields were ploughed up to give corn enough for bread, and their cows grazed in pastures that never knew what improvement was. They were, on the contrary, overgrown with hillocks which once had been thrown up by the moles, but so long ago that they were now covered with a turf as thick as the rest of the field, and had been so increased by ants or somewhat else, till many of them were big enough to fill a good wheelbarrow. Then, for long tufts of yellow ragwort, for tall crops of thistles and rushes and bushes, they were actual wildernesses, and their cows had sometimes been known to be so hidden and lost in them that their owners have run all over the parish to seek them while they were quietly chewing their cuds in some jungle of thistles or furze in their own pastures.

Such were the Newtons, the three sons of old Bill Newton, and such were their fields. There was young Bill and Tom and Ned. Young Bill was so called though he was now near fifty and had sons growing up. He was the bell-ringer ; Tom, the village

barber, and Ned the village sleeper, if he were anything. Such things as management or industry they had no conception of. To live and enjoy themselves was all they thought of; but unfortunately they had each of them only a third part of what their father had had for that purpose. But they lived in true gospel order, taking no thought for to-morrow. They have been known to kill a pig and never give over feasting till the whole was eaten up; and to brew, yet never have any occasion to tun, for they drank the liquor out of the tubs while it was working. To such people what so tempting as offered money

? Sampson Hooks saw that their cow-houses and pig-sties were in bad repair, and kindly advised them to put them in order. They naïvely asked,—where the money was to come from? Oh, there was no difficulty about that; he would most willingly lend them such a trifle for the sake of seeing the village look respectable. That was very kind, thought they. They gladly accepted it; nothing was asked of them but to put their names to an acknowledgment. They did that at once ; but it was a much easier thing for them to borrow than to pay again. The day for the annual interest arrived. They scratched their heads, but had not just then the money. No matter, it might stand ; they would be able to pay when the crops came in. But the crops came in and they had nothing to sell, none to spare ; there would be but just enough for the family. They were short even of seed. Their fences were bad, and their neighbours' cattle got in and eat their corn while it was green, and trampled half of it down. Oh, well, they need not distress themselves ; they might have some money for seed and for fencing, and then as their crops would be better, they could pay. They were glad to hear it; it really was very kind, and very pleasant to have money for everything so easily. They lived like fighting-cocks. The gentleman had plenty; it would be

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