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  From this beautiful spot we had to mount gradually the downs to the southward; but, it is impossible to quit the vale of the Itchen without one more look back at it. To form a just estimate of its real value and that of the lands near it, it is only necessary to know, that, from its source, at Bishop’s Sutton, this river has, on its two banks, in the distance of nine miles (before it reaches Winchester,) thirteen parish churches. There must have been some people to erect these churches. It is not true, then, that PITT and GEORGE III, created the English nation, notwithstanding all that the Scotch feelosofers are ready to swear about the matter. In short, there can be no doubt in the mind of any rational man, that in the time of the PLANTAGENETS England was, out of all comparison, more populous than it is now.

  When we began to get up towards the Downs, we, to our great surprise, saw them covered with Snow. ‘Sad times coming on for poor SIR GLORY,’ 3 said I to Richard. ‘why’ said Dick. It was too cold to talk much; and, besides, a great sluggishness in his horse made us both rather serious. The horse had been too hard ridden at Burghclere, and had got cold. This made us change our route again and instead of going over the downs towards Hambledon, in our way to see the park and the innumerable hares and pheasants of SIR HARRY FEATHERSTONE, we pulled away more to the left, to go through BRAMDEAN, and so on to PETERSFIELD, contracting greatly our intended circuit. And, besides, I had never seen BRAMDEAN, the spot on which, it is said, ALFRED fought his last great and glorious battle with the DANES. A fine country for a battle, sure enough! We stopped at the village to bait our horses; and, while we were in the public-house, an EXCISEMAN came and rummaged it all over, taking an account of the various sorts of liquor in it, having the air of a complete master of the premises, while a very pretty and modest girl waited on him to produce the divers bottles, jars, and kegs. I wonder whether ALFRED had a thought of any thing like this, when he was clearing England from her oppressors?

  A little to our right, as we came along, we left the village of KIMSTON, where SQUIRE GRAEME once lived, as was before related. Here, too, lived a ’ SQUIRE RIDGE, a famous fox-hunter, at a great mansion, now used as a farm-house; and it is curious enough, that this ’ SQUIRE’S son-in-law, one GUNNER, an attorney at Bishop’s Waltham, is steward to the man who now owns the estate.

  Before we got to Petersfield, we called at an old friend’s and got some bread and cheese and small beer, which we preferred to strong. In approaching Petersfield we began to descend from the high chalk-country, which (with the exception of the valleys of the ITCHEN and the TESTE) had lasted us from UPHUSBAND (almost the north-west point of the county) to this place, which is not far from the south-east point of it. Here we quit flint and chalk and downs, and take to sand, clay, hedges and coppices; and here, on the verge of Hampshire, we begin again to see those endless little bubble-formed hills that we before saw round the foot of HINDHEAD. We have got in in very good time, and got, at the Dolphin, good stabling for our horses. The waiters and people at inns look so hard at us to see us so liberal as to horse-feed, fire, candle, beds, and room, while we are so very very sparing in the article of drink! They seem to pity our taste. I hear people complain of the ‘exorbitant charges’ at inns; but, my wonder always is, how the people can live with charging so little. Except in one single instance I have uniformly, since I have been from home, thought the charges too low for people to live by.

  This long evening has given me time to look at the STAR 4 newspaper of last night; and I see, that, with all possible desire to disguise the fact, there is a great ‘panic’ brewing. It is impossible that this thing can go on, in its present way, for any length of time. The talk about ‘speculations‘; that is to say, adventurous dealings, or, rather, commercial gamblings, the talk about these having been the cause of the breakings and the other symptoms of approaching convulsion, is the most miserable nonsense that ever was conceived in the heads of idiots. These are effect; not cause. The cause is, the SMALL-NOTE BILL, that last brilliant effort of the joint mind of VAN and CASTLEREAGH. That Bill was, as I always called it, a respite; and it was, and could be, nothing more. It could only put off the evil hour; it could not prevent the final arrival of that hour. To have proceeded with Peel’s Bill was, indeed, to produce total convulsion. The land must have been surrendered to the overseers for the use of the poor. That is to say, without an ‘Equitable Adjustment’. But that adjustment as prayed for by Kent, Norfolk, Hereford, and Surrey, might have taken place; it ought to have taken place: and it must, at last, take place, or, convulsion must come. As to the nature of this ‘adjustment’, is it not most distinctly described in the NORFOLK PETITION? 5 Is not that memorable petition now in the Journals of the House of Commons? What more is wanted than to act on the prayer of that very petition? Had I to draw up a petition again, I would not change a single word of that. It pleased Mr Brougham’s ‘best public instructor’ 6 to abuse that petition, and it pleased Daddy Coke and the Hickory Quaker, Gurney, and the wise barn-orator, 7 to calumniate its author. They succeeded; but, their success was but shame to them; and that author is yet destined to triumph over them. I have seen no London paper for ten days, until to-day; and I should not have seen this, if the waiter had not forced it upon me. I know very nearly what will happen by next May, or thereabouts; and, as to the manner in which things will work in the meanwhile, it is of far less consequence to the nation, than it is what sort of weather I shall have to ride in to-morrow. One thing, however, I wish to observe, and that is, that, if any attempt be made to repeal the Corn-Bill, the main body of the farmers will be crushed into total ruin. I come into contact with few, who are not gentlemen, or very substantial farmers: but, I know the state of the whole; and I know, that, even with present prices, and with honest labourers fed worse than felons, it is rub-and-go with nineteen twentieths of the farmers; and of this fact I beseech the ministers to be well aware. And with this fact staring them in the face! with that other horrid fact, that, by the regulations of the magistrates, (who cannot avoid it, mind,) the honest labourer is fed worse than the convicted felon; with the breakings of merchants, so ruinous to confiding foreigners, so disgraceful to the name of England; with the thousands of industrious and care-taking creatures reduced to beggary by bank-paper; with panic upon panic, plunging thousands upon thousands into despair; with all this notorious as the Sun at noon day, will they again advise their Royal Master to tell the Parliament and the world, that this country is ‘in a state of unequalled prosperity’, and that this prosperity ‘must be permanent, because all the great interests art flourishing’? Let them! That will not alter the result. I had been, for several weeks, saying, that the seeming prosperity was fallacious; that the cause of it must lead to ultimate and shocking ruin; that it could not last, because it arose from causes so manifestly fictitious; that, in short, it was the fair-looking, but poisonous, fruit of a miserable expedient. I had been saying this for several weeks, when, out came the King’s Speech and gave me and my doctrines the lie direct, as to every point. Well: now, then, we shall soon see.

  FROM PETERSFIELD TO KENSINGTON

  Petworth, Saturday, 12th Nov. 1825

  I was at this town in the summer of 1823, when I crossed Sussex from WORTH to HUNTINGTON, in my way to Titchfield in Hampshire. We came this morning from Petersfield, with an intention to cross to Horsham, and go thence to WORTH, and then into Kent; but RICHARD’s horse seemed not to be fit for so strong a bout, and therefore we resolved to bend our course homewards, and first of all, to fall back upon our resources at THURSLEY, which we intend to reach to-morrow, going through NORTH CHAPEL, CHIDDINGFOLD, and BROOK.

  At about four miles from PETERSFIELD, we passed through a village, called ROGATE. Just before we came to it, I asked a man who was hedging on the side of the road, how much he got a day. He said, Is. 6d.: and he told me, that the allowed wages was 7d. a day for the man, and a gallon loaf a week for the rest of his family: that is to say, one pound and two and a quarter ounces of bread for each of them: and nothing more! And
this, observe, is one-third short of the bread allowance of gaols, to say nothing of the meat and clothing and lodging of the inhabitants of gaols. If the man have full work; if he gets his eighteen-pence a day, the whole nine shillings does not purchase a gallon loaf each for a wife and three children, and two gallon loaves for himself. In the gaols, the convicted felons have a pound and a half each of bread a day to begin with: they have some meat generally, and it has been found absolutely necessary to allow them meat when they work at the tread-mill. It is impossible to make them work at the tread-mill without it. However, let us take the bare allowance of bread allowed in the gaols. This allowance is, for five people, fifty-two pounds and a half in the week; whereas, the man’s nine shillings will buy but fifty-two pounds of bread; and this, observe, is a vast deal better than the state of things in the north of Hampshire, where the day-labourer gets but eight shillings a week. I asked this man how much a day they gave to a young able man who had no family, and who was compelled to come to the parish-officers for work. Observe, that there are a great many young men in this situation, because the farmers will not employ single men at full wages, these full wages being wanted for the married man’s family, just to keep them alive according to the calculation that we have just seen. About the borders of the north of Hampshire, they give to these single men two gallon loaves a week, or, in money, two shillings and eight-pence, and nothing more. Here, in this part of Sussex, they give the single man seven-pence a day, that is to say, enough to buy two pounds and a quarter of bread for six days in the week, and as he does not work on the Sunday, there is no seven-pence allowed for the Sunday, and of course nothing to eat: and this is the allowance, settled by the magistrates, for a young, hearty, labouring man; and that, too, in the part of England where, I believe, they live better than in any other part of it. The poor creature has seven-pence a day for six days in the week to find him food, clothes, washing, and lodging! It is just seven-pence less than one half of what the meanest foot solther in the standing army receives; besides that, the latter has clothing, candle, fire, and lodging into the bargain! Well may we call our happy state of things the ‘envy of surrounding nations, and the admiration of the world’! We hear of the efforts of Mrs FRY, Mr BUXTON, and numerous other persons, to improve the situation of felons in the gaols; but never, no never, do we catch them ejaculating one single pious sigh for those innumerable sufferers, who are doomed to become felons or to waste away their bothes by hunger.

  When we came into the village of ROGATE, I saw a little group of persons standing before a black-smith’s shop. The church-yard was on the other side of the road, surrounded by a low wall. The earth of the church-yard was about four feet and a half higher than the common level of the ground round about it; and you may see, by the nearness of the church windows to the ground, that this bed of earth has been made by the innumerable burials that have taken place in it. The group, consisting of the black-smith, the wheel-wright, perhaps, and three or four others, appeared to me to be in a deliberative mood. So I said, looking significantly at the church-yard, ‘It has taken a pretty many thousands of your forefathers to raise that ground up so high.’ ‘Yes, Sir,’ said one of them. ‘And,’ said I, ‘for about nine hundred years those who built that church thought about religion very differently from what we do.’ ‘Yes,’ said another. ‘And,’ said I, ‘do you think that all those who made that heap there are gone to the devil?’ I got no answer to this. ‘At any rate,’ added I, ‘they never worked for a pound and a half of bread a day.’ They looked hard at me, and then looked hard at one another; and I, having trotted off, looked round at the first turning, and saw them looking after us still. I should suppose that the church was built about seven or eight hundred years ago, that is to say, the present church; for the first church built upon this spot was, I dare say, erected more than a thousand years ago. If I had had time, I should have told this group, that, before the Protestant reformation, the labourers of Rogate received four-pence a day from Michaelmas to Lady-Day; five-pence a day from Lady-day to Michaelmas, except in harvest and grass-mowing time, when able labourers had seven-pence a day; and that, at this time, bacon was not so much as a halfpenny a pound: and, moreover, that the parson of the parish maintained out of the tithes all those persons in the parish that were reduced to indigence by means of old age or other cause of inability to labour. I should have told them this, and, in all probability a great deal more, but I had not time; and, besides, they will have an opportunity of reading all about it in my little book called the History of the Protestant Reformation.

  From ROGATE we came to TROTTEN. where a Mr TWYFORD is the squire, and where there is a very fine and ancient church close by the squire’s house. I saw the squire looking at some poor devils who were making ‘wauste improvements, ma’am’, on the road which passes by the squire’s door. He looked uncommonly hard at me. It was a scrutinizing sort of look, mixed, as I thought, with a little surprise, if not of jealousy, as much as to say, ‘I wonder who the devil you can be.’ My look at the squire was with the head a little on one side, and with the cheek drawn up from the left corner of the mouth, expressive of anything rather than a sense of inferiority to the squire, of whom, however, I had never heard speak before. Seeing the good and commodious and capacious church, I could not help reflecting on the intolerable baseness of this description of men, who have remained mute as fishes, while they have been taxed to build churches for the convenience of the Cotton-Lords and the Stock-jobbers. First, their estates have been taxed to pay interest of debts contracted with these Stock-jobbers, and to make wars for the sale of the goods of the Cotton-Lords. This drain upon their estates has collected the people into great masses, and now the same estates are taxed to build churches for them in these masses. And yet the tame fellows remain as silent as if they had been born deaf and dumb and blind. As towards the labourers, they are sharp and vigorous and brave as heart could wish: here they are bold as Hector. They pare down the wretched souls to what is below gaol allowance. But, as towards the taxers, they are gentle as doves. With regard, however, to this Squire TWYFORD, he is not, as I afterwards found, without some little consolation; for, one of his sons, I understand, is, like Squire Rawlinson of Hampshire, a police justice in London! I hear, that Squire TWYFORD was always a distinguished champion of loyalty; what they call a stanch friend of Government; and, it is therefore natural that the Government should be a stanch friend to him. By the taxing of his estate, and paying the Stock-jobbers out of the proceeds, the people have been got together in great masses, and, as there are Justices wanted to keep them in order in those masses, it seems but reasonable that the squire should, in one way or another, enjoy some portion of the profits of keeping them in order. However, this cannot be the case with every loyal squire; and there are many of them, who, for want of a share in the distribution, have been totally extinguished. I should suppose Squire TWYFORD to be in the second rank upwards (dividing the whole of the proprietors of land into five ranks). It appears to me, that pretty nearly the whole of this second rank is gone; that the Stock-jobbers have eaten them clean up, having less mercy than the cannibals, who usually leave the hands and the feet; so that this squire has had pretty good luck.

  From TROTTEN we came to MIDHURST, and, having baited our horses, went into Cowdry Park to see the ruins of that once noble mansion, from which the Countess of Salisbury (the last of the Plantagenets) was brought by the tyrant Henry the Eighth to be cruelly murdered, in revenge for the integrity and the other great virtues of her son, Cardinal Pole, as we have seen in Number Four, paragraph 115, of the ‘History of the Protestant Reformation’. This noble estate, one of the finest in the whole kingdom, was seized on by the king, after the possessor had been murdered on his scaffold. She had committed no crime. No crime was proved against her. The miscreant Thomas Cromwell, finding that no form of trial would answer his purpose, invented a new mode of bringing people to their death; namely, a Bill, brought into Parliament, condemning her to death. The es
tate was then granted to a Sir Anthony Brown, who was physician to the king. By the descendants of this Brown, one of whom was afterwards created Lord Montague, the estate has been held to this day; and Mr POYNTZ, who married the sole remaining heiress of this family, a Miss Brown, is now the proprietor of the estate, comprising, I believe, forty or fifty manors, the greater part of which are in this neighbourhood, some of them, however, extending more than twenty miles from the mansion. We entered the park through a great iron gate-way, part of which being wanting, the gap was stopped up by a hurdle. We rode down to the house and all round about and in amongst the ruins, now in part covered with ivy, and inhabited by innumerable starlings and jackdaws. The last possessor was, I believe, that Lord Montague who was put an end to by the celebrated nautical adventure on the Rhine along with the brother of Sir GLORY. These two sensible worthies took it into their heads to go down a place something resembling the waterfall of an overshot mill. They were drowned just as two young kittens or two young puppies would have been. And, as an instance of the truth that it is an ill wind that blows nobody good, had it not been for this sensible enterprize, never would there have been a Westminster Rump to celebrate the talents and virtues of Westminster’s Pride and England’s Glory. It was this Lord Montague, I believe, who had this ancient and noble mansion completely repaired, and fitted up as a place of residence; and a few days, or a very few weeks, at any rate, after the work was completed, the house was set on fire (by accident, I suppose), and left nearly in the state in which it now stands, except that the ivy has grown up about it, and partly hidden the stones from our sight. You may see, however, the hour of the day or night at which the fire took place; for, there still remains the brass of the face of the dock, and the hand pointing to the hour. Close by this mansion, there runs a little river which runs winding away through the vallies, and at last falls into the Arron. After viewing the ruins, we had to return into the turnpike road, and then enter another pan of the park, which we crossed, in order to go to PETWORTH. When you are in a part of this road through the park, you look down and see the house in the middle of a very fine valley, the distant boundary of which, to the south and south west, is the South Down Hills. Some of the trees here are very fine, particularly some most magnificent rows of the Spanish chesnut. I asked the people at MIDHURST where Mr Poyntz himself lived; and they told me at the lodge in the park, which lodge was formerly the residence of the head keeper. The land is very good about here. It is fine rich loam at top, with clay further down. It is good for all sorts of trees, and they seem to grow here very fast.