the poor man ever did or said becomes the subject of a jest or denunciation; even his absurd habit of wearing black trousers, tail-coat, and white neckcloth, in the daytime, though harmless enough in itself, goes to make up an ideal which the intelligent classes of society despise and detest in its entirety. But let the reader try and estimate fairly what is the proportion of such men (having any legal qualification) to the respectable classes of the profession, and we think he will confess that it is at least as small as that of the black sheep to the white in either of the other professions which are called "learned." If this opinion be correct, it must certainly be to the laws of etiquette, the tradition of our forefathers, that we owe this immunity from any extraordinary tendency to humbug and quackery; for the temptations to it are enormous in the medical profession, and such as lawyers and divines have no idea of. The ignorance of the public on medical matters is so complete, and the very first steps in the path to knowledge of these matters seems to it so mysteriously difficult, that the humblest village doctor finds himself a hero-almost a magician -to a number of people. What a trial for men to have to endure whose minds are not particularly well trained, as from poverty is often the case with medical men! There must surely be some potent influence at work, keeping them the honest, steady-going, genuine men that, as a class, they are. Doubtless, a part of this effect is due to the sobering influence of looking constantly in the face of the great mysteries of Life, Disease, and Death; but these are influences with which one soon becomes familiar, too familiar to be inspired with the awe with which they struck the mind at first. We cannot doubt that it is the unwritten law which we, borrowing a tinselsounding foreign name, have called Etiquette, which really does, in great measure, produce this salutary effect; and we trust the day is far off when anything like a demolition of the outworks, which, if our view be right, guard the honesty and purity of the medical profession, shall be levelled, and the principle introduced of every man fighting simply for his own head, and in defiance of the interests of those to whom he ought naturally to look with warm sympathy.

164

Farmers.

THE "British farmer" belongs to that category of ideal personages under which come the "British merchant," the "old English gentleman," the "Irish peasant," and other embodiments of certain national characteristics, which have now to a great extent been, as it were, dispersed, and diffused over the general body politic. He still does survive, however, as a distinct type, if not exactly answering to all that our fancy may have painted him. It is rare, certainly, to meet with a genuine Poyser, perhaps the most perfect representation of the old race of farmers that has ever been produced in fiction. But something very like him may still be met with in the more secluded parts of England, and when once encountered he is not likely to be forgotten. He lived like Dandie Dinmont, in a kind of "sluttish plenty ;" farming fairly, saving little, reading nothing: nursing, generally speaking, a sincere veneration for Church and King as the barriers which, somehow or other, kept out Frenchmen, kickshaws, and Catholics; respecting the clergyman and the squire as representatives of these two institutions; given to few vices and contented with few pleasures; altogether a sturdy, stationary, simple-hearted kind of man, who perplexed himself very little with politics, or, indeed, with any one's affairs except his own, and those of his own parish.

Now, however, this kind of man is the exception and not the rule. The pursuit of farming has extended itself so much among all classes of society, that farmers have to be divided into several distinct classes, no one of which corresponds with any exactness to the traditional agriculturist. When people now talk of farmers, they have only a very vague idea of what they mean by the word. Sometimes they mean any man who farms at all; sometimes any man who makes a livelihood of farming; sometimes only the regular tenant farmer who works upon the land himself, and in no way aspires to be a gentleman. It is, however, only to the last two of these classes that the term properly belongs, and more properly to the third than to the second. That is to say, it would always be an adequate account of a tenant farmer to say that he was a farmer; but it would not always be so in the case of any man who lived by farming. For instance, many men of good birth and university education have of late years taken to agriculture as a trade. But if one were asked what such a man was, and replied merely that he was a farmer, we should probably convey a very erroneous impression of him to the inquirer's mind.

Nor would it always be sufficient to say that such a one was a gentleman farmer. In many parts of England, it is true, this title denotes exclusively the gentleman who happens to farm. But elsewhere it is

simply the modern substitute for the yeoman, signifying a man who has land of his own, and is wealthier and more independent than the majority of tenants. Dismissing, therefore, all that class of persons who, if they farm at all, really do it either as an amusement or a scientific experiment, or whose proper work in life, at all events, is not that of a farmer, such as the nobility, squirearchy, and clergy of these realms, there remain, upon the whole, three classes, first, the gentleman farmer who is so called because he is a gentleman; secondly, the gentleman farmer who is so called to distinguish him from the tenant farmer; and thirdly, the tenant farmer himself, the most unmixed specimen of the genus. All these, of course, have a great deal in common qua farmers. But they are often wide as the poles asunder in education and intelligence; so that when smart London clubmen speak glibly of the "bucolic mind," they should recollect of what very various ingredients that mind is now composed; and that a good deal of refinement and literature and general culture is mixed up with it, which leavens the mass, and renders it more worthy of reverence than they are, too frequently, disposed to think it.

The gentleman farmer number one is almost always a capital kind of man to know. With the tastes and personal habits of the most refined classes he often unites a kind of jolly simplicity that one does not always find in squires. He feels that he is to some extent roughing it, that he is, as it were, "in the bush." He is conscious that not a very few years ago he must have been either a barrister, a soldier, or a clergyman, struggling perhaps on a short allowance or a poor living. Now he has shaken off those social fetters; leads a healthier and freer life than he could have done then; has amusements and luxuries which, in a profession, he could perhaps only have sighed for; and, what is more, can marry without inconvenience, as soon as the fated pair of eyes happen to look into his own. He has also this advantage over the regular village squire, that although his social circle is a limited one, it is not so limited as his. He sees a greater variety of human beings; he associates more with his fellowcreatures; he goes to market, and rubs up against cattle-dealers and cornfactors. On the other hand, he has, of course, the benefit of all the good society which his own neighbourhood affords. Thus he becomes more a man of the world, easier to get on with, and has fewer prejudices than his ostensible social superior. The family of such a man are pretty much what we can suppose the family of a well-to-do clergyman to be, if we eliminate the clerical aroma. His daughters are apt to be very charming: accomplished, and refined, with a sweet subdued air of country life about them, like the fragrance of a beanfield in June; great at croquet, picnics, and the conveyance of luncheon to shooting parties on a hazy hot September day. Here is your true Arcadia-especially when there are lots of birds!

The gentleman farmer number two is a far less desirable kind of man. In the first place, he is not a gentleman; in the second place, he is sure to be badly educated; in the third place, he is very likely to be both purse-proud and vulgar. He is, nine times out of ten, much fatter

than either of the other two grades. But fatness, with him, does not always mean good-humour. He is usually, however, of a jovial turn, and is fond of giving dinner-parties, which comprise the doctor, the squire's steward, the attorney from the next market town, and a brace of farmers like himself. They drink heady port-wine after dinner; then play at whist or loo, and have some final brandy-and-water before they disperse. The women of his family have, of course, no pretension to be ladies. Here again, however, let it not be supposed that there are no exceptions to the rule. There are many. But we must hurry on to number three, the party we love best of all.

This is the farmer, "pure and simple "-may he forgive us for coupling his honest name with any such outlandish phrase; who rents his two, three, or five hundred acres, as the case may be, attends exclusively to his business, and aims at being nothing but what his fathers have ever been before him. It is in this class that vestiges of the old farmer character, shadows and faint echoes of Mr. Poyser, may still be traced. These are the men who still have faith in old ale, which they drink by sips; who like standing outside the church door after service with their hands in the pockets of their drab knee-breeches, to compare notes on crops and prices, and pay their duty to the vicar. These are they who, if you call upon them while out shooting, have the natural politeness to offer you only what they know to be good, namely, a jug of home-brewed, whereas the more genteel party insists upon "a glass of sherry." Even among tenant farmers, however, this particular kind of man is growing scarcer and scarcer. We can remember one or two in whose sons hunting was a high crime and misdemeanor, and whose daughters plied their fancy-work in fear and secrecy. When one of these old gentlemen wished to be especially bitter, he would address the son as "my lord," and the sister as "my lady," the latter, a pretty and lady-like girl enough, being occasionally goaded by his sarcasms into tucking up her sleeves and petticoats and scrubbing the floor till she was crimson. Heaven in its mercy removed the worthy man to a better sphere ere crinoline invaded his home: id rebus defuit unum. That would have brought his grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. Still almost all these men belong to a past generation. Here and there, indeed, a man under forty may still be found who belongs to this class. But that is only in sequestered districts, where very primitive manners still linger among all ranks of the population. He is then rather a touching spectacle-a sort of Smike among farmers; the old-fashioned dress, the deferential manner, and the simplicity of ideas which sit pleasingly on the grey-haired sire, not appearing to equal advantage in the stalwart offspring. Generally the tenant farmer, though his manners and customs have altered of late years, is not intellectually much more advanced than his grandfathers. They differ, of course, very greatly among themselves; but the representative man is still guiltless of literature, little given to reflection, and slow to take an interest in novelties. There is, usually speaking, but little

affectation in him. He is civil, homely, and hospitable. The ancient manner, smacking as it did of the old feudal relation between a lord and his retainers, has disappeared simply because the relation has itself disappeared, though the shadow lingered long after the substance had departed. But still it has left behind it many of the old sterling virtues which we commonly associate with agriculture.

The farmer's connection with his landlord is now, however, almost wholly a commercial one; and since the repeal of the corn laws there is not even any one great interest which they share in common. Thus a certain reserve is frequently to be observed among the younger race of farmers, as of men who still desire to be perfectly courteous and accommodating, but who feel no longer quite that same sympathy with, and attachment towards, the gentleman, as such, which their fathers felt. They seem to wish you to comprehend that they stand upon their own bottom, and are obliged to nobody for anything. This makes intercourse with them less genial than it used to be; but it is part of the inevitable change which time has brought with it to all English society, and considering it from a purely rational point, there is no ground, perhaps, for grumbling. The change, however, has doubtless robbed the idea of the English farmer of much of its picturesqueness. Tweed trousers are not nearly so effective in point of colour as yellow leggings; nor is an increased rental and scientific agriculture a romantic exchange for that personal service which it was always supposed that the tenant would willingly have rendered. Not but what we think it very probable that, on many large estates to this day, the tenants would arm and fight under their landlord's banner in a cause which approved itself to their reason. But they would no longer accept their view of public affairs implicitly from him, or go out merely because he asked them.

The wives and daughters of these men, where they do not aspire to be fine ladies, are often very nice. But as a general rule we fear now-a-days that the old-fashioned idea of rustic beauty is seldom to be realized: a really pretty farmer's daughter of the class we are describing being quite as rare a bird as that creation of the poets, the lovely milkmaid. We expect to see a lovely mermaid quite as soon as this latter work of art, though we were bred up in a dairy county. Whether it is that these nymphs have all become extinct because the "fine gentlemen" from London, to whose amusement, a hundred years ago, they were necessary in the country, have become extinct also, and that in this way the supply has followed the demand, we cannot undertake to say. But they are not to be found now by gentle or simple. Still, a farmer's daughter, when pretty, is often very pretty indeed. Perhaps the nature of her occupations, and the aspect of the people round about her, afford a more than usually favourable contrast with a delicate skin, a clear pale complexion— Like privet when it flowers

a softly swelling contour and a lissome figure.

Such are the three chief classes into which farmers may be divided.