Mr. Burke commends the excellent and most useful works of his "friend
Arthur Young," (of whom I shall have somewhat to say another time,) but
regrets that he should intimate the largeness of a farmer's profits. He
discusses the drill-culture, (for wheat,) which, he says, is well,
provided "the soil is not excessively heavy, or encumbered with large,
loose stones, and provided the most vigilant superintendence, the most
prompt activity, _which has no such day as to-morrow in its
calendar_,[O] combine to speed the plough; in this case I admit," he
says, "its superiority over the old and general methods." And again he
says,--"It requires ten times more of labor, of vigilance, of attention,
of skill, and, let me add, of good fortune also, to carry on the
business of a farmer with success, than what belongs to any other
trade."

May not "A Farmer" take a little pride in such testimony as this?

One of his biographers tells us, that, in his later years, the neighbors
saw him on one occasion, at his home of Beaconsfield, leaning upon the
shoulder of a favorite old horse, (which had the privilege of the lawn,)
and sobbing. Whereupon the gossiping villagers reported the great man
crazed. Ay, crazed,--broken by the memory of his only and lost son
Richard, with whom this aged saddle-horse had been a special
favorite,--crazed, no doubt, at thought of the strong young hand whose
touch the old beast waited for in vain,--crazed and broken,--an oak,
ruined and blasted by storms. The great mind in this man was married to
a great heart.

It is almost with a feeling of awe that I enter upon my wet-day studies
the name of Oliver Goldsmith: I love so much his tender story of the