VI.

_A New-England Squire._


Frank has a grandfather living in the country, a good specimen of the
old-fashioned New-England farmer. And--go where one will the world
over--I know of no race of men who, taken as a whole, possess more
integrity, more intelligence, and more of those elements of comfort
which go to make a home beloved and the social basis firm, than the
New-England farmers.

They are not brilliant, nor are they highly refined; they know nothing
of arts, histrionic or dramatic; they know only so much of older nations
as their histories and newspapers teach them; in the fashionable world
they hold no place;--but in energy, in industry, in hardy virtue, in
substantial knowledge, and in manly independence, they make up a race
that is hard to be matched.

The French peasantry are, in all the essentials of intelligence and
sterling worth, infants compared with them; and the farmers of England
are either the merest 'ockeys in grain, with few ideas beyond their
sacks, samples, and market-days,--or, with added cultivation, they lose
their independence in a subserviency to some neighbor patron of rank;
and superior intelligence teaches them no lesson so quickly as that
their brethren of the glebe are unequal to them, and are to be left to
their cattle and the goad.

There are English farmers indeed, who are men in earnest, who read the