rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a
manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take
him in another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighbourhood of the
town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay,
and where men with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say that
»they never meddled with politics themselves«. The busy scenes of the shuttle
and the wheel, of the roaring furnace, of the shaft and the pulley, seemed to
make but crowded nests in the midst of the large-spaced, slow-moving life of
homesteads and far-away cottages and oak-sheltered parks. Looking at the
dwellings scattered amongst the woody flats and the ploughed uplands, under the
low grey sky which overhung them with an unchanging stillness as if Time itself
were pausing, it was easy for the traveller to conceive that town and country
had no pulse in common, except where the handlooms made a far-reaching
straggling fringe about the great centres of manufacture; that till the
agitation about the Catholics in '29, rural Englishmen had hardly known more of
Catholics than of the fossil mammals; and that their notion of Reform was a
confused combination of rick-burners, trades-union, Nottingham riots, and in
general whatever required the calling-out of the yeomanry. It was still easier
to see that, for the most part, they resisted the rotation of crops and stood by
their fallows: and the coachman would perhaps tell how in one parish an
innovating farmer, who talked of Sir Humphrey Davy, had been fairly driven out
by popular dislike, as if he had been a confounded Radical; and how, the parson
having one Sunday preached from the words, »Plough up the fallow-ground of your
hearts,« the people thought he had made the text out of his own head, otherwise
it would never have come so pat on a matter of business; but when they found it
in the Bible at home, some said it was an argument for fallows (else why should
the Bible mention fallows?), but a few of the weaker sort were shaken, and
thought it was an argument that fallows should be done away with, else the Bible
would have said, »Let your hearts lie fallow;« and the next morning the parson
had a stroke of apoplexy, which, as coincident with a dispute about fallows, so
set the parish against the innovating farmer and the rotation of crops, that he
could stand his ground no longer, and