they were in terror lest the like should occur in England. We know from Lord Stanhope that in 1794, Pitt believed himself surrounded by thousands of bandits, and that he might wake one morning and find London in flames.
The truth, however, about the Revolution had not reached the majority of his supporters, and their nerves being less sensitive, they judged the state of the country more correctly. As to the agricultural labourers, they knew them to be what we see them depicted in the drawings of Morland, and in the writings of Crabbe, Blomfield, and Clare; an artless, patient, gregarious herd, who went on plodding from day to day, hopeless and aimless, with no other relief than an occasional burst of frantic merriment, of which horse-play and hard drinking were the chief features. Freed from all anxiety concerning the future, mostly ignorant of any higher good than the satisfaction of their senses, there was nothing to fear from such a people.
However, the soul of the Agricultural Poor was not quite dead. It fluttered still in the breasts of a few sufferers, and came out as such deep vague sorrows do in verse.
Blomfield and Clare, these poets of the people, have throughout the same undertone of melancholy, arising from the conviction that they belonged to a class which is day by day falling into a deeper, more abject state of poverty or crime. When the former, as he reflected on the distance the increasing wealth made between different ranks, cries out—
"Has Wealth done this ?—then Wealth's a foe to me;
Foe to our rights; that leaves a pow'rful few
The paths of emulation to pursue:—
For emulation stoops to us no more:
The hope of humble industry is o'er"—
we have, as it were, a throb from a slumbering volcano.
And the conviction that the sleeper might awake seems to have been the result of Mr. Pitt's bill, for though dropped, its main proposition, the making up out of the rates of the deficiency of a labourer's income, came to be the general practice throughout the country. This suggested the necessity of a scale, and the amount
