books familiar, but the Bible, and the liturgy
or hymnbook. To the latter cause, indeed, which is so far accidental,
that it is the blessing of particular countries and a particular age,
not the product of particular places or employments, the poet owes the
show of probability, that his personages might really feel, think, and
talk with any tolerable resemblance to his representation. It is an
excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's that 'a man of confined
education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the Bible will
naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than those that
are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial phrases
debasing their style'.

It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not
less formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
vantage-ground is pre-requisite. It is not every man that is likely to
be improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or
original sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms,
and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where
these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of
stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and
hard-hearted. Let the management of the POOR LAWS in Liverpool,
Manchester, or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of
the poor rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the
overseers and guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not
been particularly unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable
country clergymen with whom I have conversed on the subject, the
result would engender more than scepticism concerning the desirable
influences of low and rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be
concluded on the other side, from the stronger local attachments and
enterprising spirit of the Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a
particular mode of pastoral life, under forms of property that permit
and beget manners truly republican, not to rustic life in general, or
to the absence of artificial cultivation. On the contrary the
mountaineers, whose manners have been so often eulogized, are in
general better educated and greater readers than men of equal rank
elsewhere. But where this is not the case, as among the peasantry of
North Wales