ger of the slightest use to anybody
in particular. The soil seems to have been naturally poor; but it must
have taken a good deal of spoiling to render it the sterile, verdureless
waste it is now; for even where it had been poorest, I found that in the
island-like appropriated patches by which it is studded, it at least
bears, what it has long ceased to bear elsewhere, a continuous covering
of green sward. But if disposed to quarrel with the commons of Orkney, I
found in close neighborhood with them that with which I could have no
quarrel,--numerous small properties farmed by the proprietors, and
forming, in most instances, farms by no means very large. There are
parishes in this part of the mainland divided among from sixty to eighty
landowners.

A nearly similar state of things seems to have obtained in Scotland
about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the greater part
of the previous one. I am acquainted with old churchyards in the north
of Scotland that contain the burying-grounds of from six to ten landed
proprietors, whose lands are now merged into single properties. And, in
reading the biographies of our old covenanting ministers, I have often
remarked as curious, and as bearing in the same line, that no
inconsiderable proportion of their number were able to retire, in times
of persecution, to their own little estates. It was during the
disastrous wars of the French Revolution,--wars from the effects of
which Great Britain will, I fear, never fully recover,--that the smaller
holdings were finally absorbed. About twenty years ere the war began,
the lands of England were parcelled out among no fewer than two hundred
and fifty thousand families; before the peace of 1815, they had fallen
into the hands of thirty-two thousand. In less than half a century, that
base of actual proprietorship on which the landed interest of any
country must ever find its surest standing, had contracted in England to
less than one-seventh its former extent. In Scotland the absorption of
the great bulk of the lesser properties seems to have taken place
somewhat earlier; but in it also the revolutionary war appears to have
given them the final blow; and the more extensive proprietors of the
kingdom are assuredly all the less secure in consequence of their
extinction. They were the smaller stones in the wall, that gave firmness
in the setting to the larger, and jammed them fast within those safe
limits determined by the line an