orthy of attention than
the achievement. The power of retaining and handling facts was one
which he never lost, but it was absorbed and even concealed among
powers of later development, when reality was a richer thing to him
than is to be surmised from anything in 'The Story of Swindon.'

'Unequal Agriculture' (_Fraser's_, May, 1877) and 'Village
Organization' (_New Quarterly_, October, 1875) belong to the same
period. They describe and debate matters which are now not so new,
though often as debatable. The description is sometimes felicitous,
as in the 'steady jerk' of the sower's arm, but is not destined for
immortality; and the picture of a steam-plough at work he himself
surpassed in a later paper. But it is sufficiently vivid to survive
for another generation. Since Cobbett no keener agriculturist's eye
or better pen had surveyed North Wiltshire. The most advanced and
the most antiquated style of farming remain the same in our own day.
Whether these articles were commissioned or not, their form and
direction was probably dictated as much by the expressed or supposed
needs of the magazine as by Jefferies himself. His own line was not
yet clear and strong, and he consciously or unconsciously adopted
one which was a compromise between his own and that of his
contemporaries. In fact, it is hard in places to tell whether he is
expressing his own opinion or those of the farmers whom he has
consulted; and he still writes as one of an agricultural community
who is to remain in it. But many of the suggestions in 'Village
Organization' may still be found stimulating, and the inactivity of
men in country parishes is not yet in need of further description;
while the fact that 'the great centres of population have almost
entirely occupied the attention of our legislators of late years' is
still only fitfully perceived. It should be noticed, also, that he
is true to himself and his later self, if not in his valiant
asseveration of the farmer's sturdy independence, yet in the wish
that there should be an authority to 'cause a parish to be supplied
with good drinking water,' or that there should be a tank, 'the
public property of the village.'

To 'Unequal Agriculture' the editor of _Fraser's Magazine_ appended
a note, saying that if England were to be brought to such a pitch of
perfection under scientific cultivation as Jefferies desired, 'a few
of us would then prefer to go away and live elsewhere.' And there is
no doubt that