the sway and influence of the
priesthood. If the tenantry regarded the landlord as a simple-hearted,
crotchety old gentleman with no harm in him, the landlord believed them
to be almost incurably sunk in barbarism and superstition. Their native
courtesy in declining to accept suggestions they never meant to
adopt, he looked on as duplicity; he could not understand that the
matter-of-fact sternness of English expression has no parallel here;
that politeness, as they understood it, has a claim, to which truth
itself may be sacrificed; and he was ever accepting in a literal
sense, what the people intended to be received with its accustomed
qualification.

But a more detrimental result followed than even these: the truly
well-conducted and respectable portion of the tenantry felt ashamed to
adopt plans and notions they knew inapplicable and unsuited to their
condition; they therefore stood aloof, and by their honest forbearance
incurred the reproach of obstinacy and barbarism; while the idle, the
lazy, and the profligate, became converts to any doctrine or class of
opinion, which promised an easy life and the rich man's favour. These,
at first sight, found favour with him, as possessing more intelligence
and tractibility than their neighbours, and for them, cottages were
built, rents abated, improved stock introduced, and a hundred devices
organized to make them an example for all imitation. Unhappily the
conditions of the contract were misconceived: the people believed that
all the landlord required was a patient endurance of his benevolence;
they never reckoned on any reciprocity in duty; they never dreamed that
a Swiss cottage cannot be left to the fortunes of a mud cabin; that
stagnant pools before the door, weed-grown fields, and broken fences,
harmonize ill with rural pailings, drill cultivation, and trim hedges.
They took all they could get, but assuredly they never understood the
obligation of repayment. They thought (not very unreasonably perhaps),
"it's the old gentleman's hobby that we should adopt a number of habits
and customs we were never used to--live in strange houses and work with
strange tools. Be it so; we are willing to gratify him," said they, "but
let him pay for his whistle."

He, on the other hand, thought they were greedily adopting what they
only endured, and deemed all converts to his opinion who lived on his
bounty. Hence, each morning presented an array of the most worthless,
irreclaimable of