to digression to return to illustrations of a plainsailing sort. When Mr. Hawthorne visited the Earl of Leicester's Hospital, at Warwick, and interested himself so benignly in the ways and means of its old and liveried Twelve Brethren, a sense of their sense of dependence marred his enjoyment of the survey; and it was a relief to him, in this respect, to enter the vegetable garden, with its twelve small, separate patches allotted to "the individual brethren, who cultivate them at their own judgment and by their own labour; and their own beans and cauliflowers," he remarks, "have a better flavour, I doubt not, than if they had received them directly from the dead hand of the Earl of Leicester, like the rest of their food." Each several stalk of greenstuff might in itself be a poor thing, but it was the poor Brother's own. Dr. Bucknill, of the Devon Lunatic Asylum, in advocating the system of placing the patients in detached buildings, observes of the so-called cottages attached to that institution: "These cottages are much preferred to the wards by the patients themselves, and permission to reside in them is much coveted." A writer in the Quarterly Review, adopting the same view, and therefore condemning the Colney Hatch system, urges the infinite superiority for the lunatics of the smallest cottage to the formal monotony of cheerless wards; and incidentally remarks how far greater an interest a patient woul d undoubtedly feel in peeling his own potatoes for the pot, and in boiling his own bit of bacon, than in receiving them ready cooked. John Constable said, proudly, but not without cause shown for his pride, "Whatever may be thought of my art, it is my own, and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than live in a palace belonging to another." English Landscape was Constable's cottage-and his very own. Propria domus omnium optima, says the Latin proverb: one's own house is the best of all, simply because it is one's own. To Thestylis that binds the sheaves, as to Boaz that owns the broad acres, there's no place like home,-his home. Dr. Boyd moralises on the instinctive desire there is in human nature to possess some portion of the earth's surface. "You look with indescribable interest at an acre of ground that is your own. There is something quite remarkable about your own trees. You have a sense of property in the sunset over your own hills." One may apply the stanzas of the Laureate, as to the interest felt in working one's own bit of ground: And I must work thro' months of toil, And years of cultivation, Upon my proper patch of soil To grow my own plantation. A little garden blossom. My proper patch-there is the key-note. A patch, but property; and that property, mine. A poor thing, but mine own. And therefore to be made better, to be made more of; according to political economists, to be made the very most of, because one's very own. Adam Smith remarks, that a small proprietor, who knows every part of his little territory, views it with all the affection which property, especially small property, naturally inspires, and who upon that account naturally takes pleasure not only in cultivating but in adorning it, is generally of all improvers the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful. The especial affection inspired by small property has often been noticed. Extent of ownership, observes the Essayist on Social Subjects, takes away from the pleasures of ownership quite as much as it adds: the nobleman seldom has the greatest of all the pleasures of ownership-that of himself creating something. "He is obliged to work continually by deputy. He does not know the delight with which a poor man digs and trains his little border." And the Essayist no way exaggerates in asserting, that there is more keen satisfaction in laying out one of those odd little black plots that back up a suburban villa, than in gazing on the labours of twenty gardeners-all in your pay-at Chatsworth or Blenheim. So, from his own Country Parson experience, does A. K. H. B. contend that there is a peculiar comfort and interest about a little place, which vanishes with increasing magnitude and magnificence. And he calls it a law of all healthy minds, that what is one's own has an attraction for one's self far beyond that possessed by much finer things which belong to another. "A man with one little country abode, may have more real delight in it, than a duke has in his wide demesnes. Indeed, I heartily pity a duke with half a score of noble houses. He can never have a home feeling in any one of them." Elsewhere again, the same discourser, but "concerning" another topic, asks if it can be supposed that a rich man, sitting in his sumptuous library, all oak and morocco, glittering backs of splendid volumes, lounges and sofas of every degree, all which he has “merely paid for,” has half the enjoyment that Robinson Crusoe had when he looked round his cave with its rude shelves and bulkheads, its clumsy arm-chair and its rough pottery, all contrived and made by his own hands? "Now the poor cottager has a good deal of the Robinson Crusoe enjoyment; something of the pleasure which Sandford and Merton felt when they had built and thatched their house, and then sat within it, gravely proud and happy, while the pelting shower came down but could not reach them." Adam Smith's incidental plea for peasant proprietors has been supported, and enlarged upon, by political economists, not a few, continental and English, most especially, and most elaborately, perhaps, by Mr. John Stuart Mill. Sismondi maintains the peasant proprietor to be of all cultivators the one who gets most from the soil, and of all cultivators the happiest. Mr. Howitt, describing the rudeness of the implements in use with the Rhenish peasantry, and the inferiority of their ploughing, yet shows that under the "invigorating influence of the feelings of proprietorship, they make up for the imperfections of their apparatus by the intensity of their application." They labour hard, he says, early and late, because they feel that they are labouring for themselves. "The English peasant is so cut off from the idea of property, that he comes habitually to look upon it as a thing from which he is warned off by the laws of the large proprietors, and becomes, in consequence, spiritless, purposeless." Arthur Young, who was a staunch opposer of the policy favoured by these citations, freely testified, nevertheless, to the impulse given to agricultural labour abroad by a sense of proprietorship. His are the italics in the extracts that follow: "Such a knot of active husbandmen . . . turn their rocks into scenes of fertility, because I suppose their own." "The magic of property turns sand to gold." (This refers to some poor cottage property on the Dunes, near Dunkirk,-with garden ground of "most wretched blowing dune sand, naturally as white as snow, but improved by industry.") Of another district he reports: "An activity has been here, that has swept away all difficulties before it, and has clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it." The metayer, Sismondi writes, lives on his metairie as his inheritance, loving it with affection, labouring incessantly to im |