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Updated: May 8, 2025
Shall I find him at the plough-tail, I wonder, this mute inglorious heir-at-law? or shall I find an heiress with brawny arms meekly churning butter? or shall I discover the last of the Meynells taking his rest in some lonely churchyard, not to be awakened by earthly voice proclaiming the tidings of earthly good fortune? I am going to Yorkshire that is enough for me.
But it does seem strange that no other amusement can be found for them than the beer-shop. Can't they read? Can't they practise light and interesting handicrafts at home, as the German peasantry do? 'Who'll teach 'em, sir? From the plough-tail to the reaping-hook, and back again, is all they know.
This piece of conduct, in choosing a camp under the walls of an enemy's fortification, which I believe never happened before, was practised, I presume, with a view of accustoming the soldiers to stand fire, who were not as yet much used to discipline, most of them having been taken from the plough-tail a few months before.
It needs no effort of imagination to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars, almost all either clergymen or professors, must have been in the presence of this big-boned, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who had forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single stride; and it will always be a reflection in their honour that they suffered no pedantic prejudices to interfere with their reception of the poet.
'Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, are called. Let a poor man at his plough-tail, or a poor woman in her garret, or a collier in the pit, have Jesus Christ for their Companion, and they have got the kernel; and the gentlemen that like such diet may live on the shell if they will, and can.
Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS. of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or serving as apothecaries' 'prentices we were good society from the beginning.
Little children love playing at soldiers best of all games, and delight in destroying whole tin armies with pea-shooting artillery. With what silent eagerness the newspapers are devoured in war-time when the details of a battle appear! If two cocks in a farm- yard get at one another the heaviest bumpkin from the plough-tail, who seems incapable of an emotion, grows animated.
"There lies the very thing that never should be said. Captain, you have seven children, or it may be eight of them justly. And the pride of life Mary, you be off!" Mary was glad to run away, for she liked not to be among so many men. But her father would not have her triumphed over. "Speak for yourself, good wife," he said. "I know what you have got behind, as well as rooks know plough-tail.
And what was very wrong of me, though I did not see it then, I kept John Fry there, to praise my shots, from dinner-time often until the grey dusk, while he all the time should have been at work spring-ploughing upon the farm. And for that matter so should I have been, or at any rate driving the horses; but John was by no means loath to be there, instead of holding the plough-tail.
"What's thy need, young man that comest down to Temple wi' sword a- danglin'?" The girl was a half-naked savage, dress'd only in a strip of sacking that barely reach'd her knees, and a scant bodice of the same, lac'd in front with pack thread, that left her bosom and brown arms free. Yet she appear'd no whit abash'd, but lean'd on the plough-tail and regarded me, easy and frank, as a man would.
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