1773.—Here began a new career of industry, ill-exerted, of new hopes and never-failing disappointments, labour and sorrow, folly and infatuation, which it is scarcely possible for a man, turned into the world without business or profession, to escape, and it affords a most impressive lesson to all parents to be almost as ready to hang their children as to bring them up without a regular profession. If I had been a country curate with 50_l._ a year, in addition to the income I possessed, and had lived in a quiet parsonage, the probability of happiness would have been far greater. The business of my farm at North Mimms was insufficient to keep me employed, and the intercourse I constantly had with London I considered as a means which should be turned to some account in the increase of a most insufficient income; in fact, I was in a most uncomfortable state, which induced me to listen to the proposals of a gentleman I met with—I have quite forgotten whom—who informed me that the ‘Morning Post’ proprietors were in great want of some person to report the debates in Parliament. In consequence of this information I applied at their office, and they very readily engaged me for a trial, to see if I was able to perform the business they required. This was done, and as they were well satisfied with the manner in which the work was executed, I continued it at a salary, as well as I can recollect, of five guineas a week. Every Saturday I walked seventeen miles to my farm, and back again on the Monday morning. This year I published my observations on the present state of waste lands, which contained a new idea of extreme importance in the mode of working any great and effective improvement. In most of the attempts that have been made by individuals to accomplish these meritorious works, there generally appeared a weakness of effort and insufficiency of means, which prevented anything considerable being effected, and the cause I justly explained to be, a want of proportion between the means and the end, not so much in a want of money as in a most erroneous method of applying it. To raise a set of buildings for a farm, with gradual additions to the whole, and enclosing from the waste, field after field for improvement, with views merely of forming a large farm, and keeping the whole in hand, demands so large a capital that the succeeding languor of the exertions has been evidently owing to want of money, the capital being insufficient for the two distinct objects of farming and improving. The novel idea struck me that the whole capital in such cases should be appropriated to improvements alone; that no other buildings should be raised than exactly sufficient for such a small farm as lets most readily in the district—and this, usually, is little more than a cottage, and ten or twenty acres of grass round it. Hence I proposed that an entire new farm should, after one course of crops, be formed, and let, sold, or mortgaged every year.