The school of political economists, moreover, who urge the advantage of a peasant proprietary--of small independent holdings,--as at once drawing from the land the fullest produce and rearing upon it the most vigorous and provident population,--this school, as is well known, finds in the _statesmen_ of Cumberland one of its favourite examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first object was to secure the existence of as many armed men as possible, in readiness to repel the Scot, the abbeys and great proprietors in the north readily granted small estates on military tenure, which tenure, when personal service in the field was no longer needed, became in most cases an absolute ownership. The attachment of these _statesmen_ to their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which they would make to avoid parting with them, formed an impressive phenomenon in the little world--a world at once of equality and of conservatism--which was the scene of Wordsworth's childish years, and which remained his manhood's ideal. The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased competition for land, has swallowed up many of these small independent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of the most tragic outcast of fortune could still Have laughed himself to scorn, to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3] [Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from a poem).] Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life of the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.