This pleasant village is worthy of notice from being the place where Bloomfield commenced his humble career as the ‘Farmer's Boy;' a situation which introduced him to the knowledge of those rural employments and occupations which he has delineated with so much felicity and correctness.
Here his first thoughts to Nature's charms inclin'd.
Which stamps devotion on th' inquiring mind.
It affords an instructive lesson, and is an agreeable retrospect, to trace the Poet from his present circumstances, as an author high in the public estimation, to the early years of his life, when he was employed in the field, which forms the foreground of the annexed Print, to scare birds from the corn; and where frequently, basking in the sun at the foot of that aged, and now almost sapless, elm, by the focus of a glass he consumed his paper, and his time, unconscious of the purposes to which they were destined by futurity. The scenery round the farm has been greatly injured within the last twenty-five or thirty years, by felling most of the timber.
