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From The Cornhill Magazine.
COBBETT.

She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple pudding for dinner, and bread and cheese for supper. Her IN common with that of all men who, fire was made of turf cut from the neighfrom the lowest origin and through the boring heath, and her evening light was a most extraordinary obstacles, have made rush dipped in grease." As soon as the their way to fame and power, the life of boy William was old enough to be useful William Cobbett must at all times, and on the farm, he was set to work. Scaring under all variations of opinion, derive a birds was of course his first occupation; certain claim on our attention, from the and he was sent into the field with his purely human interest attaching to it. At wooden bottle and his satchel when he the present day, however, it possesses was hardly big enough to climb the gates something more than this. Many of the and stiles. Here he remained the whole social and political questions which Cob- day, finding it, as he tells us, a task of bett was the first to raise in this country infinite difficulty to get home at night. slumbered for a long time after his death, Had a commission been appointed in those and have only recently reappeared. They days to inquire into the condition of agrihave taken, indeed, a very different form cultural children, would this have been from that which they wore in his hands, accounted cruelty? Cobbett, at all events, but they are essentially the same ques- throve under the system. In due time he tions, and to Cobbett belongs the credit, was set to weed wheat, then to lead a for good or for evil, of having been the horse at harrowing; and eventually he first to indicate their existence. It would joined the reapers at harvest, and rose to be far beyond the scope of this article to the dignity of driving the team, and holdconsider these questions on their merits;ing the plough. "Honest pride and happy but as entwined with the growth of a very days!" says he. Cobbett, however, even uncommon character, they possess a col- at this early age, appears to have been lateral interest sufficient to excuse the more alive to the beauties of nature than introduction of them in an essay which is most children of his class or perhaps of not political. any other class. He remembered the Cobbett was born at Farnham, in Sur- pleasure that he took when a very little rey, on March 9, 1762. His father was boy in the birds and the flowers, in the the son of a day-laborer, but had risen primroses and bluebells clustering on the himself into the position of a small oc- hedge banks, and the song of the linnets cupier, and, according to the account given in the spreading trees above his head. of him in the Annual Register, kept the He was also, as he continued through life, public-house called the "Jolly Farmer." keenly alive to the sports of the field, and The grandfather, who had worked forty at the cry of the hounds used to start from years for the same master, died before his work and dash after them wherever William Cobbett was born. Every one, they led him. When he was about fourhis grandson hopes, "will have the good- teen he accompanied his father to Weyhill ness to believe that he was no philosopher fair, and heard the London Gazette read neither was he a deist-and all his out at supper announcing the taking of children were born in wedlock. The lega- Long Island by the British. But it was cies he left were his scythe, his reap-hook, not till he was more than twenty, that his and his flail." His grandmother he re- mind was really stirred to look beyond the membered well, who lived "in a little limits of his own happy valley, and to grow thatched cottage with a garden before the impatient of his homely life. In the autumn door. It had but two windows; a damson- of 1782 he paid a visit to a relative who tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts lived near Portsmouth, and his first view the other. Here I and my brother went of the sea from the top of Portsdown Hill every Christmas and Whitsuntide to spend inspired him with a sudden longing to be a week or two, and torment the poor old a sailor. He went on board a man-of-war woman with our noise and dilapidations. with that object, but the captain good

naturedly refused to take him, and he He had read a little in general literature returned to the plough once more, but besides; and used to boast that he was "spoiled for a farmer." His former a much better educated man than "the amusement palled upon him, and to surpass his brothers in the labors of the field no longer satisfied his ambition.

frivolous dunces" who came from Westminster and Eton. But for the want of the training to be got at these despised At length, in May 1783, when he was institutions, Cobbett, in the judgment of dressed to go to a neighboring fair in com- Lord Dalling, never did himself justice in pany with some village girls, he met the the arena of political philosophy. UnLondon coach just as he sallied from home, doubtedly, with the advantages of a regular and, unable to resist the impulse of the education he would have been less violent, moment, mounted to the roof and was less coarse, and less really superficial than soon deposited in London to make his own he was. But whether his influence with fortune. He descended from the coach the public would have been any the greater almost penniless, for his little stock of on that account may reasonably be doubted. money, consisting of a few crown and half- It was the simplicity and directness of his crown pieces, which he says he had been writings which made them so popular and years in amassing, "melted away like so powerful; and these are not always snow before the sun when touched by the reconcilable with the study of first prinfingers of the innkeepers and their wait- ciples, the investigation of remote causes, ers." He was indebted for immediate and the analysis and comparison of comshelter to the generosity of one of his fel-plex and divergent products. Such as he low-travellers, a hop-merchant, who had was, however, he had made himself by made the acquaintance of Cobbett's father these seven years of application, and the at Weyhill. Through him he obtained a | achievement is probably unique. situation as clerk to an attorney in Gray's In February 1792, he married Anne Inn, but finding this life intolerable, he | Reid, a young woman who had saved some enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Regiment, and money in domestic service; and after trywas soon on his way to Nova Scotia.ing his fortune as a bookseller and journalCobbett remained in the army for seven ist in America, where he made himself years, rose to the rank of sergeant-major, famous in the town of Philadelphia under and obtained his discharge in 1791 with a the sobriquet of "Peter Porcupine," he very flattering testimonial from his major, returned to England in the last year of the Lord Edward Fitzgerald. These seven eighteenth century. years are in some respects the most wonderful of Cobbett's life. There is no need to describe what a barrack-room was in those days. Yet with all the interruptions, distractions, and temptations to which every hour of his leisure was necessarily exposed, he steadily applied himself to the work of self-education. He procured a "Lowth's English Grammar," to which, says he, "I applied myself with unceasing assiduity.... The pains I took cannot be described; I wrote the whole grammar out two or three times; I got it by heart. 1 repeated it every morning and every evening, and when on guard, I imposed on myself the task of saying it all over once every time I was posted sentinel." At the same time he was reading Watts' "Logic," and books on rhetoric and geometry, the authors of which he afterwards forgot.

When Cobbett disembarked at Falmouth on the 8th of July, 1800, he brought back to England a Tory of the old school, in whom Bolingbroke and Barnard would have recognized a kindred spirit. Unfortunately, however, the Tories were at this time in power, and obnoxious to many of the same charges which the Craftsman used to bring against the Whigs. The great expense of government, the increase of the national debt, the depression of the landed interest, the growth of jobbery and corruption, etc., etc., stared Cobbett in the face when he returned from America as broadly as they did Bolingbroke when he returned from France. But the Tories were Cobbett's friends, and it was necessary that he should learn to distinguish between their principles and their practices. Of the former, however, he had no

philosophical conceptions, and the latter | after their names. He had letters at one