TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Volume II is available as Project Gutenberg ebook number 49845.

WILLIAM COBBETT.

A BIOGRAPHY.

VOL. I.

LONDON:
GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, PRINTERS,
ST. JOHN’S SQUARE.

J. R. Smith pinxit. F. Bartolozzi R.A. sculpsit.

M^r. William Cobbett.

WILLIAM COBBETT:
A BIOGRAPHY.

By EDWARD SMITH.

IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.

London:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON,
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET.
1878.
[All rights reserved.]

“It is not by his faults, but by his excellences, that we measure a great man.”

G. H. Lewes (On Actors, &c.).

“Fear never but you shall be consistent in whatever variety of actions, so that they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem.”

R. W. Emerson (Essay on Self-reliance).

“My good blade carves the casques of men,

My tough lance thrusteth sure,

My strength is as the strength of ten,

Because my heart is pure!”

Tennyson (Sir Galahad).

NOTE.

The following pages need no Preface, with regard to their subject.

I am unwilling, however, to let the work go forth to the public without a renewed word of thanks, to those who have given me any sort of encouragement or assistance. My acknowledgments are especially due to the venerable daughter of Mr. James Swann, for the use of some letters; to the author of the “Handbook of Fictitious Names,” without whose apt teaching in the art of Bibliography, the work might have wanted the interesting appendix; to Mr. Job Swain, one of the last survivors of Cobbett’s personal friends, for some reminiscences; and to Mr. Ellis Yarnall, of Philadelphia, for copies of several letters, and for some suggestions which have enabled the author to throw additional light on the “Porcupine” days.

E. S.

London: November, 1878.

CONTENTS.

WILLIAM COBBETT:
A BIOGRAPHY.

CHAPTER I.
“I looked back with pride to my waggon-driving grandfather.”

William Cobbett was born in the parish of Farnham, in the county of Surrey, on the 9th of March, 1762.

The town of Farnham is a hop-garden. It had, in olden days, one of the most important corn-markets in the south of England. Before that, it was a great clothing mart; and, early in Parliamentary history, was called upon to send representatives to the “Collective Wisdom.” But, at last, the mercantile spirit proper, as was the case with many towns in Surrey, Kent, and Sussex, fled from Farnham; granaries took the place of workshops; and manufactures declined. With the extinction of the iron-furnaces of the Weald expired the once-flourishing trade of the south of England; and agriculture became the staple pursuit of the still-prosperous people, all over the fertile country which lies between the Thames and the English Channel. Corn-fields took the place of extensive sheep and cattle pastures; new grazing-downs succeeded to the burnt-up forests, whilst hops took the pick of the land, upon which they throve in a hitherto-unexampled manner. And Farnham, with its deep, rich, light-brown soil, found itself with a title to give to the best hops grown in England.

So Farnham is, to this day, a big hop-garden. In spite of a railway-station and 10,000 inhabitants, and the proximity of a garrison, the impression is, all around, the same. You enter the town from London, and the first church you come to is nearly surrounded with vines; the last building, at the other end of the long street, is an oast-house. You may take a lodging down by the river-side, and find a forest of hop-poles immediately outside your window, in the morning; or taking stand on any elevation, you will see all the uplands around, either in their luxuriant summer dress of vine, or else, so many square miles of poles placed tent-wise, taking their winter rest, looking like nothing so much as the encampment of a monstrous army.

They must have been clever enough in their generation, who planted and built hereabouts nearly two thousand years ago; but he who did the most on behalf of this part of Surrey was he who planted a small field of hops on the upland towards Crondell, somewhere about the year 1600. By the middle of the eighteenth century the hops of Farnham were already distinguished—“always at the top of the market;” and the agricultural writers of that day wax eloquent over the praises of the pleasing, fertile vale, and its “hazel-coloured,” loamy soil, and the yearly-increasing number of acres given up to hop-culture. Arthur Young calls the district between Farnham and Alton the finest in England.

The scenery around Farnham is not, in itself, unique; so far, that any well-cultivated English river-valley is like almost any other, with its low hills crowned along their summits with the evidences of prosperous farming. But, from the top of one of these eminences, the eye soon discovers certain characteristics, which compel a deep impression upon the mind of singularity and beauty. The best view is, perhaps, to be obtained from Hungry Hill, near Aldershot; the most prominent object being Crooksbury Hill, rising from above the woods of Moor Park and Waverley Abbey. A very odd-looking hill, covered with tall Scotch firs, the like of which it would be difficult to name; a wide expanse of sandy heath, now partly cultivated, stretches for many miles beyond, until broken up into a tumultuous range of heath-clad hills; and these, again, succeeded by the distant blue outlines of the Sussex and Hampshire downs. The river Wey courses down the vale, passing through the lower part of Farnham town; and after spinning merrily through the meadows and hop-fields below, bends abruptly round in the direction of Guildford.

The inhabitants of this district, one hundred years ago, were almost out of the great World. The turnpike-road to Winchester and the south-west bounded their earthly aims; upon it was situated the weekly goal for the produce of their farms; and along it was, at a toilsome distance, either the great metropolis at one end, or Portsmouth and her marines at the other. With strong native prejudices, and a character for inflexible honesty, the farmers (generally speaking) lived remote, “equal enemies to improvements in agriculture and to relaxations in morals;” the smallest occupiers sharing the hardest toil with their labourers.

Before the great scarcity and dearness set in, in the last quarter of the century—when the clocks and the brass kettles began to disappear from the parlours, and the visions of general pauperism began to appear—the spirit of the peasantry in the remoter parts of Surrey was high and independent—chill penury was then uncommon with the able-bodied. In the receipt of only seven or eight shillings a week of average money wages, such was the cheapness of food, and so light were the burdens which Prudence had to bear, that the labourer was healthy, cheerful, and contented; whilst he could often explain clearly enough, from his own observation and reflection, the merits or demerits of the different systems and practice upon the neighbouring farms.

Of this class was the grandfather of William Cobbett.

“With respect to my ancestors, I shall go no further back than my grandfather, and for this plain reason, that I never heard talk of any prior to him. He was a day-labourer, and I have heard my father say, that he worked for one farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death, upwards of forty years. He died before I was born, but I have often slept beneath the same roof that had sheltered him, and where his widow dwelt for several years after his death. It was a little thatched cottage with a garden before the door. It had but two windows; a damson-tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts the other. Here I and my brothers went every Christmas and Whitsuntide, to spend a week or two, and torment the poor old woman with our noise and dilapidations. She used to give us milk and bread for breakfast, an apple-pudding for our dinner, and a piece of bread and cheese for supper. Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her evening light was a rush dipped in grease.”

George Cobbett, son of this old couple, appears to have much improved his condition in life; and he lived to see all his boys gradually rising in the world. William was the third (out of four), and he gives vivid sketches of their daily course of existence.

“My father, when I was born, was a farmer. The reader will easily believe, from the poverty of his parents, that he had received no very brilliant education: he was, however, learned, for a man in his rank of life. When a little boy, he drove the plough for twopence a day, and these his earnings were appropriated to the expenses of an evening school. What a village schoolmaster could be expected to teach, he had learnt, and had besides considerably improved himself in several branches of the mathematics. He understood land surveying well, and was often chosen to draw the plans of disputed territory: in short, he had the reputation of possessing experience and understanding, which never fails, in England, to give a man, in a country place, some little weight with his neighbours. He was honest, industrious, and frugal; it was not, therefore, wonderful, that he should be situated in a good farm, and happy in a wife of his own rank, like him, beloved and respected.

“So much for my ancestors, from whom, if I derive no honour, I derive no shame.

“A father like ours, it will be readily supposed, did not suffer us to eat the bread of idleness. I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas. When I first trudged a-field, with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and, at the close of the day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was weeding wheat, and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing peas followed, and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving the team and holding the plough. We were all of us strong and laborious, and my father used to boast, that he had four boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. Honest pride, and happy days!…”

“I have some faint recollection of going to school to an old woman, who, I believe, did not succeed in teaching me my letters. In the winter evenings my father taught us all to read and write, and gave us a pretty tolerable knowledge of arithmetic. Grammar he did not perfectly understand himself, and therefore his endeavours to teach us that, necessarily failed; for, though he thought he understood it, and though he made us get the rules by heart, we learnt nothing at all of the principles.”

No, the book-learning was not to come yet. That was to be left until the little world of his birthplace had become too small to hold him. Nearly sixty years after these simple times, Mr. Cobbett is riding in the neighbourhood, accompanied by one of his sons, and the two go out of their way to visit the spot where he received “the rudiments of his education.”

“There is a little hop-garden in which I used to work when from eight to ten years old; from which I have scores of times run to follow the hounds, leaving the hoe to do the best that it could to destroy the weeds; but the most interesting thing was a sand-hill, which goes from a part of the heath down to the rivulet. As a due mixture of pleasure with toil, I with two brothers, used occasionally to disport ourselves, as the lawyers call it, at this sand-hill. One diversion was this: we used to go to the top of the hill, which was steeper than the roof of a house; one used to draw his arms out of the sleeves of his smock-frock, and lay himself down with his arms by his sides; and then the others, one at head and the other at feet, sent him rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood. By the time he got to the bottom, his hair, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, were all full of this loose sand; then the others took their turn; and at every roll, there was a monstrous spell of laughter. I had often told my sons of this while they were very little, and I now took one of them to see the spot. But, that was not all. This was the spot where I was receiving my education; and this was the sort of education; and I am perfectly satisfied that if I had not received such an education, or something very much like it; that, if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nursery-maid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been at this day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or from any of those dens of dunces called colleges and universities. It is impossible to say how much I owe to that sand-hill; and I went to return it my thanks for the ability which it probably gave me to be one of the greatest terrors, to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools, that ever were permitted to afflict this or any other country.”

In such manner the merry, sturdy, little life went on. At tying hop-poles, or scaring birds, almost as soon as he could barely stand, a trifling share was given to the family efforts; whilst the vigorous, healthy senses were already open to the keenest enjoyment of nature, and to the unexpected moments of fun which enter into the days of boyhood. Look at this, for example (written at nearly seventy years of age).

“When I was a very little boy, I was, in the barley-sowing season, going along by the side of a field, near Waverley Abbey; the primroses and blue-bells bespangling the banks on both sides of me; a thousand linnets singing in a spreading oak over my head; while the jingle of the traces, and the whistling of the plough-boys saluted my ear from over the hedge; and, as it were to snatch me from the enchantment, the hounds, at that instant, having started a hare in the hanger on the other side of the field, came up scampering over it in full cry, taking me after them many a mile. I was not more than eight years old; but this particular scene has presented itself to my mind many times every year from that day to this. I always enjoy it over again, &c.”

Cobbett’s political writings, during his whole career, were largely illustrated by the incidents and occurrences of his life. This was the line taken by his own peculiar egotism, and we are indebted to it for numerous pictures similar to the above. Of this particular period there is only space here for the following capital story:—

“When I was a boy, a huntsman named George Bradley, who was huntsman to Mr. Smither, of Hale, very wantonly gave me a cut with his whip, because I jumped in amongst the dogs, pulled a hare from them, and got her scut, upon a little common, called Seal Common, near Waverley Abbey. I was only about eight years old; but my mind was so strongly imbued with the principles of natural justice, that I did not rest satisfied with the mere calling of names, of which, however, I gave Mr. George Bradley a plenty. I sought to inflict a just punishment upon him; and, as I had not the means of proceeding by force, I proceeded by cunning in the manner that I am presently going to describe. I had not then read the Bible, much less had I read Grotius and Puffendorf; I, therefore, did not know that God and man had declared, that it was laudable to combat tyranny by either force or fraud; but, though I did not know what tyranny meant, reason and a sense of justice taught me that Bradley had been guilty of tyranny towards me; and the native resources of my mind, together with my resolution, made me inflict justice on him in the following manner:—Hounds (hare-hounds at least) will follow the trail of a red herring as eagerly as that of a hare, and rather more so, the scent being stronger and more unbroken. I waited till Bradley and his pack were trailing for a hare in the neighbourhood of that same Seal Common. They were pretty sure to find in the space of half an hour, and the hare was pretty sure to go up the common and over the hill to the south. I placed myself ready with a red herring at the end of a string, in a dry field, and near a hard path, along which, or near to which, I was pretty sure the hare would go. I waited a long while; the sun was getting high, the scent bad; but, by and by, I heard the view-halloo and full cry. I squatted down in the fern, and my heart bounded with the prospect of inflicting justice, when I saw my lady come skipping by, going off towards Pepperharrow; that is to say, to the south. In a moment, I clapped down my herring, went off at a right angle towards the west, climbed up a steep bank very soon, where the horsemen, such as they were, could not follow; then on I went over the roughest part of the common that I could find, till I got to the pales of Moor Park, over which I went, there being holes at the bottom for the letting in of the hares. That part of the park was covered with short heath; and I gave some twirls about to amuse Mr. Bradley for half-an-hour. Then off I went, and down a hanger at last, to the bottom of which no horseman could get without riding round a quarter of a mile. At the bottom of the hanger was an alder moor, in a swamp. There my herring ceased to perform its service. The river is pretty rapid, I tossed it in, that it might go back to the sea, and relate to its brethren the exploits of the land. I washed my hands in the water of the moor; and took a turn, and stood at the top of the hanger to witness the winding up of the day’s sport, which terminated a little before dusk in one of the dark days of November. After overrunning the scent a hundred times, after an hour’s puzzling in the dry field, after all the doubles and all the turns that the sea-borne hare had given them, down came the whole posse to the swamp; the huntsman went round a mill-head not far off, and tried the other side of the river: ‘No! d— her, where can she be?’ And thus, amidst conjectures, disputations, mutual blamings, and swearings a plenty, they concluded, some of them half-leg deep in dirt, and going soaking home at the end of a drizzling day.”

The little life, that was destined to be such a cruel thorn in the sides of Authority, was very near being summarily extinguished about this time; on occasion of William getting out of his depth while bathing in the river Wey, and from which he was “pulled out by the foot, which happened to stick up above the water.”

By the time of his reaching ten or eleven years of age he is already getting useful, in his way, and he takes his turn with his brothers of going the annual visit to Weyhill Fair with their father. The fair at Weyhill, though still considerable, is not what it was then; the hop-growers now run off to Worcester, or Burton-on-Trent; but in those days, long before the railways, Weyhill in October was the grand centre for sheep, hops, &c. There the yearly hirings took place, and there the bucolic gathering from all the neighbouring counties had an annual dissipation. We shall presently see that it was at one of these trips Cobbett made his first acquaintance with American politics. But the following incident—which has often been told, but cannot on that account be omitted here—presents his first recorded look-out upon life.

“At eleven years of age, my employment was clipping of box-edgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester, at the Castle of Farnham, my native town. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens; and a gardener, who had just come from the King’s Gardens at Kew, gave such a description as made me instantly resolve to work in these gardens. The next morning, without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on, from place to place, inquiring my way thither. A long day (it was in June) brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese, and a pennyworth of small beer, which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other, left threepence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond, in my blue smock-frock, and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book in a bookseller’s window. ‘Tale of a Tub,’ price 3d. The title was so odd, that my curiosity was excited. I had the 3d., but then I could have no supper. In I went, and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field, at the upper corner of Kew Gardens, where there stood a haystack. On the shady side of this, I sat down to read. The book was so different from anything that I had ever read before; it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and, doubtless, his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotchman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodgings, and set me to work. And it was during the period that I was at Kew, that the present King (Geo. IV.), and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress, while I was sweeping the grass-plat round the foot of the pagoda. The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but these I could not relish after my ‘Tale of a Tub,’ which I carried about with me wherever I went; and when I, at about twenty [24] years old, lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain then I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds.”

How long the employment at Kew lasted, and how he got home again, does not appear. The life at Farnham was probably resumed before the approach of winter; for, either the year before this, or that immediately succeeding, he mentions being sent down from Farnham to Steeple Langford, in Wiltshire, with a horse; remaining at the latter place “from the month of June till the fall of the year.”

Cobbett must have been about fourteen years of age at the time alluded to in the following incident:—

“My father used to take one of us with him every year to the great hop-fair at Weyhill. The fair was held at Old Michaelmastide, and the journey was to us a sort of reward for the labours of the summer. It happened to be my turn to go thither the very year that Long Island was taken by the British. A great company of hop-merchants and farmers were just sitting down to supper as the post arrived, bringing in the ‘Extraordinary Gazette,’ which announced the victory. A hop-factor from London took the paper, placed his chair upon the table, and began to read with an audible voice. He was opposed, a dispute ensued, and my father retired, taking me by the hand, to another apartment, where we supped with about a dozen others of the same sentiments. Here Washington’s health, and success to the Americans, were repeatedly toasted, and this was the first time, as far as I can recollect, that I ever heard the General’s name mentioned. Little did I then dream that I should ever see the man, and still less that I should hear some of his own countrymen reviling and execrating him.”

Although we have learned, not only to look with complacency upon the results of the attempt to coerce the Colonies, but, also, to wonder that there could have ever been English statesmen so deluded as to expect anything but disaster from the contest; it has not been sufficiently observed, that the immediate effect was the partial ruin of the labouring poor in this country; that it is from that period that their prosperity has declined, and their comforts have become fewer and fewer. And what is more, before their impoverishment made it obvious to everybody, the common people and the tradesmen showed, by their abhorrence of the war, that they were, for once, gifted with a truer political sagacity than their precious rulers; and that there must have been some vague general anticipation of the consequences to them, and to their families. Prices rose, whilst wages remained stationary; and, from the very outset, the privations of the poor were aggravated to an intense degree. But from that date arose the thirst of the labouring classes for political information, which has since resulted in their possessing so general a share in representation.

So, down at quiet Farnham, the people had hitherto been, “like the rest of the country people in England,” neither knowing nor thinking much about politics. The “shouts of victory or the murmurs at a defeat,” would now and then break in upon their tranquillity for a moment; but after the American war had continued for a short time, the people began to be a little better acquainted with subjects of that kind. Cobbett says, that opinions were pretty equally divided concerning the war, at first; whilst there grew up a good deal of pretty warm discussion, sometimes:—

“My father was a partisan of the Americans: he used frequently to dispute on the subject with the gardener of a nobleman who lived near us. This was generally done with good humour, over a pot of our best ale; yet the disputants sometimes grew warm, and gave way to language that could not fail to attract our attention. My father was worsted, without doubt, as he had for antagonist a shrewd and sensible old Scotchman, far his superior in political knowledge; but he pleaded before a partial audience: we thought there was but one wise man in the world, and that that one was our father. He who pleaded the cause of the Americans had an advantage too, with young minds: he had only to represent the King’s troops as sent to cut the throats of a people, our friends and relations, merely because they would not submit to oppression, and his cause was gained.”

Old George Cobbett remained a staunch American in politics; but, as to whether he was right or wrong, his son admits that he never, at that period, formed any opinion. His own notions were those of his father, which would have been as warmly entertained if they had been all on the other side. The short autobiography of which the above forms a part, was written during the early part of his pamphleteering career in the United States; at which time he found it necessary to explain that he had not been nursed in the lap of aristocracy, and that he did not imbibe his then “principles or prejudices from those who were the advocates of blind submission.” The story of this pamphlet will come in its proper place, when its author was upwards of thirty years of age.

Here we have, then, probably as much as we shall ever know, of William Cobbett’s early years. The utter obscurity of his father’s social status is, of itself, sufficient reason why there were no admiring friends to detect precocity, and to record its achievements: until the age of twenty his life was made up of the ordinary occupations of a country lad. Fairs, cricket-matches, and hare-hunts filled up the joyous periods of recreation; and it was not till the year 1782, that an incident occurred, which, bringing him into the bustling activity of town-life, had the same effect upon him, that a similar change of scene has had upon many an ardent, healthy spirit; and which estranged him from the sequestered vale of life, for ever.

There can be little doubt, however, that a very great mental stimulus was acquired by the trip to Kew, and the reading of Swift’s wonderful satire.[1] The poor ploughboy, very probably, read and reread the laughable story of Peter and Martin hundreds of times without understanding the real drift of it; but there was enough in the book, with its entertaining accounts of grotesque fashions and weak-minded characters, to furnish such an impressionable spirit as Cobbett’s with an inexhaustible store of odd ideas concerning the world outside him. Readers of his works will notice his frequent quotation of Swift: “The celebrated Dean of St. Patrick somewhere observes, &c., &c.” is the opening sentence of the autobiographical sketch; and the “Political Register,” in after-years, continued to manifest evidences of the source and character of Cobbett’s early reading. Cobbett’s literary style, however, was not exactly that of Dean Swift; of which the former’s ignorance, and even contempt, of Latinity is sufficient explanation. But his alternations of sweetness and acrimony,—his ever-ready images,—the picturesque manner of his describing individual characters,—his constant tendency to satire,—cannot but be ascribed, in great measure, to the little book whose loss “cost him greater pain than losing thousands of pounds.”

So there is, now, some difference. A head and shoulders above the average of his mates, his mind is, likewise, on a higher level. Not so high, but as yet to be infinitely dark as to any purpose: a healthy spirit in a healthy body, there stood, working as hard and as cheerily as ever; but ready for the first impulse—which impulse came, in no uncommon way; in no more romantic style than that which sets a ball rolling, upon the impact of the foot.

“Towards the autumn of 1782, I went to visit a relation who lived in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth. From the top of Portsdown, I, for the first time, beheld the sea, and no sooner did I behold it than I wished to be a sailor. I could never account for this sudden impulse, nor can I now. Almost all English boys feel the same inclination: it would seem that, like young ducks, instinct leads them to rush on the bosom of the water.

“But it was not the sea alone that I saw; the grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England; I had formed my ideas of a ship and of a fleet, but what I now beheld so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors, of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and of all those memorable combats that good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The brave Rodney’s victories over our natural enemies, the French and Spaniards, had long been the theme of our praise, and the burthen of our songs. The sight of the fleet brought all these into my mind; in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen, the fleet belonged to my country, and surely I had my part in it, and all its honours; yet, these honours I had not earned; I took to myself a sort of reproach for possessing what I had no right to, and resolved to have a just claim by sharing in the hardships and the dangers.

“I arrived at my uncle’s late in the evening, with my mind full of my sea-faring project. Though I had walked thirty miles during the day, and consequently was well wearied, I slept not a moment. It was no sooner daylight than I arose and walked down towards the old castle on the beach at Spithead. For a sixpence given to an invalid I got permission to go upon the battlements; here I had a closer view of the fleet, and at every look my impatience to be on board increased. In short, I went from the Castle to Portsmouth, got into a boat, and was in a few minutes on board the ‘Pegasus’ man-of-war, commanded by the Right Honourable George Berkeley, brother to the Earl of Berkeley.

“The Captain had more compassion than is generally met with in men of his profession; he represented to me the toils I must undergo, and the punishment that the least disobedience or neglect would subject me to. He persuaded me to return home, and I remember he concluded his advice with telling me, that it was better to be led to church in a halter, to be tied to a girl that I did not like, than to be tied to the gang-way, or, as the sailors call it, married to Miss Roper. From the conclusion of this wholesome counsel, I perceived that the captain thought I had eloped on account of a bastard.

“I in vain attempted to convince Captain Berkeley,[2] that choice alone had led me to the sea; he sent me on shore, and I at last quitted Portsmouth, but not before I had applied to the Port-Admiral, Evans, to get my name enrolled among those who were destined for the service. I was, in some sort, obliged to acquaint the Admiral with what had passed on board the ‘Pegasus,’ in consequence of which my request was refused, and I happily escaped, sorely against my will, from the most toilsome and perilous profession in the world.

“I returned once more to the plough, but I was spoiled for a farmer. I had, before my Portsmouth adventure, never known any other ambition than that of surpassing my brothers in the different labours of the field, but it was quite otherwise now; I sighed for a sight of the world; the little island of Britain seemed too small a compass for me. The things in which I had taken the most delight were neglected; the singing of the birds grew insipid, and even the heart-cheering cry of the hounds, after which I formerly used to fly from my work, bound o’er the fields, and dash through the brakes and coppices, was heard with the most torpid indifference. Still, however, I remained at home till the following spring, when I quitted it, perhaps for ever.

“It was on the 6th of May, 1783, that I, like Don Quixote, sallied forth to seek adventures. I was dressed in my holiday clothes, in order to accompany two or three lasses to Guildford Fair. They were to assemble at a house about three miles from my home, where I was to attend them; but, unfortunately for me, I had to cross the London turnpike-road. The stage-coach had just turned the summit of a hill and was rattling down towards me at a merry rate. The notion of going to London never entered my mind till this very moment, yet the step was completely determined on, before the coach came to the spot where I stood. Up I got, and was in London about nine o’clock in the evening.

“It was by mere accident that I had money enough to defray the expenses of this day. Being rigged out for the fair, I had three or four crown and half-crown pieces (which most certainly I did not intend to spend), besides a few shillings and halfpence. This my little all, which I had been years in amassing, melted away like snow before the sun, when touched by the fingers of the innkeepers and their waiters. In short, when I arrived at Ludgate Hill, and had paid my fare, I had but about half-a-crown in my pocket.

“By a commencement of that good luck, which has hitherto attended me through all the situations in which fortune has placed me, I was preserved from ruin. A gentleman, who was one of the passengers in the stage, fell into conversation with me at dinner, and he soon learnt that I was going I knew not whither nor for what. This gentleman was a hop-merchant in the borough of Southwark, and, upon closer inquiry, it appeared that he had often dealt with my father at Wey Hill. He knew the danger I was in; he was himself a father, and he felt for my parents. His house became my home, he wrote to my father, and endeavoured to prevail on me to obey his orders, which were to return immediately home. I am ashamed to say that I was disobedient. It was the first time I had ever been so, and I have repented of it from that moment to this. Willingly would I have returned, but pride would not suffer me to do it. I feared the scoffs of my acquaintances more than the real evils that threatened me.

“My generous preserver, finding my obstinacy not to be overcome, began to look out for an employment for me. He was preparing an advertisement for the newspaper, when an acquaintance of his, an attorney, called in to see him. He related my adventure to this gentleman, whose name was Holland, and who, happening to want an understrapping quill-driver, did me the honour to take me into his service, and the next day saw me perched upon a great high stool, in an obscure chamber in Gray’s Inn, endeavouring to decipher the crabbed draughts of my employer.

“I could write a good plain hand, but I could not read the pot-hooks and hangers of Mr. Holland. He was a month in learning me to copy without almost continual assistance, and even then I was of but little use to him; for, besides that I wrote a snail’s pace, my want of knowledge in orthography gave him infinite trouble: so that for the first two months I was a dead weight upon his hands. Time, however, rendered me useful, and Mr. Holland was pleased to tell me that he was very well satisfied with me, just at the very moment when I began to grow extremely dissatisfied with him.

“No part of my life has been totally unattended with pleasure, except the eight or nine months I passed in Gray’s Inn. The office (for so the dungeon, where I wrote, was called) was so dark, that on cloudy days, we were obliged to burn candles. I worked like a galley-slave from five in the morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. How many quarrels have I assisted to foment and perpetuate between those poor innocent fellows, John Doe and Richard Roe! How many times (God forgive me!) have I set them to assault each other with guns, swords, staves, and pitch-forks, and then brought them to answer for their misdeeds before our sovereign Lord the King seated in his Court of Westminster? When I think of the saids and soforths, and the counts of tautology that I scribbled over; when I think of those sheets of seventy-two words, and those lines two inches apart, my brain turns. Gracious Heaven! if I am doomed to be wretched, bury me beneath Iceland snows, and let me feed on blubber; stretch me under the burning line and deny me thy propitious dews; nay, if it be thy will, suffocate me with the infected and pestilential air of a democratic club-room; but save me, O save me from the desk of a pettifogging attorney!

“Mr. Holland was but little in the chambers himself. He always went out to dinner, while I was left to be provided for by the laundress, as he called her. Those gentlemen of the law, who have resided in the inns of court in London, know very well what a laundress means. Ours was, I believe, the oldest and ugliest of the officious sisterhood. She had age and experience enough to be Lady Abbess of all the nuns in all the convents of Irish-Town. It would be wronging the witch of Endor to compare her to this hag, who was the only creature that deigned to enter into conversation with me. All except the name, I was in prison, and this Weird Sister was my keeper. Our chambers were to me, what the subterraneous cavern was to Gil Blas: his description of the Dame Leonarda exactly suited my Laundress; nor were the professions, or rather the practice, of our masters altogether dissimilar.

“I never quitted this gloomy recess except on Sundays, when I usually took a walk to St. James’s Park, to feast my eyes with the sight of the trees, the grass, and the water. In one of these walks I happened to cast my eye on an advertisement, inviting all loyal young men, who had a mind to gain riches and glory, to repair to a certain rendezvous, where they might enter into his Majesty’s marine service, and have the peculiar happiness and honour of being enrolled in the Chatham Division. I was not ignorant enough to be the dupe of this morsel of military bombast; but a change was what I wanted; besides, I knew that marines went to sea, and my desire to be on that element had rather increased than diminished by my being penned up in London. In short, I resolved to join this glorious corps; and, to avoid all possibility of being discovered by my friends, I went down to Chatham, and enlisted into the marines as I thought, but the next morning I found myself before a captain of a marching regiment. There was no retreating: I had taken a shilling to drink his Majesty’s health, and his further bounty was ready for my reception.

“When I told the captain (who was an Irishman, and who has since been an excellent friend to me) that I thought myself engaged in the marines: ‘By Jasus, my lad,’ said he, ‘and you have had a narrow escape.’ He told me that the regiment into which I had been so happy as to enlist was one of the oldest and boldest in the whole army, and that it was at that moment serving in that fine, flourishing, and plentiful country, Nova Scotia. He dwelt long on the beauties and riches of this terrestrial Paradise, and dismissed me, perfectly enchanted with the prospect of a voyage thither.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] It is a noteworthy circumstance that Moor Park and “my grandmother’s cottage” should be almost within hail of each other; for it was among these very scenes that Swift spent some of his earliest and best years—a nice little item for any ingenious believer in “affinities.”

When Cobbett wrote “The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine,” he was not aware of this coincidence, otherwise his humour would have happily played around the topic.

[2] Afterwards Admiral Sir George Berkeley. He entered the navy at twelve years of age, and saw a good deal of service, including the glorious 1st of June. Died 1818, æt. sixty-five.

CHAPTER II.
“WHEN I HAD THE HONOUR TO WEAR A RED COAT.”

From the point of view which Englishmen usually take, in speaking of success in life, it may remain an open question as to whether the hero of this story ever really attained it. But let such question be narrowed down to a point, from which is excluded all notions of wealth, and personal aggrandizement: the placing of one’s feet upon a given spot from which others have been ousted—the thing becomes clearer. The attainment of objects upon which one has set the heart, from time to time, can alone be called Success.

Now, this reflection is hazarded, because it is necessary for the reader of William Cobbett’s history to observe a leading feature in his character, from this stage onward; consisting in what may be called the instinct of discipline. Money-making (as such) was ever with him a process which he treated with contempt; the whole future, as it stood before him year after year, was to promise only the comfort of his family, and the welfare of his countrymen. All the blunders which he committed, in the untiring pursuit of this twofold object, were the result of undue impetuosity, the rashness of the soldier in the heat of strife: the temporary derangement of discipline, in the rear of a discomfited enemy. But in spite of ridicule and opposition, and long-deferred anticipation, and, besides, slanders of the foulest character, one after another were the dearest wishes of his heart fulfilled; and at seventy years of age he could write:—

“I have led the happiest life of any man that I have ever known. Never did I know one single moment when I was cast down; never one moment when I dreaded the future.”

So, if we think of the soldier’s career; what it is for the idle and the devil-may-care; what it is to the mere adventurer; what it is to the drudge; and what it is, as a last resource, to the outlaw; and, then, what it is to him who deliberately makes it a school of self-discipline, then we shall have some likelihood of understanding why this man, only twenty years after leaving the plough-tail, had become the Mentor of English statesmen, and wielded a pen so powerful that no price could buy it.

It cannot be said, however, that there had been any want of parental control in the little household at Farnham. In the foregoing chapter are clearly to be found traces, on the part of Cobbett’s father, of his duty in this respect; and to the gentle discipline of home must be ascribed the readiness, with which the sterner apprenticeship of army life was undertaken. All the sons of George Cobbett did well in after-life. Whilst this William, going into a rougher school than his brothers, and submitting for a term to its rough lessons, not only with a good grace, but with a happy foresight, distances them all.

His own testimony to the quality of his early moral training is, by-the-bye, worth quoting:—

“When in the army I was often tempted to take up the cards. But the words of my father came into my mind, and rescued me from the peril.… During this part of my life I lived amongst, and was compelled to associate with, the most beastly of drunkards, where liquor was so cheap, that even a soldier might be drunk every day; yet I never, during the whole time, even tasted of that liquor: my father’s, and especially my mother’s precepts were always at hand to protect me.”

But there is one other factor to be taken into account. It seems that among his few acquaintances in London, was a young man who could give him friendly counsel, from a superior social standpoint; and consequently, with a far better knowledge of the world upon which they were both emerging;[1] and Cobbett declares that it was to his advice that he owed all that he ever possessed beyond the lot of a common soldier. For after the enlistment,—

“Upon being informed by me of what I had done, he began his answer to me in somewhat these words:—‘Now then, my dear Bill, it is for you to determine whether you shall, all your life, yield an abject submission to others, or whether you yourself shall be a guider and leader of men. Nature has done her part toward you most generously; but her favours will be of no avail without a knowledge of grammar. Without that knowledge you will be laughed at by blockheads; with it, you may laugh at thousands who think themselves learned men.’ The letter was long, full of urgent recommendation, and seasoned with the kindest of expressions, all which I knew to be sincere. I was, at that time, much more intent upon the beauty of my cap and feathers, than upon anything else; but, upon seeing my friend afterwards to take leave of him, he renewed his advice in such a strain as to make a thorough impression upon me; and I set about my study in good earnest.”

Not, then, of mere chance, nor even because he possessed certain advantages in the shape of a robust, elastic frame, and a healthy mind therein dwelling, did this man eventually put such a powerful shoulder to the wheel of liberty. Without the personal influence of his noble peasant-father, the affectionate firmness of his friend, the soldier’s round of duty cheerily performed, and supplemented by self-discipline, these natural advantages were valueless; and he no leader and guider of men!

The year 1784 opened, with England at peace. The American States had achieved independence, or as it is sometimes euphemistically put, King George had granted it to them. Soldiers were getting their discharge, or were being sent out to colonize New Brunswick. Recruiting was comparatively sluggish work, and there was little need to complement the full strength of regiments on foreign stations. The 54th, that in which William Cobbett found himself, was then serving in Nova Scotia, whilst the depôt was in garrison at Chatham; and here he remained about a year. Of this life at Chatham, learning his drill, &c., there are abundant materials for a picture, as Cobbett never tired of referring to this period, when in after-years he would, again and again, point a moral from his own career. The story was told at seventy years of age, to the young men of England, as it had been told to his irritated American neighbours, in 1796.

“My leisure time, which was a very considerable portion of the twenty-four hours, was spent, not in the dissipation common to such a way of life, but in reading and study. In the course of this year I learnt more than I had ever done before. I subscribed to a circulating library at Brompton, the greatest part of the books in which I read more than once over. The library was not very considerable, it is true, nor in my reading was I directed by any degree of taste or choice. Novels, plays, history, poetry, all were read, and nearly with equal avidity.[2] Such a course of reading could be attended with but little profit: it was skimming over the surface of everything. One branch of learning, however, I went to the bottom with, and that the most essential branch too, the grammar of my mother-tongue. I had experienced the want of a knowledge of grammar during my stay with Mr. Holland; but it is very probable that I never should have thought of encountering the study of it, had not accident placed me under a man whose friendship extended beyond his interest.

“Writing a fair hand procured me the honour of being copyist to Colonel Debbieg, the commandant of the garrison. I transcribed the famous correspondence between him and the Duke of Richmond, which ended in the good and gallant old colonel being stripped of the reward bestowed on him for his long and meritorious servitude.[3] Being totally ignorant of the rules of grammar, I necessarily made many mistakes in copying, because no one can copy letter by letter, nor even word by word. The colonel saw my deficiency, and strongly recommended study. He enforced his advice with a sort of injunction, and with a promise of reward in case of success. I procured me a Lowth’s grammar, and applied myself to the study of it with unceasing assiduity, and not without some profit, for, though it was a considerable time before I fully comprehended all that I read, still I read and studied with such unremitted attention, that, at last, I could write without falling into any very gross errors. The pains I took cannot be described; I wrote the whole grammar out two or three times; I got it by heart; I 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. To this exercise of my memory I ascribed the retentiveness of which I have since found it capable, and to the success with which it was attended, I ascribe the perseverance that has led to the acquirement of the little learning of which I am master. This study was, too, attended with another advantage: it kept me out of mischief. I was always sober and regular in my attendance; and not being a clumsy fellow, I met with none of those reproofs which disgust so many young men with the service.”

These efforts at self-education would be wonderful enough, in a person surrounded with the comforts of life, but when we recollect what the life of a private soldier was, until very recently, with the temptations presented by poverty, and by dissolute associates, and by the almost utter want of sympathy between the soldier and his aristocratic superiors, the extreme difficulty of the case is evident.

“Of my sixpence nothing like fivepence was left to purchase food for the day. Indeed not fourpence. For there was washing, mending, soap, flour for hair-powder, shoes, stockings, shirts, stocks and gaiters, pipe-clay and several other things, all to come out of the miserable sixpence!… The whole week’s food was not a bit too much for one day. It is not disaffection, it is not a want of fidelity to oaths, that makes soldiers desert, one time out of ten thousand; it is hunger, which will break through stone walls; and which will, therefore, break through oaths and the danger of punishment. We had several recruits from Norfolk (our regiment was the West Norfolk); and many of them deserted from sheer hunger. They were lads from the plough-tail. All of them tall; for no short men were then taken. I remember two that went into a decline and died during the year; though when they joined us they were fine hearty young men. I have seen them lay in their berths, many and many a time, actually crying on account of hunger.

“The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my book-case; a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table.… I had no money to purchase candle or oil; in winter-time it was rarely that I could get any evening light but that of the fire; and only my turn even of that.… To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of food, though in a state of half-starvation: I had no moment of time that I could call my own; and I had to read and to write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling, and brawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their freedom from all control. Think not lightly of the farthing that I had to give, now and then, for ink, pen, or paper. That farthing was, alas! a great sum to me. I was as tall as I am now; I had great health and great exercise. The whole of the money, not expended for us at market, was twopence a week for each man. I remember (and well I may!) that upon one occasion I, after all absolutely necessary expenses, had, on a Friday, made shift to have a halfpenny in reserve, which I had destined for the purchase of a red-herring in the morning; but, when I pulled off my clothes at night, so hungry then as to be hardly able to endure life, I found that I had lost my halfpenny! I buried my head under the miserable sheet and rug, and cried like a child.”

And yet the life had its amenities. Tender recollections come up, when he visits Chatham again, nearly forty years after, of the pretty girls of his “cap-and-feather days.” How they evinced a sincere desire to smooth the inequalities of life; and particularly to serve out the beer more fairly than their masters or husbands. His superior officers, too, inspired him with a certain amount of respect and affection; whilst the Colonel’s discovery of the willing horse was, undoubtedly, a fount of pleasure and gratification to the young recruit.

Cobbett tells, somewhere, of a poor little drummer-boy who gambled. He gambled away all his pay, his shirts, his stockings, and all his necessaries, even to his loaf, which was served out to him twice a week. At last, to prevent him from begging through the streets of Rochester and Chatham, the men were compelled to take his loaf from him, to serve it out a slice at a time, and to see that he ate it. Here is about the lowest depth of degradation to which a private soldier could descend; but the moralist will see, in this anecdote, only one other instance in which the weight or the deficiency of moral stamina is dependent, whether in private soldier or in prince, upon the habit of mind acquired in childhood. Beneath the parental roof must the parental duty be done; no “prayer,” and no idle talk of reliance on providence (so very, very often put forth, when only a plea for laziness and indifference) will avail, unless the dictates of common prudence are heeded, and a straightforward principle, in example, daily shown. The riff-raff of society, in all grades, is composed of those whose childhood was neglected.

Early in 1785, a detachment from the depôt at Chatham was forwarded to head-quarters, and the event is thus described in the autobiography:—

“There is no situation where merit is so sure to meet with reward as in a well-disciplined army. Those who command are obliged to reward it for their own ease and credit. I was soon raised to the rank of corporal; a rank which, however contemptible it may appear in some people’s eyes, brought me in a clear twopence per diem, and put a very clever worsted knot upon my shoulder too.… As promotion began to dawn, I grew impatient to get to my regiment, where I expected soon to bask under the rays of Royal favour. The happy day of departure at last came: we set sail from Gravesend, and, after a short and pleasant passage, arrived at Halifax in Nova Scotia. When I first beheld the barren, not to say hideous, rocks at the entrance of the harbour, I began to fear that the master of the vessel had mistaken his way; for I could perceive nothing of that fertility that my good recruiting captain had dwelt on with so much delight.

“Nova Scotia had no other charm for me than that of novelty. Everything I saw was new: bogs, rocks, and stumps, mosquitoes and bull-frogs. Thousands of captains and colonels without soldiers, and of squires without stockings or shoes.… We stayed but a few weeks in Nova Scotia, being ordered to St. John’s, in the province of New Brunswick. Here, and at other places in the same province, we remained till the month of September, 1791, when the regiment was relieved, and sent home.”

Cobbett repeatedly declared, in after-life, that during these eight years he was never accused of the slightest fault. As his numerous opponents, in all their violence and unscrupulousness, never succeeded in raking up anything, in the smallest degree, derogatory to his high character as a soldier, the statement is, probably, as perfectly true as need be. But he also boasts that he never wilfully disobeyed his father or his mother. These two things are so interdependent (in the mind of the biographer), that the reader must once more be recalled to the idea presented in the early part of this chapter, of the prominence due to the illustrious results of self-discipline. An idea, which is only an idea with the great majority of mankind, to their latest hour. An idea, which gains prominence in some minds only just in time to enable them to warn their younger fellows, of the certain consequences of its neglect. An idea, which is eagerly embraced by some few, who, by a happy inspiration, note that the world has been led and guided, and governed, by the men who first put the bit and the bridle upon their own unruly selves.

So William Cobbett goes to his regiment. And while others are swilling, or gambling, or idling, he is continually training. Rapid promotion is the result. At the end of little more than a year, he is Sergeant-Major, having been placed in that proud position over the heads of fifty other sergeants.

While, however, he was only corporal, he was made clerk of the regiment, a post which brought him in an immensity of labour, a great deal of which was due to the ignorance or unworthiness of his superior officers. The studies, too, were not neglected:—

“I was studying at one and the same time, Dr. Lowth’s Grammar, Dr. Watts’s Logic, the Rhetoric of some fellow whom I have forgotten, a book on Geometry, … Vauban’s Fortifications, and (ex-officio) the famous Duke of York’s Military Exercise and Evolutions, explaining these latter by ground-plans.… Never did these cause me to neglect my duty in one single particular; a duty of almost every hour in the day, from daylight till nine o’clock at night.” … “When I was sergeant-major … I found time to study French and Fortification. My chef-d’œuvre in the latter was the plan of a regular sexagon with every description of outwork. When I had finished my plan, on a small scale, and in the middle of a very large piece of drawing-paper, I set to work to lay down the plan of a siege, made my line of circumvallation, fixed my batteries and cantonments, opened my trenches, made my approaches, covered by my gabions and fascines,—at last effected a mine, and had all prepared for blowing up the citadel.” … “When I was in the army, I made, for the teaching of young corporals and sergeants, a little book on arithmetic; and it is truly surprising in how short a time they learned all that was necessary for them to know of that necessary department of learning. I used to make each of them copy the book.”

Those were days when a man might rise above the rank-and-file.[4] Cobbett himself had the promise of an ensigncy, when he came to make application for his discharge. As a matter of course, such officers, through their skill, prudence, and general knowledge, became the crack men of their regiments; the best practically-instructed men, perhaps, in the army. For the rest, the average officer must have been a curious make-up; sent into the army, often as early as fourteen years of age—without any special training—he was there for his social position; and, except when on active service, passed a frivolous sort of existence; often so ignorant of his professional duties (i.e. everything beyond daily routine) that they were habitually shirked, excepting when the colonel was a Tartar, or when a clever factotum could be found among his subordinates.

Such a factotum was the new clerk to the 54th regiment:—

“In a very short time, the whole of the business, in that way, fell into my hands; and at the end of about a year, neither adjutant, paymaster, or quarter-master, could move an inch without my assistance. The military part of the regiment’s affairs fell under my care in like manner. About this time, the new discipline, as it was called: (that is to say, the mode of handling the musket, and of marching, &c., called Dundas’s System) was sent out to us, in little books, which were to be studied by the officers of each regiment, and the rules of which were to be immediately conformed to. Though any old woman might have written such a book, though it was excessively foolish from beginning to end, still it was to be complied with; it ordered and commanded a total change, and this change was to be completed before the next annual review took place. To make this change was left to me, who was not then twenty [24] years of age, while not a single officer in the regiment paid the least attention to the matter; so, that when the time came for the annual review, I, then a corporal, had to give lectures of instruction to the officers themselves, the colonel not excepted; and, for several of them, if not for all of them, I had to make out, upon large cards which they bought for the purpose, little plans of the position of the regiment, together with lists of the words of command, which they had to give in the field.… There was I, at the review, upon the flank of the grenadier company, with my worsted shoulder-knots, and my great, high, coarse, hairy cap, confounded in the ranks amongst other men, while those who were commanding me to move my hands or my feet, thus or thus, were, in fact uttering words which I had taught them; and were, in everything excepting mere authority, my inferiors, and ought to have been commanded by me.”

Several references to this period are made in the “Advice to Young Men;” and need not be reproduced here. But the following racy story (from the “Political Register” of Dec. 1817) must be laid under contribution to illustrate this period of Cobbett’s life.

“The accounts and letters of the Paymaster went through my hands, or, rather, I was the maker of them. All the returns, reports, and other official papers were of my drawing up. Then I became the sergeant-major to the regiment, which brought me in close contact at every hour, with the whole of the epaulet gentry, whose profound and surprising ignorance I discovered in a twinkling. But I had a very delicate part to act with these gentry; for, while I despised them for their gross ignorance and vanity, and hated them for their drunkenness and rapacity, I was fully sensible of their power; and I knew also the envy which my sudden rise over the heads of so many old sergeants had created. My path was full of rocks and pit-falls; and, as I never disguised my dislikes or restrained my tongue, I should have been broken and flogged for fifty different offences, given to my supreme jackasses, had they not been kept in awe by my inflexible sobriety, impartiality, and integrity, by the consciousness of their inferiority to me, and by the real and almost indispensable necessity of the use of my talents. First, I had, by my skill and by my everlasting vigilance, eased them all of the trouble of even thinking about their duty; and this made me their master,—a situation in which, however, I acted with so much prudence, that it was impossible for them, with any show of justice, to find fault. They, in fact, resigned all the discipline of the regiment to me, and I very freely left them to swagger about, and to get roaring drunk out of the profits of their pillage, though I was, at the same time, making preparations for bringing them to justice for that pillage, in which I was finally defeated by the protection which they received at home.

“To describe the various instances of their ignorance, and the various tricks they played to disguise it from me, would fill a volume. It is the custom in regiments to give out orders every day from the officer commanding. These are written by the adjutant, to whom the sergeant-major is a sort of deputy. The man whom I had to do with was a keen fellow, but wholly illiterate. The orders, which he wrote, most cruelly murdered our mother tongue. But, in his absence, or during a severe drunken fit, it fell to my lot to write orders. As we both wrote in the same book, he used to look at these. He saw commas, semi-colons, colons, full-points, and paragraphs. The questions he used to put to me, in an obscure sort of way, in order to know why I made these divisions, and yet, at the same time, his attempts to disguise his object, have made me laugh a thousand times. As I often had to draw up statements of considerable length, and as these were so much in the style and manner of a book, and so much unlike anything he had ever seen before in man’s handwriting, he, at last, fell upon this device: he made me write, while he pretended to dictate! Imagine to yourself me sitting, pen in hand, to put upon paper the precious offspring of the mind of this stupid curmudgeon! But here a greater difficulty than any former arose. He that could not write good grammar, could not, of course, dictate good grammar. Out would come some gross error, such as I was ashamed to see in my handwriting. I would stop; suggest another arrangement; but this I was, at first, obliged to do in a very indirect and delicate manner. I dared not let him perceive that I saw, or suspected his ignorance; and, though we made sad work of it, we got along without any very sanguinary assaults upon mere grammar. But this course could not continue long, and he put an end to it in this way: he used to tell me his story, and leave me to put it upon paper; and thus we continued to the end of our connexion.

“He played me a trick upon one occasion, which was more ridiculous than anything else, but which will serve to show how his ignorance placed him at my mercy. It will also serve to show a little about Commissioners sent out by the Government. There were three or four Commissioners sent out to examine into the state of the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Their business was of a very extensive nature. They were to inquire into the number of the people, the extent of their settlements, the provisions expended upon them, and a great variety of other matters. Upon all these several heads they were to make a Report, and to subjoin to it a detail in figures. It required great ingenuity to frame these tables of figures, to bring the rude and undigested materials under general heads, dividing themselves into more particular sections, and then again subdividing themselves, and so on, and showing, at last, a sort of total, or result of the whole. To frame this appendix to the Report, and to execute in any moderate space of paper required a head, an eye, and a hand; and to draw up the Report itself was a task of a still superior order. The Commissioners, the name of one of whom was Dundas … who or what he was besides, I know not; and I have forgotten the names of the rest. But they closed their work at Fredericton in New Brunswick, where I was with my regiment. As the arrival of every stranger was an excuse for a roaring drunk with our heroes, so this ceremony now took place. But the Commissioners had their Report to make. And what did my ass of an adjutant do, but offer to do it for them! They, who in all likelihood, did not know how to do it themselves, took him at his word; and there was he, in the sweetest mess that ever vain pretender was placed in. He wanted to get some favour from these Commissioners, and relied upon me, not only to perform the task, but to keep the secret. But then, the part he had to act now was full of difficulty. The Report of these fellows was no concern of mine. It could not, by any contrivance, be hooked in amongst my duties. He therefore talked to me, at first in a sort of ambiguous manner. He said that the Commissioners wanted him to do it,—and, d——n them, he would not do it for them. Then, when I saw him again, he asked me something about it, showing me their rude mass of papers at the same time. I now began to find what he would be at; but I affected not to understand him, turned the matter as soon as I could, and so we parted. At this time I had long been waiting to go and see an old farmer and his family, and to shoot wild pigeons in the woods; and, as the distance was great, and a companion on the journey necessary, I wanted a sergeant to go with me. The leave to do this had been put off for a good while, and the adjutant knew that I had the thing at heart. What does he do now, but come to me, and after talking about the Report again, affect to lament, that he should be so much engaged with it, that there was no hope of my being permitted to go on my frolic, till he had finished the Report. I, who knew very well what this meant, began to be very anxious for this finishing, to effect which I knew there was but one way. Tacked on to the pigeon-shooting the report became an object of importance, and I said, ‘Perhaps I can do something, sir, in putting the papers in order for you.’ That was enough. Away he went, brought me the whole mass, and tossing them down upon the table: ‘There,’ said he, ‘do what you like with them; for, d——n the rubbish, I have no patience with it!’ Rubbish it really was, if we looked only at the rude manner of the papers; but the matter would to me, at this day, have been very interesting. I d——d the papers as heartily as he did, and with better reason; but they were to bring me my week’s frolic; and, as I entered into everything with ardour, this pigeon-shooting frolic, at the age of about 23 [27], was more than a compensation for all the toil of this Report and its appendix. To work I went, and with the assistance of my shooting-companion sergeant, who called over the figures to me, I had the appendix completed in rough draft, in two days and one night. Having the detail before me, the Report was short work, and the whole was soon completed. But before a neat copy was made out, the thing had to be shown to the Commissioners. It would not do to show it them in my handwriting. The adjutant got over this difficulty by copying the report; and having shown it, and had it highly applauded,—‘Well then,’ said he, ‘here sergeant-major, go and make a fair copy.’ This was the most shameless thing that I ever witnessed. This report and appendix, though I hated the job, were, such was my habit of doing everything well, executed with so much neatness and accuracy, that the Duke of Kent, who afterwards became Commander-in-chief in those provinces, and who was told of this report, which was in his office at Halifax, had a copy of it made to be kept in the office, and carried the original with him to England as a curiosity; and of this fact he informed me himself. The duke, from some source or other, had heard that it was I who had been the penman upon this occasion, though I had never mentioned it to anybody. It drew forth a great deal of admiration at Fredericton, and the Lieutenant-governor, General Carleton,[5] asked me in plain terms, whether it was I who had drawn up the Report. The adjutant had told me that I need not say but it was he, because he had promised to do it himself. I was not satisfied with his logic; but the pigeon-shooting made me say, that I certainly would say it was done by him if any one should ask me. And I kept my word with him; for, as I could not give the question of the governor the go-by, I told him a lie at once, and said it was the adjutant. However, I lied in vain; for, when I came to Halifax, in my way from the United States to England, ten years afterwards, I found that the real truth was known to a number of persons, though the thing had wholly gone out of my mind; and after my then late pursuits, and the transactions of real magnitude in which I had been concerned, I was quite surprised that anybody should have attached any importance to so trifling a thing.”

It appears that the Duke of Kent, who was Commander-in-chief at that station a few years later, was one of the “persons” who got wind of this affair; and in 1800, when Cobbett was returning to England the second time, the Duke saw him, and showed that he had kept the veritable copy as a curiosity, having had it transcribed for the use of the Governor. Further—

“When I told him the whole story, he asked me how much the Commissioners gave me; and when I told him not a farthing, he exclaimed most bitterly, and said that thousands of pounds had, first and last, been paid by the country for what I had done.”

It must be noted, too, that there were individual cases of benefit arising from the example of our very smart sergeant. Several men caught the “grammar”-fever, whilst an increasing zeal appeared, in the performance of duty, on the part of many of his comrades. So far, indeed, that his services to the regiment were at last recognized in public orders. When the regiment was relieved and sent home in the autumn of 1791, Cobbett applied for his discharge; which he obtained, accompanied by a flattering testimonial from his major,[6] to his “good behaviour, and the services he had rendered the regiment.”

And, with all his duties, Cobbett found time for his share of sports; skating, fishing, shooting, and even gardening, took some portion of his hours of liberty. He could work, and he could play, but could never be idle for a minute.

It must have been in the year 1787, when Cobbett was about twenty-five years of age, that he first saw his future wife. She was the daughter of an artilleryman, and then only about thirteen, and, although so very young, won the heart of our sergeant in a twinkling. Her character, too, had been moulded by careful and untiring parents; and when the lover came by, there was the promise of a genuine helpmeet for one, who required in that respect a woman of unquestioned propriety, of great industry, and of unfailing discretion. How quickly he prospered, and the whole story of his courtship, with the one great risk that it ran of being annulled, is all told in the “Advice to a Lover;” suffice it to say here, that not only was there never a moment’s regret, but that Cobbett, to the last day of his life laid all his fame and all the earthly prosperity which he had enjoyed, to the happy choice which he had made in his wife. The first trial came, early enough in the history of the affair, to be a real trial, when the artillery were sent home, and carried the sergeant’s hopes along with them, besides 140 or 150 guineas of his savings in the girl’s pocket.

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was Mr. Benjamin Garlike, who afterwards became envoy to two or three foreign courts. He died in 1815, unmarried, ætat. forty-nine. For a notice of him, vide Gent. Mag. lxxxv. 564. Cobbett met him again, when in the full tide of fame, and says that “he had lived so long in courts, had so long had to do with superior power, and had so long lived in submission to the mandates of others, that he became nervous when he heard my ordinary talk, about men in place and authority.”

[2] Some clever lecturer has said that “he had but little knowledge of books, and even less of other men’s thoughts.” We find, however, in “Porcupine’s Works” (1794-1800), quotations from, or references to, Swift, Shaftesbury, Pope, Sterne, Butler, Dryden, Shakespeare, Somerville, Racine, Montesquieu, Le Sage, Cervantes, Congreve, and Bishop Watson, besides minor names. But such is the way of these clever historical lecturers—cooking a man’s reputation in their own pot, and taking the skimmings for truth.

[3] Colonel Debbieg was himself no ordinary man, and had seen active service in various parts of the world. He entered the army in 1746, at the age of fourteen, served in the Low Countries, and afterwards in North America under General Wolfe, whose friendship and entire confidence he soon acquired. He was gazetted Colonel-Commandant of the Engineers early in 1783, but retired in a year or two; gazetted Major-General, 1798, General 1803. He died in 1810, at an advanced age, having employed his retirement in ingenious studies in fortification. The circumstance in the text refers to certain letters of Debbieg (who was a high-spirited fellow) which were addressed to his superior officer, the Duke of Richmond, then Master-General of the Ordnance. The Duke took offence, and demanded a court-martial on Debbieg, “for using indecent and disrespectful expressions towards him, and injurious and groundless expressions imputing partiality and oppression in the discharge of his duty.” The Colonel was found guilty, and reprimanded in open court, and ordered to apologize to the Duke, which he did, and his arrest was then terminated. It is pretty clear that this affair, however, did him no injury; and it is not unlikely that there was some ground for the “expressions” which he had used. No doubt the members of the court felt bound to protect the Duke in his official character, even if they thought that Colonel Debbieg had right on his side; and Cobbett must have very early learnt that military discipline did not always go along with even-handed justice. The sequel will show what opinion he acquired concerning the impartiality of military courts.

[4] “When I was in the army, the Adjutant-general, Sir William Fawcett, had been a private soldier; General Slater, who had then recently commanded the Guards in London, had been a private soldier; Colonel Picton, whom I saw at the head of his fine regiment (the 12th, at Chatham) had been a private soldier; Captain Green, who first had the command of me, had been a private soldier. In the garrison of Halifax there were no less than seventeen officers that had been private soldiers. In my own regiment the quarter-master had been a private soldier; the adjutant, who was also a lieutenant, had been a private soldier. No man of sense need be told what powerful motive there was here for good conduct in the soldiers.”

[5] General Carleton, a “very wise, mild, and just man,” as Cobbett said of him. The General, many years afterwards, renewed acquaintance with his quondam subaltern. He was created Baron Dorchester in 1786.

[6] Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Cobbett declared that Fitzgerald was a really conscientious and humane man. He makes repeated testimony to this effect. In point of fact, he was one of the most amiable of men, besides a very promising young officer. His unfortunate end, a few years after this period, is matter of history. (Vide his “Life,” by Thomas Moore.)

CHAPTER III.
“I HAVE ALWAYS SHOWN MY ENMITY TO EVERY SPECIES OF PUBLIC FRAUD OR ROBBERY.”

Seven years of army-life had completed the drill of William Cobbett. Master of himself, in every sense of the word, his campaign was now to begin. Putting off his red-coat, of which he had been proud enough withal, he entered upon the last stage of that educational process which, sooner or later, was to bear some fruit. He had studied men in the world of books, and he had seen something of them in the circumscribed arena of one class, viz. the military. But of mankind as a whole he knew almost nothing: and he would blunder on, for long years, before getting that sort of wisdom.

However, he came back from Nova Scotia with two closely-linked ideas uppermost in his mind—an intense affection for the soldiery and for the classes from which they were drawn, and the deepest disgust at the peculation which added to their natural privations. He had never read the newspapers, and was ignorant of politics; he did not know that the public service was at that period eaten into by corruption as far up as the Treasury Bench, and that the specimens of venality that he had witnessed were only examples of a system that pervaded all classes of officialism. In point of fact, he did not know that returning to England and obtaining his discharge, with the determination to expose peculation, he had set his foot upon a track which would in after-years give him the distinction of having mainly contributed to the disgrace, the utter confusion, of “the race that plunder the people.” Beyond all, he did not know that, far from getting any credit from any soul upon earth, the sure reward for raking up the misdeeds of the “public plunderers” was contumely and malignity to the bitterest degree.

The first thing, of course, which Cobbett attended to upon reaching England in December, 1791, was his love affair with Ann Reid. He found her in service, with his money unbroken; and “admiration of her conduct, and self-gratulation on this indubitable proof of the soundness of my own judgment, were now added to my love of her beautiful person.” So that matter was settled, from that moment, and on the 5th of February, 1792, they were married at Woolwich. They appear to have lived in London for a few weeks. Here is one anecdote of the period—

“I was about two months in London; and some one led me to spend two or three evenings in the week at Coachmakers’ Hall, where there was a debating society[1] that held its regular sittings. The ‘Cruelties of the Slave Trade’ was the standing subject; it was the fashionable cant of the day; the country was in peace and in great prosperity, and this was a sort of overflowing of the idle feelings of the nation. The hall used to be crowded to excess, and with as many women as men. It did not require much talent to be eloquent upon such a subject, especially as there was perfect freedom as to facts, and as to contradiction, that was nearly as much as a man’s life was worth.… In consequence of the intense oratory of the Coachmakers’ Hall, and of little lying books, and delightfully-disgusting pictures … my wisdom decided that my wife and I should never more use sugar or coffee, these being, as the orators assured me, highly impregnated with the sweat and blood of the poor blacks.”

The young couple adhered to this resolve until some time after they had settled in Philadelphia.

The debating societies in London had other subjects, too, to occupy their minds; the progress of the French Revolution having strongly excited the popular mind. In May a proclamation was issued against meetings and seditious writings, and as the year went on there was increasing ferment. Although the country was at peace, His Majesty’s ministers were really contemplating war against France; and the Government had enough on its hands, endeavouring, at one and the same time, to quell these feelings and to humour the military and naval forces. It was found necessary, early in the year, to make some important changes in the Navy Victualling Department, in consequence of wholesale corruption, and prostitution of the public money, being unexpectedly brought to light.[2] The sister service had also its grievances, a stringent warrant having been issued regulating the soldiers’ equipment, and reprobating extravagance and waste.[3] In February, a curious item appeared in the discussion on the estimates of the year, in the shape of an additional allowance to the soldiers’ pay, which was distinctly a bait thrown out to humour the private soldier, victim of the said extravagance or something worse.—Concerning which item in the estimates we shall see presently.

Meanwhile, William Cobbett was spending his honeymoon in completing the plans he had designed several years before, for bringing certain officers of the 54th Regiment before a court-martial. And, as to the history of this affair, we must have full details, because we cannot otherwise see very clearly how he came to fail in this his first onslaught upon public fraud.

Rapid writers have been content to say that he was bought off; that he carefully avoided all reference to the affair; that no trace of any allusion to it occurs in his subsequent writings; that there was something unpleasant which would tell against himself, and so he stopped short, &c. Indeed, the paragraph-monger began it; for the London Chronicle of the 28th March, after mentioning the holding of the court-martial, adds that “the person who was to have prosecuted the above officers was formerly sergeant-major of the regiment. It is said that he has fled to France on account of some misconduct.”

No such thing at all, paragraph-monger! And, no such things at all, ye rapid writers! You don’t know this man. You don’t know how he retires from the unequal conflict with money, prescription, aristocratic influence. Let him flee from anticipated vengeance, and see him return one day, himself always incorruptible, with such a budget, such a quiverful!—come back and tell you, with absolute calmness, that he lays his account with “being calumniated, and with being the object of the bitterest and most persevering malice.” And why? Because he has made the war upon Corruption his own particular business, and has found out that the cruelties which wounded his earnest soul, in those hapless Nova Scotia days, were just part of a system which was sapping his country’s strength. No part nor lot would he have in it. And, rather than seem to support it, he has spurned brilliant offers, which would have made him rich and high-stomached; and has chosen the part, the reward of which is calumny and annoyance of every description. See how he glories, at last, in the conflict, and how fully he knows the nature of his foe:—

“No sooner does a man become in any degree formidable to her [‘corruption’], than she sets to work against him in all the relationships of life. In his profession, his trade, his family; amongst his friends, the companions of his sports, his neighbours, and his servants. She eyes him all round, she feels him all over, and if he has a vulnerable point, if he has a speck, however small, she is ready with her stab. How many hundreds of men have been ruined by her without being hardly able to perceive, much less name, the cause; and how many thousands, seeing the fate of these hundreds, have withdrawn from the struggle, or have been deterred from taking part in it!”

In the year 1809, Mr. Cobbett was at about the zenith of his fame. Completely emancipated from the aristocratic influence under which he had, several years before, appeared as a political writer in England, his eyes were thoroughly opened to the need of Parliamentary Reform. Early this year his energies had been principally directed on behalf of this popular cause, but he had also dealt hardly with certain notorious scandals. When our history comes to that period, we shall see the various means made use of by his opponents in the endeavour to silence him; but it is necessary now to refer to that year, because one of those means was the circulation of a pamphlet with the following title:—

“Proceedings of a General Court Martial held at the Horse Guards, on the 24th and 27th of March, 1792, for the trial of Captain Richard Powell, Lieutenant Christopher Seton, and Lieutenant John Hall, of the 54th Regiment of Foot, on several charges preferred against them respectively, by William Cobbett, late Sergeant-Major of the said regiment; together with several curious letters which passed between the said William Cobbett and Sir Charles Gould, Judge-Advocate-General; and various other documents connected therewith, in the order of these dates.” [London, 1809.]

Copies of the pamphlet were distributed broadcast over the country, and in Hampshire, where Cobbett was then living, carriage people threw them out to the passers-by as they drove along. A very great number must have got into circulation; and, as pamphlets go, it is not now a particularly rare one. Of government pamphleteering we shall have more to say anon; for the present, we will confine ourselves to Cobbett’s full and complete answer as given in an address to the people of Hampshire, in the “Political Register” for June 17, 1809. Full, complete, and satisfactory it was; nobody referred to the matter again. Even the pamphleteering system itself fell into desuetude for several years. Other and more arbitrary means were adopted, in the attempt to stifle this voice—to shut this mouth.

The pamphlet consisted chiefly of a selection of letters, which passed between the accused officers, the Judge-Advocate-General, and William Cobbett; and concluded with an account of the trial. The three officers appeared perfectly willing to meet the charges; and as for the prosecutor there could be no doubt as to the earnestness of his intention,[4] up to within about a week of the date first appointed for the court-martial. That date was the 24th of March; and, on the court assembling, no prosecutor appeared, the result being a postponement to the 27th. On that day, the court having reassembled, the Judge-Advocate-General was himself sworn, and deposed that he had made ineffectual efforts to discover the prosecutor, whilst the landlady at whose house Cobbett had lodged stated that he had removed the previous week. This witness also produced the three last letters of the Judge-Advocate-General to William Cobbett, unopened; which letters stated (1) that an important witness for the prosecution was not likely to be well enough to attend, (2) that the day of the trial was fixed, and (3) that the trial was postponed. The charges were then read, to the effect that the accused had made false musters, mustered persons who were not soldiers, made false returns to the Brigadier-general commanding at New Brunswick, misapplied work-money earned by the non-commissioned officers and men, deducted firewood from the allowance, and disposed of it for their own purposes, disposed of clothing belonging to the men, and obliged them (whilst they were clothed in rags) to accept of an inadequate sum in lieu of the said clothing, signed false certificates respecting the clothing, and defrauded the men of bread. After the “acquittal,” a memorandum was submitted to the law officers of the crown, upon the whole case. Their opinion was, that, unless there were proof of conspiracy with others, Cobbett could not be criminally prosecuted; but that the parties injured by his conduct, which was certainly most highly blamable, might maintain actions upon the case against him.

Such was the offending pamphlet: on the 3rd of June, 1809, a notice appears in the “Political Register,” of its publication, evidently under the sanction of Government; also, that Mr. Cobbett will take the earliest opportunity of giving a full account of the matter. He repudiates positively every insinuation of having acted, at any time of his life, dishonestly or dishonourably; at the same time, had the whole of the papers connected with this affair been published without misrepresentation he never would have noticed the thing at all, but have left the documents to speak for themselves. A fortnight later a double number of the “Register” contains the full account, with a great deal more in the shape of commentary, touching the topics of the day;—it occupies the fifth of a series of Letters to the people of Hampshire, which Cobbett was then writing, on the subject of Parliamentary Reform. And it is necessary, in order to do justice to the whole story, to reproduce a great portion of it here.

After repeating the tale of his honourable discharge from the army, he proceeds to say:—

“The object of my thus quitting the army, to which I was, perhaps, more attached than any man that ever lived in the world, was to bring certain officers to justice for having, in various ways, wronged both the public and the soldier. With this object in view, I went straight to London the moment I had obtained my liberty and secured my personal safety, which, as you will readily conceive, would not have been the case if I had not first got my discharge.… This project was conceived so early as the year 1787, when an affair happened that first gave an insight into regimental justice. It was shortly this: that the quarter-master, who had the issuing of the men’s provisions to them, kept about a fourth part of it to himself. This, the old sergeants told me, had been the case for many years; and they were quite astonished and terrified at the idea of my complaining of it. This I did, however; but the reception I met with convinced me that I must never make another complaint, till I got safe to England, and safe out of the reach of that most curious of courts, a COURT-MARTIAL. From this time forward I began to collect materials for an exposure, upon my return to England. I had ample opportunities for this, being the keeper of all the books, of every sort, in the regiment, and knowing the whole of its affairs better than any other man. But the winter previous to our return to England, I thought it necessary to make extracts from books, lest the books themselves should be destroyed. And here begins the history of the famous court-martial. In order to be able to prove that these extracts were correct, it was necessary that I should have a witness as to their being true copies. This was a very ticklish point. One foolish step here would have sent me down to the ranks with a pair of bloody shoulders. Yet it was necessary to have the witness. I hesitated many months. At one time I had given the thing up. I dreamt twenty times, I daresay, of my papers being discovered, and of my being tried and flogged half to death. At last, however, some fresh act of injustice toward us made me set all danger at defiance. I opened my project to a corporal, whose name was William Bestland, who wrote in the office under me, who was a very honest fellow, who was very much bound to me for my goodness to him, and who was, with the sole exception of myself, the only sober man in the whole regiment. To work we went, and during a long winter, while the rest were boozing and snoring, we gutted no small part of the regimental books, rolls, and other documents. Our way was this: to take a copy, sign it with our names, and clap the regimental seal to it, so that we might be able to swear to it when produced in court. All these papers were put into a little box, which I myself had made for the purpose. When we came to Portsmouth there was a talk of searching all the boxes, &c., which gave us great alarm, and induced us to take out all the papers, put them in a bag, and trust them to a custom-house officer, who conveyed them on shore to his own house, whence I removed them in a few days after.

“Thus prepared, I went to London, and on the 14th of January, 1792, I wrote to the then Secretary at War, Sir George Yonge, stating my situation, my business with him, and my intentions; enclosing him a letter or petition from myself to the King, stating the substance of all the complaints I had to make; and which letter I requested Sir George Yonge to lay before the King. I waited from the 14th to the 24th of January without receiving any answer at all, and then all I heard was that he wished to see me at the War-office. At the War-office I was shown into an antechamber amongst numerous anxious-looking men, who, every time the door which led to the great man was opened, turned their eyes that way with a motion as regular and as uniform as if they had been drilled to it. These people eyed me from head to foot, and I never shall forget their look, when they saw that I was admitted into paradise, without being detained a single minute in purgatory. Sir George Yonge heard my story; and that was apparently all he wanted of me. I was to hear from him again in a day or two, and after waiting for fifteen days, without hearing from him or any one else upon the subject, I wrote to him again, reminding him that I had from the first told him that I had no other business in London; that my stock of money was necessarily scanty; and that to detain me in London was to ruin me. Indeed, I had in the whole world but about 200 guineas, which was a great deal for a person in my situation to have saved. Every week in London, especially as, by way of episode, I had now married, took at least a couple of guineas from my stock. I therefore began to be very impatient, and, indeed, also very suspicious that military justice, in England, was pretty nearly akin to military justice in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The letter I now wrote was dated on the 10th of February, to which I got an answer on the 15th, though the answer might have been written in a moment. I was, in this answer, informed that it was the intention to try the accused upon only part of the charges which I had preferred; and from a new-modelled list of charges sent me by the Judge-advocate, on the 23rd of February, it appeared that, even of those charges that were suffered to remain, the parts the most material were omitted. But this was not all. I had all along insisted that, unless the court-martial were held in London, I could not think of appearing in it; because, if held in a garrisoned place like Portsmouth, the thing must be a mere mockery. In spite of this, however, the Judge-advocate’s letter of the 23rd of February informed me that the court was to be held at Portsmouth or Hilsea. I remonstrated against this, and demanded that my remonstrance should be laid before the King, which, on the 29th, the Judge-advocate promised should be done by himself; but, on the 5th of March, the Judge-advocate informed me that he had laid my remonstrance before—whom, think you? Not the king, but the accused parties, who, of course, thought the court ought to assemble at Portsmouth or Hilsea, and doubtless for the very reasons that led me to object to its being held there.

“Plainly seeing what was going forward, I, on the 7th of March, made, in a letter to Mr. Pitt, a representation of the whole case, giving him a history of the obstacles I had met with, which letter concluded thus: ‘I have now, sir, done all a man can do in such a case. I have proceeded regularly, and I may add, respectfully, from first to last; if I am allowed to serve my country by prosecuting men who have injured it, I shall do it; if I am thwarted and pressed down by those whose office it is to assist and support me, I cannot do it; in either case, I shall be satisfied with having done my duty, and shall leave the world to make a comparison between me and the men whom I have accused.’ This letter (which, by-the-bye, the public robbers have not published) had the effect of changing the place of the court-martial, which was now to be held in London; but, as to my other great ground of complaint, the leaving of the regimental books unsecured, it had no effect at all; and it will be recollected that, without those books, there could be, as to most of the weighty charges, no proof adduced without bringing forward Corporal Bestland, and the danger of doing that will be presently seen. But now, mark well as to these books: as to this great source of that kind of evidence which was not to be brow-beaten, or stifled by the dangers of the lash. Mark well these facts, and from them judge of what I had to expect in the way of justice. On the 22nd of January I wrote to Sir George Yonge, for the express purpose of having the books secured; that is to say, taken out of the hands and put out of the reach of the parties accused. On the 24th of January he told me that HE HAD taken care to give directions to have these documents secured. On the 18th of February, in answer to a letter, in which I (upon information received from the regiment) complained of the documents not having been secured, he wrote to me—and I have now the letter before me, signed with his own hand—that he would write to the colonel of the regiment about the books, &c.: ‘although,’ says he, ‘I cannot doubt but that the regimental books have been properly secured.’ This was on the 18th of February, mind; and now it appears, from the documents which the public-robbers have put forth, that the first time any order for securing the books was given was on the 15th of March, though the Secretary told me he had done it on the 24th of January, and repeated his assertion in writing on the 18th of February. There is quite enough in this fact alone, to show the public what sort of a chance I stood of obtaining justice.

Without these written documents nothing of importance could be proved, unless the non-commissioned officers and men of the regiment should happen to get the better of their dread of the lash; and, even then, they could only speak from memory. All, therefore, depended upon those written documents, as to the principal charges. Therefore, as the court-martial was to assemble on the 24th of March, I went down to Portsmouth on the 20th, in order to know for certain what was become of the books; and I found, as indeed I suspected was the case, that they had never been secured at all; that they had been left in the hands of the accused from the 14th of January to the very hour of trial; and that, in short, my request as to this point, the positive condition as to this most important matter, had been totally disregarded. There remained, then, nothing to rest upon with safety but our extracts, confirmed by the evidence of Bestland, the corporal, who had signed them along with me; and this I had solemnly engaged with him not to have recourse to, unless he was first out of the army; that is to say, out of the reach of the vindictive and bloody lash. He was a very little fellow, not more than about five feet high, and had been set down to be discharged when he went to England; but there was a suspicion of his connexion with me, and therefore they resolved to keep him. It would have been cruel, and even perfidious, to have brought him forward under such circumstances; and, as there was no chance of doing anything without him, I resolved not to appear at the court-martial, unless the discharge of Bestland was first granted. Accordingly, on the 20th of March, I wrote from Fratton, a village near Portsmouth, to the Judge-Advocate, stating over again all the obstacles that had been thrown in my way, complaining particularly that the books and documents had been left in the possession of the accused, contrary to my urgent request and to the positive assurances of the Secretary at War, and concluding by demanding the discharge of a man, whom I should name, as the only condition upon which I would attend the court-martial. I requested him to send me an answer by the next day, at night, at my former lodging; and told him,[5] that unless such answer was received, he and those to whom my repeated applications had been made, might do what they pleased with their court-martial; for that I confidently trusted that a few days would place me beyond the scope of their power. No answer came, and as I had learned in the meanwhile that there was a design to prosecute me for sedition, that was an additional motive to be quick in my movements. As I was going down to Portsmouth I met several of the sergeants coming up, together with the music-master; and as they had none of them been in America, I wondered what they could be going to London for; but, upon my return, I was told by a Captain Lane, who had been in the regiment, that they had been brought up to swear that at an entertainment given to them by me before my departure from the regiment, I had drunk ‘the destruction of the House of Brunswick.’ This was false; but I knew that that was no reason why it should not be sworn by such persons, and in such a case. I had talked pretty freely upon the occasion alluded to; but I had neither said nor thought against the King; and, as to the House of Brunswick, I hardly knew what it meant. My head was filled with the corruptions and the baseness in the army. I knew nothing at all about politics. Nor would any threat of this sort have induced me to get out of the way for a moment, though it certainly would if I had known my danger, for glorious ‘Jacobinical’ times were just then beginning. Of this, however, I knew nothing at all. I did not know what the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act meant. When you have a mind to do a thing, every trifle is an additional motive. Lane, who had enlisted me, and who had always shown great kindness toward me, told me they would send me to Botany Bay; and I now verily believe, that if I had remained, I should have furnished a pretty good example to those who wished to correct military abuses. I did not, however, leave England from this motive. I could not obtain a chance of success, without exposing the back of my poor faithful friend Bestland, which had I not pledged myself not to do, I would not have done. It was useless to appear, unless I could have tolerable fair play; and, besides, it seemed better to leave the whole set to do as they pleased, than to be made a mortified witness of what it was quite evident they had resolved to do.

“Such is the true history of this affair, which had the public-robbers given it as it stood, unmutilated, not a word should I ever have published, by way of defence or explanation.”

Cobbett then proceeds to show the hollow and tricky nature of the attack, by summing up the points which tend obviously to show that the whole is a trumped-up charge against his honour and his reputation; first stating that the five letters from himself, which appear in the pamphlet, were the least important of twenty-seven which he actually wrote, including one to Mr. Pitt, and one, in the shape of a petition, to the King. He then reminds his readers that he would have scarcely put himself to the expense of two or three months’ living in London, and to the trouble of writing so many letters and of dancing attendance at the Horse Guards, if he hadn’t a good case and were not in earnest about it; that nine years had elapsed since his return to England, and no process had been taken upon the opinion of the Attorney-General and his colleague; that his “Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine” was reprinted in London, in 1796, at the express desire of Mr. Canning, i.e. only four years after the incident, and yet nothing had been done to supply the omission (in that publication) of the court-martial story; that he had, when dining with Mr. Pitt in August, 1800, talked freely about Fitzgerald and about the army “for the express purpose of leading him on to talk about the court-martial, but it was avoided. In fact, they all well knew that what I had complained of was true, and that I had been baffled in my attempts to obtain justice only because I had neither money nor friends.” That General Carleton (late Governor of Nova Scotia) had visited him in England, since his return, and that the Duke of Kent had talked to him in Halifax about the regiment and its affairs in the year 1800; yet both these distinguished officers must have known all about the court-martial, the Governor’s name, in point of fact, having occurred in one of the “charges.” Besides this, there could be little doubt that the whole facts were not put before Sir John Scott and Sir John Mitford, or their opinion would have been very different from what it was.

Finally, he reminds his readers that he had, in the year 1805, himself given the cue. Which was certainly the case, as may be seen by referring to his writings of that date:—

“In the printed account of my life, there is a small chasm. When I published that account I was in the midst of the revilers of England, and particularly of the English army; or, I should have then stated, that the primary cause of my leaving the army, that the circumstance which first disgusted me, and that finally made me resolve to tear myself from a service, to which my whole mind and heart were devoted, was, the abuses, the shocking abuses as to money-matters, the peculation, in short, which I had witnessed in it, and which I had, in vain, endeavoured to correct. What those abuses were, by whom they were committed, and how, after I quitted the army, I failed in obtaining redress, it would not now, after many of the parties are dead, be proper for me to state; but, if the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ have, as it is more than probable they have, access to the records of the War Office, and can obtain leave to publish the correspondence upon the subject, the public will then see that I have all my life, and in all situations, been the enemy of peculation. It is, however, incumbent upon me to state, that I have good reason to believe that my failure upon that occasion was in no way to be ascribed to Mr. Pitt, who, as far as a person in so obscure and perfectly friendless a situation as I then was, could judge, was, as to the matter in question, the friend of fair inquiry and of justice.”

We may safely dismiss this matter. Should the reader find it worth his while to rake up this old pamphlet, and compare it with Cobbett’s “full account,” he may find a stray divergence of date or of trifling fact; but nothing more than, as a careless omission, will serve to establish the good faith of the man—a class of evidence which is often as serviceable as a statement clear and unfaltering to the minutest detail. Why the affair went off as it did is obvious to any one who knows the world, and the rules of society, better than Cobbett did: it was a hopeless task, from the very first, to undertake it upon his own responsibility, without professional assistance. A mistake, however, which he seldom corrected through life; and the consequence being that he as seldom succeeded in gaining a cause: he persisted, to the very last, in being his own advocate—and with the proverbial result.

Let us turn, then, to another incident of this year. An incident which has given the biographer a good deal of trouble; as it presents an occasion upon which it has seemed difficult to reconcile two statements which, at first sight, seem to vary.

For this purpose, we must again refer to a later date in the history. In the year 1805, Mr. Cobbett made himself very offensive to the Government over the unfortunate difficulties of Lord Melville. The whole contest, between the Government and its opponents, was of the hottest; and the choicest Billingsgate passed between them. One periodical, inspired by the Pitt and Melville party, made it its business to assail Cobbett in particular; and, on the 27th of July of the above-mentioned year, the following passage occurred:—

“As Mr. Cobbett can hardly fail to read this review, I beg leave, through its medium, to ask that worthy patriot if he knows who was the author, and industrious circulator through the army, of a pamphlet entitled The Soldiers’ Friend, published about the same time, but fraught with ten times more mischief than Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’? A pamphlet calculated to render soldiers discontented with their situation, and incite them to mutiny and rebellion; a pamphlet which, in short, I have no hesitation in saying, was a considerable source of the naval mutiny at the Nore.”

Now, by the time this effusion appeared in public, Cobbett had begun to incur the severest displeasure of his opponents; he had created mortal enemies by the development of his warfare upon “corruption.” Caricature was at work, keeping pace with the most virulent attacks on the part of the ministerial press. For all which he did not care a pin, but this charge of sedition was more than he could stand. Perfectly happy (as his letters of that date will show), both in his domestic pursuits and in the general public appreciation which he was then possessing, he enjoyed fair fight; but this beginning of dark insinuation roused him; and, for the first time since his return to England, he entered upon a proud and energetic boast of the services which he had rendered to his country. The part with which we have at present to do is the answer to the charge of sedition, which is as follows:—

“During the interval of my discharge and of my departure for France, a proposition, preceded by a speech of the Secretary at War, was made in parliament to augment the pay of the army. Some parts of the speech contained matter which a person, with whom I was acquainted, and to whom I had communicated my information upon such subjects, thought worthy of remark in print. Hence arose a little pamphlet, entitled the Soldiers’ Friend. Of this pamphlet I was not the author; I had nothing to do either with the printing or the publishing of it; and I never had in my possession, or ordered to be sent to any person, or to any place, three copies of it in my life; and I do not believe that 500 copies, in the whole, ever went from the bookseller’s shop; a fact, however, that may easily be ascertained by application to Mr. Ridgway, who was the publisher of it.”

Here, then, is a distinct disavowal: a circumstance that is calculated to worry the impartial biographer, anxious to be fair toward a good (though sometimes ill-advised) man; the reason for its being a disturbing factor lying in this, that the Soldiers’ Friend is enumerated, on two distinct occasions during the closing years of Cobbett’s life, among the writings by which he had helped to benefit his fellow-men. Let us have his own words (June, 1832):—

“The very first thing I ever wrote for the press in my life was a little pamphlet entitled the Soldiers’ Friend, which was written immediately after I quitted the army in 1791, or early in 1792. I gave it in manuscript to Captain Thomas Morrice (the brother of that Captain Morrice who was a great companion of the Prince of Wales); and by him it was taken to Mr. Ridgway, who then lived in King Street, St. James’s Square, and Mr. Ridgway (the same who now lives in Piccadilly) published it. I do not know that I ever possessed the pamphlet, except for a week or two, after it was published, &c., &c.”

Now these two statements cannot, on a superficial reading, be easily reconciled; and they form, together, an instance which may be eagerly seized upon, on the part of those who would continue to represent Cobbett as a man who would wilfully utter contradictory things. But, upon examining the matter somewhat more closely, we know, even better than Cobbett himself, something of the actual circumstances. In the first place, the great probability is that Cobbett was not the originator of the pamphlet; that this Captain Thomas Morrice, or somebody else (still more interested in awakening the public mind on army-frauds) had instigated him to put his ideas upon paper. The speech of the Secretary-at-War, above referred to, occurs in a debate upon the army estimates, on the 15th February, 1792—a debate in which Mr. Fox, among others, took part; and the item of an additional allowance to the soldiers was that which was the immediate inspiration of the pamphlet; besides being, in all likelihood, productive of some little excitement in military circles generally.[6]

Secondly, it will be observed that the sting of the charge against Cobbett lay in this: that he had been instrumental in spreading sedition in the naval and military services. Now, this was totally false. It is a fact that the “Soldiers’ Friend” was afterwards circulated largely, and provoked antagonism; but of this Cobbett knew nothing, and could not know anything, for he had long been safe in Philadelphia, far away from English domestic politics, and much more concerned in earning his bread-and-cheese by hard work, than in spreading the principles of the French Revolution. Those who made it their business to circulate clever and spicy pamphlets, saw the merit of this one, and reprinted it for their own objects.

How we come to be satisfied upon this point is this: the pamphlet published by Ridgway (8vo, 6d.) was mentioned among “new publications,” in the “Scots Magazine” for June, 1792; and reviewed by the “Monthly” and the “Critical” of the same month. Although the “Critical Review” professes to know the person who had been distributing it “on the parade in St. James’s Park,” this sixpenny pamphlet did not long continue to burden Mr. Ridgway’s shelves. It is possible that there is now no copy in existence. But, in the following year, a cheap reprint appeared, without printer’s or publisher’s name—which had an extensive circulation; for it was answered by anti-reform tracts, such as “A Few Words to the Soldiers of Great Britain,” “The Soldier’s and Sailor’s Real Friend,” &c.

So, the matter seems clearer. Cobbett is in London, preparing for the grand exposure; he has sympathizers, who durst not, however, show themselves. This Captain Morrice (or somebody) thinks that the speech on the army estimates contains “matter worthy of remark in print.” William Cobbett not only agrees with him (somebody), but he is burning with the desire to set right certain cases of practical injustice, with which he is only too familiar: (of the quarter-master of the regiment defrauding the men of their rice and peas by means of short weights, and so forth,—to the tune of unutterable meannesses.) William Cobbett has the pen of a ready writer, and a grasp of hard facts withal. Hence arises a “little pamphlet:” a little pamphlet, published in respectable octavo form, by a highly respectable house; addressed to the aristocratic and well-to-do section of society, and published at their very doors. With this printing and publishing W. Cobbett has “nothing to do;” and he never sees it again after a week or so. But there’s some real stuff in it; and, next year, real stuff is much in vogue!

Those were lively times, in 1792. The extreme “horrors” of the French Revolution had not yet been displayed; and the news from France, with the new and glorious doctrines of Liberty and Equality, were being eagerly embraced by a large section of the English people. Besides the Society of Free Debate, there were others established in London, which soon caused alarm on the part of the Government; for their influence and consequence rapidly grew, on account of the frequency and publicity of their meetings, and the readiness with which all persons were invited to come and deliver their sentiments. Of course, ministerial alarm soon took action. The king’s proclamation appeared in May: new life was put into the magisterial office; the trumpery police force of that day was reorganized; and prosecutions for libel became frequent. “Not a pamphlet or paper was published, in which any measure of government was animadverted on or disapproved of, but proceedings were immediately commenced against the parties who either wrote, edited, printed, or published it.”[7]

So, London is no place for our ex-sergeant, even if his plans are not already formed. With all his loyalty, he is beginning to think there must be something in republicanism. And he will carry out his notion of going to the United States of America; after having visited France, with the object of perfecting himself in the language of that country:—

“From the moment that I resolved to quit the army, I also resolved to go to the United States of America, the fascinating and delusive description of which I had read in the works of Raynal. To France I went for the purpose of learning to speak the French language, having, because it was the language of the military art, studied it by book in America. To see fortified towns was another object; and how natural this was to a young man who had been studying fortification, and who had been laying down Lille and Brisach upon paper, need not be explained to those who have burnt with the desire of beholding in practice that with which they have been enamoured in theory.”

As matters stood, then, in March, 1792, there was no longer any occasion for delay; and it appears that he landed in France before the month was out: very much startled and amused, by the way, at seeing written up over a shop-door in Calais,—“Ici l’on a des Assignats, dès cent francs à un sou.” He settled at Tilq, a little village near St. Omer, and remained there for about five months. He found the people so unexpectedly kind and hospitable, to a degree that he had never been accustomed to, that all those prejudices, with which Englishmen, at that time, regarded their brave and impulsive neighbours, and which prejudices were fully developed in his own breast—were dispelled in a few weeks. What with his newly-married bliss, and his perfect health, and his zealous reading and study, this must have been the very happiest period of Cobbett’s life. He did intend to go to Paris for the winter, but the troublous times prevented that purpose:—

“I perceived the storm gathering: I saw that a war with England was inevitable, and it was not difficult to foresee what would be the fate of Englishmen in that country, where the rulers had laid aside even the appearance of justice and mercy. I wished, however, to see Paris, and had actually hired a coach to go thither. I was even on the way, when I heard at Abbeville that the king was dethroned and his guards murdered. This intelligence made me turn off towards Havre-de-Grâce, whence I embarked for America.”

[APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III.]

Extracts from

“The Soldiers’ Friend; or, Considerations on the late pretended Augmentation of the Subsistence of the private Soldiers.

“[Motto] ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.’—Goldsmith.

“Written by a Subaltern. Price Twopence, or one hundred copies, 10s. 6d. 1793.

“Amongst the many curious manœuvres of the present administration, I do not recollect one that marks more strongly its character than the late alteration in the pay and establishment of the army. The augmentation (as they would insinuate it is) of the pay of the British soldiers is represented as arising from a consideration of the wretchedness of their situation; and the pretended reduction of the foot forces is held out to the public as an act of œconomy. The people, I am much afraid, are satisfied with this.… The situation of the privates in our marching regiments of foot was really so miserable, that every one endued with the least compassion, must rejoice to find that a morsel of bread has been by any means added to that scanty meal; and the enormous load of taxes, that press out the very vitals of the people, ensures a favourable reception to every reduction, or pretended reduction, of public expense, let it be ever so trifling or absurd.…

“I propose to make a few observations on the alteration that has taken place in the soldiers’ pay; in doing which, although I shall be very concise, I have the vanity to think I shall discover a little better information on the subject than the Secretary at War did at his opening of it in the House of Commons; when he observed (after having stated the saving that would arise from the reduction in the infantry) that ‘against this saving he had to mention an increase that had been made to the pay of the private soldiers to the amount of 23,000l. The situation of the privates had long been admitted to have been extremely hard. It had in former years been the regulation that a soldier should receive three shillings a week for his subsistence. It has of late years so happened that he had not had for that purpose above eighteenpence or two shillings. This was evidently too little for the bare purpose of existence. By the late regulation his pay was to be made adequate to the subsistence the common soldier formerly enjoyed, an object which he was confident would meet with the warm approbation of every man.’…

“As the Secretary observed, ‘the situation of the privates had long been admitted to have been extremely hard;‘ but people had not the least notion that it ’had so happened of late years, that the soldier had only eighteenpence or two shillings a week for his subsistence.’ Men of humanity thought the soldier’s situation hard, but every one thought that he received three shillings a week for his subsistence; and why any man unacquainted with the abuses of the army should think otherwise I cannot imagine, seeing that there is an Act of Parliament, a law of the land, that declares it shall be so.”

[After reciting the regulations that existed, and which were yearly renewed in each Mutiny Act, he proceeds:—]

“It has so happened! and for years too! astonishing! It has so happened that an Act of Parliament has been most notoriously and shamefully disobeyed for years, to the extreme misery of thousands of deluded wretches (our countrymen), and to the great detriment of the nation at large; it has so happened that not one of the offenders has been brought to justice for this disobedience, even now it is fully discovered; and it has so happened that the hand of power has made another dive into the national purse, in order—not to add to what the soldier ought to have received; not to satisfy his hunger and thirst; but to gratify the whim or the avarice of his capricious and plundering superiors.”

[After a good deal more, to the same effect, the writer reverts to the new demand upon the national purse by the Secretary at War:—]

“This is certainly the most curious mode of rectifying abuses that ever was heard of; and it points out in the clearest light the close connexion that exists between the ruling Faction in this country and the military officers; and this connexion ever must exist while we suffer ourselves to be governed by a Faction. If any other body of men had thus impudently set the laws of the land at defiance,—if a gang of robbers, ornamented with red coats and cockades, had plundered their fellow-citizens, what would have been the consequence? They would have been brought to justice, hanging or transportation would have been their fate; but, it seems, the Army is become a Sanctuary from the power of the law. Nor shall we be at all surprised at this, if we consider that a standing army is the great instrument of oppression, and that a very numerous one may in a little time be necessary. I am not, therefore, blaming the ministry for this proceeding. I really think they have acted with a great deal of prudence in procuring the 23,000l. for their supporters; but (as it was all amongst friends) I think the business might have been opened in a more unequivocal manner; as thus, in the language of truth:—

“‘The situation of the privates has long been admitted to be extremely hard. It is a law (which in former years was obeyed) that a soldier shall receive three shillings a week for his subsistence. It has so happened that of late years the officers have thought proper to despise this law, and to give the soldier only eighteenpence or two shillings. This is evidently too little for the bare purpose of existence; and though he has subsisted on it of late years, and might with our good will have done so to the day of judgment, as there now is a necessity to humour the wretch a little, for reasons best known to ourselves; we have, by a late regulation, made his pay adequate to what he always ought to have enjoyed: an object that we are confident must meet the warm approbation of our majority in this House. The public burden will, indeed, be increased by this, but it is certainly much better to tax the people to their last farthing than to wound the honour of our trusty and well-beloved, the officers of the army, by any odious and ungentlemanlike investigation of their conduct.’

“It particularly becomes you, the British Soldier, to look upon this matter in its proper light. The pretended addition to your subsistence is, in fact, no addition at all; you will now receive no more than you always ought to have received.… If you should have the fortune to become a non-commissioned officer, and were to deduct but a penny from a man unlawfully, you know the consequences would be breaking and flogging, and refunding the money so deducted; but here you see your officers have been guilty of the practice for years, and now it is found out not a hair of one of their heads is touched; they are even permitted to remain in the practice, and a sum of money is taken from the public to coax you with, now it seems likely that you may be wanted.…

“Soldiers are taught to believe everything they receive a gift from the Crown. Cast this notion from you immediately, and know that there is not a farthing you receive but comes out of the public purse. What you call your King’s Bounty, or Queen’s Bounty, is no bounty from either of them: it is 12s. 2d. a year of the public money, which no one can withhold from you; it is allowed you by an Act of Parliament, while you are taught to look upon it as a present from the King or Queen!—I feel an indignation at this I cannot describe—I would have you consider the nature of your situation, I would have you know that you are not the servant of one man only; a British soldier never can be that. You are a servant of the whole nation, of your countrymen, who pay you, and from whom you can have no separate interests. I would have you look upon nothing that you receive as Favour or a Bounty from Kings, Queens, or Princes; you receive the wages of your servitude; it is your property, confirmed to you by Acts of the Legislature of your country, which property your rapacious officers ought never to seize on, without meeting with a punishment due to their infamy.”

“Finis.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] This was The Society of Free Debate, one of several which had just been set on foot. For some interesting particulars of these societies vide “Memoirs of John Thelwall” (London, 1837).

[2] Public Advertiser, April 10, 1792.

[3] Scots Magazine, Jan., 1792.

[4] “I have placed myself in London, sir, and have continued here ever since the 26th December last, for no other purpose than the prosecution of this affair” (Letter of 23rd February).

“I must beg leave, sir, once more to request that you will be pleased to lay my representation of this matter [locale of the court-martial] before the King, and that as soon as possible” (4th March).

“If my accusation is without foundation, the authors of cruelty have not yet devised the tortures I ought to endure” (11th March).

The letter of the 16th March expresses the astonishment of the writer that the greatest part of the charges were to be left out!—which throws much light on the subject.

[5] This accounts for the paragraph in the London Chronicle; a thing which is inexplicable till one comes to this sentence.

[6] Not to interrupt the thread of the narrative, we will append to this Chapter one or two extracts from the “Soldiers’ Friend”—a course which will at one and the same time tell the whole story of the grievance, and introduce us to the first essay of Cobbett’s pen.

[7] “Memoirs of John Thelwall,” i. 89.

CHAPTER IV.
“I LIVED IN PHILADELPHIA.”

The Quaker city may well be the pride of the American nation. Founded by William Penn, shortly after his settlement of Pennsylvania in the year 1682, it has become, after the lapse of two centuries, the most important town in the United States. Second to New York only in the matter of population, it is, at present, the first manufacturing city in the whole country; whilst it has long held supremacy as the centre of literary and philosophical activity. In the centenary year of 1876, Philadelphia possessed no less than 146 daily and weekly newspapers, and twenty public libraries: no bad sign of the state of intellectual advancement of a town containing about seven hundred thousand inhabitants. The population consists largely of members of the Society of Friends, or of their descendants; but there is always a considerable foreign element in the city: the Irish numbering about one-seventh, the Germans one-thirteenth, and the English one-thirtieth. There are at least 400 churches and chapels, and more than 400 public schools; and 100 hospitals and asylums.

The causes of the prosperity of Philadelphia are not difficult to be discovered. It is noticeable, that all flourishing capitals are marked by strong cosmopolitan features, with a background of national characteristic. The characteristic basis of the Pennsylvanian is his Quaker ancestry; and upon this has been grafted, in varying proportions, the religious and political notions, the manners, customs, and national prejudices, of English, Scotch, German, Irish, Welsh, Swedish, and other emigrants, ever since the middle of the last century. The capital of the state took the full-flow of this tide of immigration; further augmented during and after the war of independence, by a number of French people seeking for that peace and security which was denied them in their native land. With all these varying elements, however, the frugal, patient, industrious Quaker spirit has pervaded the place; and reduced all this complexity to some sort of harmony. Of party spirit there has, naturally, been much activity; indeed, at the period of our history, it prevailed more extensively than in almost any other town in the United States; but the cultivation of knowledge, of the useful arts, and of commercial enterprise, have been the agents in producing the prosperous and beautiful capital of Pennsylvania.

The city of Philadelphia would appear to have been the pole, one hundred years ago, which attracted alike the inquiring traveller and the political fugitive. The Abbé Raynal had collected and published, in 1770, an account of the American colonies,[1] which produced a profound sensation in Europe. It was translated into almost every European language. The literary characteristics of the book were great animation and plausibility; and, although it excited many strictures, from the political facts being largely mixed up with rhetorical allusions to the wrongs and errors of past generations, the work was, for a time, exceedingly popular, and furnished a basis for much of the cotemporary information on America. The unfortunate Jean Pierre Brissot, who was at Philadelphia in or about the year 1788, declared that Raynal had exaggerated everything; and Cobbett always qualified any allusion to the Abbé’s writings by some expression or other, to a similar effect. Brissot adds, however, his own impressions of the city, which were high enough, both with reference to the beauty of its situation and of its public buildings, and to the prosperity of its inhabitants.

An English traveller,[2] who visited the States in 1795-6, gave some curious particulars of the condition of society in Philadelphia at that period. Quakers appeared to number about one quarter of the whole population. The average Philadelphian was represented as being deficient in hospitality and politeness towards strangers:—

“Amongst the uppermost circles in Philadelphia, pride, haughtiness, and ostentation are conspicuous.… In the manners of the people in general, there is a coldness and reserve, as if they were suspicious of some designs against them, which chills to the very heart those who come to visit them. In their private societies a tristesse is apparent, near which mirth and gaiety can never approach. It is no unusual thing, in the genteelest houses, to see a large party of from twenty to thirty persons assembled, and seated round a room, without partaking of any other amusement than what arises from the conversation, most frequently in whispers, that passes between the two persons who are seated next to each other. The party meets between six and seven in the evening; tea is served with much form; and at ten, by which time most of the company are wearied with having so long remained stationary, they return to their own homes. Still, however, they are not strangers to music, cards, dancing, &c.”

Until about 1779 no public amusements were suffered in the city; but, after a few years later, Philadelphia would seem to have got a little gayer,[3] at least in the winter time—when the Congress and the State Assembly were sitting, and President Washington made his annual stay of some weeks. The President’s birthday became a special anniversary, when all the citizens (except Quakers) would make a point of paying him a visit. Concerts and public assemblies were held, and two or three theatres, even, were started. The great political revolution, in point of fact, produced a social one of quite as definite a character, even in prim Philadelphia. As concerning the manners of the lower classes, Weld records a sad deficiency: they would return impertinent answers to questions couched in the most civil terms, and would insult a person bearing the appearance of a gentleman, on purpose to show how highly they estimated the principles of liberty and equality. Hostlers and servants always appeared to be “doubtful whether they ought to do anything for you or not;” civility was not to be purchased with money; it seemed incompatible with freedom, and with the ideas which would convince a stranger that he was really in a land of liberty.

Now, Mr. William Cobbett, late of his Majesty’s 54th Regiment, had heard of this new country. His reading, hitherto, had been purely literary; but, plunged into the world of London—a novice in politics—he imbibes the then popular notions of republicanism, and is an enthusiastic admirer of the new ideas. The eloquent pages of Tom Paine,—unanswerable in themselves, yet, at that day, rigorously proscribed,—help to intoxicate; and, boiling with indignation (as he says) at the abuses he had witnessed, he has, indeed, become a republican. That is, a theoretical republican: for, when he soon comes to see all sides of republicanism, he reverts to his intrinsic love for the constitution under which he was born.

And to this new land of liberty he will go.

He landed in Philadelphia in October, 1792, and, for a short time, took up his residence at Wilmington, a little port[4] on a creek of the Delaware, about twenty-eight miles below Philadelphia. Here Cobbett found the very thing to give him a start in life; for the place was swarming with French emigrants, who wanted, above all things, to learn the English language. After a little time it appears that he found Philadelphia itself a better field for his energies; and, accordingly, having removed thither, he soon had as many pupils as he could attend to. This occupation was the occasion, also, which produced the “English Grammar for Frenchmen:”—

“When I afterwards came to teach the English language to French people in Philadelphia, I found that none of the grammars, then to be had, were of much use to me. I found them so defective, that I wrote down instructions and gave them to my scholars in manuscript. At the end of a few months, this became too troublesome; and these manuscript instructions assumed the shape of a grammar in print, the copyright of which I sold to Thomas Bradford,[5] a bookseller in Philadelphia, for 100 dollars (or 22l. 11s. 6d.); which grammar, under the title of Maître d’Anglais, is now in general use all over Europe.”

Cobbett seems to have held a rather qualified opinion upon this French grammar: for he elsewhere says it was “a very hasty production,” and that it was so defective that he was almost ashamed to look into it [1829]; but that it had the great merit of “clearness, and of making the learner see the reason of the rules.” Yet the book still holds its own; and it has been repeatedly reprinted in France, Belgium, &c.[6]

Besides the teaching of English to the emigrants, there was some translating done for the booksellers. The first of any importance, and which Cobbett alludes to somewhere as his “coup d’essai in the authoring way,” was the work of Von Martens on the “Law of Nations;” at that date a book of considerable authority:—

“Soon after I was married, I translated, for a bookseller in Philadelphia, a book on the Law of Nations. A member of Congress had given the original to the bookseller, wishing for him to publish a translation. The book was the work of a Mr. Martens, a German jurist, though it was written in French. I called it Martens’s Law of Nations.… I translated it for a quarter of a dollar (thirteenpence halfpenny) a page; and, as my chief business was to go out in the city to teach French people English, I made it a rule to earn a dollar while my wife was getting the breakfast in the morning, and another dollar after I came home at night, be the hour what it might; and I have earned many a dollar in this way, sitting writing in the same room where my wife and only child were in bed and asleep.”

Another task of similar character was the translation of “A Topographical and Political Description of the Spanish part of St. Domingo,” the author of which was Moreau de St. Méry,[7] one of the more distinguished of the French emigrants. This worthy man’s shop, at No. 84, South Front Street, was probably a favourite resort of the literati, as he was a person of considerable attainments, and a member of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia; whilst the bulk of his expatriated fellow-countrymen consisted, without doubt, of a cultivated class of men. Louis Philippe and his brothers were there. Talleyrand was there for a time,[8] and Cobbett recalls the fact, many years after, of having met him in St. Méry’s house.

Several of Cobbett’s best anecdotes of Philadelphian life are associated with Frenchmen; here is one:—

“A Frenchman, who had been driven from St. Domingo to Philadelphia, by the Wilberforces of France, went to church along with me one Sunday. He had never been in a Protestant place of worship before. Upon looking round him, and seeing everybody comfortably seated, while a couple of good stoves were keeping the place as warm as a slack oven, he exclaimed, ‘Pardi! on se sert Dieu bien à son aise ici!’”

It need not be imagined, however, that he had no American friends. On the contrary, as we shall see in the sequel, he made some friendships that lasted through life.

FOOTNOTES

[1] “Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes.” The author was assisted by Diderot, and others; and, at last (about 1780) the work was forbidden in France. Raynal lived to regret the extreme notions which he had advocated, and actually appeared at the bar of the National Assembly (in the month of May, 1791), there, to the surprise and displeasure of his audience, boldly to expostulate with them on their rash and ruinous courses; the principal charge being that they had too literally followed his principles, and reduced to practice the reveries and abstracted ideas of a philosopher, without having previously adapted and accommodated them to men, times, and circumstances! Raynal exercised a great deal of influence upon his generation, and may be considered as having contributed largely to the uprooting of institutions which resulted from the French Revolution; and this singular piece of moral courage was displayed at an advanced period of his life, when he had little to fear from any possible violence; the usual consequence, in those days, of reaction in opinion.

[2] Isaac Weld. See his “Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797” (2 vols., London, 1800).

[3] According to Brissot, even the Quakers were getting less strict, some of them being inclined to lapse into luxury, and have carpets!

[4] Now a flourishing town, with several newspapers, and extensive manufactures.

[5] Thomas Bradford, a leading Philadelphian of the period, was one of the members of a family that exercised a good deal of influence in the city for a long course of years. He died in 1838, at the advanced age of ninety-four. His father was Colonel William Bradford, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and his great grandfather William Bradford, one of the fellow-emigrants of Penn. This founder of the family was the first printer in Pennsylvania, and he lived to see some of his descendants amongst the most useful and esteemed citizens of Philadelphia. The Bradfords, during an entire century (1719-1819), published and conducted a newspaper in the city. Thomas Bradford was among the founders of the American Philosophical Society. His son, Thomas, became a judge of the United States.

[6] The actual title, at first, was “Le Tuteur Anglais, ou grammaire regulière de la langue Anglaise, en deux parties, &c. (à Philadelphie, chez Thomas Bradford, 1795).”

The 35th Edition (Paris, 1861: Baudry) has the following remarks in the preface, after alluding to the original success of the work: “La clarté de sa méthode l’a fait accueillir en France avec un plus vif empressement encore qu’en Amerique; ce qui s’explique parfaitement, car cette grammaire étant à l’usage des Français, il fallait que son mérite fut bien réel pour obtenir dans un pays étranger un succès qui n’a fait que grandir depuis. Sa supériorité incontestable sur les autres ouvrages du même genre ne peut donc faire doute, et ce qui le prouve, c’est que le public et la plupart des professeurs les plus en renommée parmi ceux qui ont conservé leur libre arbitre n’ont cessé de se servir de cette grammaire.”

A republication of this grammar was undertaken by Mons. L. H. Scipion, Comte Du Roure, who made large additions, with critical emendations, to Cobbett’s book (5th Edit. Paris, 1816). This gentleman adds his testimony to the general estimation in which the work was held, both in America and Europe, and says, “Ce qui distingue avantageusement le travail de M. Cobbett, c’est qu’il raisonne souvent, et oblige, plus souvent encore, le lecteur à raisonner.” But he must needs give currency to a report which he had heard, that Cobbett was not the real author of the Maître d’Anglais:—“Plusieurs personnes, bien dignes de foi, m’ont assuré qu’il était tres-eloigné, surtout en 1795, de posséder suffisamment la langue Française pour pouvoir écrire dans cette langue; et que d’ailleurs M. Cobbett, très-célèbre écrivain politique sans doute, n’avait pas fait dans sa jeunesse toutes les études classiques que la composition d’une Grammaire rend indispensables. Peut-être ai-je été mal informé”! A little bit of national pique, let us suppose. Of course we know more about Mons. Cobbett’s classical studies. And Mons. Du Roure got a little wiser on that point, if he read the No. of the “Political Register” for Feb. 21, 1818.

[7] Médéric Louis Elie Moreau de St. Méry, a Frenchman of good family. He had passed a somewhat distinguished career as a legislator, in his native country, until the period of the Revolution; when he had to flee from Robespierre. Having safely reached the United States with his family, he became a merchant’s clerk for a short time, and eventually opened a bookseller’s shop, to which was afterwards added a printing office. He wrote and published several works in Philadelphia, and returned to France in 1799. Died 1819, ætat. sixty-nine.

[8] The residence of Talleyrand in America is an obscure period in his history. We may learn more of it when the long-expected memoirs are published. The first part of his exile was spent in the neighbourhood of New York, and time hung heavily on his hands, for his pecuniary resources were scanty; and, indeed, this period was afterwards one of the most painful memories of his life. There does not appear any foundation for the suspicion that Talleyrand was a spy in the pay of the French Government, although it is probable enough that he kept his eyes open on his own account. At last he determined (as he wrote to Madame Genlis) to try and retrieve his fortunes with mercantile speculations; and in this he was successful. Towards the close of 1795, he sent a petition for the revocation of his banishment, which was ultimately granted, and he returned to France in the course of the following year. (Vide “Biographie Universelle;” also Touchard-Lafosse: “Hist. Polit. de Talleyrand.”)

A singular contribution to Talleyrand’s history occurs in “Men and Times of the Revolution,” by Elkanah Watson (New York, 1856, pp. 387, 388). It will serve to refute the notion that he had any particular mission. “In the years 1794 and 1795, I resided in the northern suburbs of Albany, known as the Colonie. Monsr. Le Contaulx, formerly of Paris, a very amiable man, was my opposite neighbour. His residence was the resort of the French emigrants. During that period, Count Latour Dupin, a distinguished French noble, made a hair-breadth escape from Bordeaux with his elegant and accomplished wife, the daughter of Count Dillon. They were concealed in that city for six terrible weeks, during the sanguinary atrocities of Tallien, and arrived at Boston with two trunks of fine towels, containing several hundred in each, the only property they had been able to save from the wreck of an immense estate.… They purchased a little farm upon an eminence nearly opposite Troy. Here they were joined by Talleyrand, who had arrived about the same time in Albany, also an exile and in want. I became intimate with them.… They avowed their poverty, and resided together on the little farm, suffering severe privations, bringing to Albany the surplus produce of their land, and habitually stopping, with their butter and eggs, at my door. They yielded with a good grace to their humiliating condition. In the year following, I was surrounded in my office by a group of distinguished Frenchmen; the Count, Talleyrand, Volney, the philosophical writer and traveller, Mons. Pharoux, … and Desjardins, a former Chamberlain of Louis XVI.” This intercourse at length terminated, through the avowed dislike of the émigrés to American institutions, habits, and customs.

CHAPTER V.
“HEARING MY COUNTRY ATTACKED, I BECAME HER DEFENDER THROUGH THICK AND THIN.”

Nearly two years had elapsed, before Cobbett’s life was disturbed by any greater excitement than would be furnished by his daily pursuits as a teacher of the French language. Even in Philadelphia, where party spirit was strong, and antipathy to England was particularly manifest, a busy, hard-working man, with his bread to earn, and who had no natural taste for politics, had no need to interfere—and Cobbett would not have interfered, probably, had not the occasion been brought about almost by accident. The little republicanism which had leavened his mind, whilst in London, had disappeared, when he came to see more of human nature in his new country; and the municipal contests, and the flaring speeches and writings, which excited less industrious minds, had no charm for him. “Newspapers,” he says, “were a luxury for which I had little relish, and which, if I had been ever so fond of, I had not time to enjoy.”

But a circumstance occurred, about the middle of the year 1794, which aroused Cobbett’s native spirit; and offered, at the same time, an opportunity for its exercise:—

“One of my scholars, who was a person that we in England should call a coffee-house politician, chose, for once, to read his newspaper by way of lesson; and, it happened to be the very paper which contained the addresses presented to Dr. Priestley at New York, together with his replies. My scholar, who was a sort of republican, or at best, but half a monarchist, appeared delighted with the invectives against England, to which he was very much disposed to add. Those Englishmen who have been abroad, particularly if they have had time to make a comparison between the country they are in and that which they have left, well know how difficult it is, upon occasions such as I have been describing, to refrain from expressing their indignation and resentment; and there is not, I trust, much reason to suppose, that I should, in this respect, experience less difficulty than another.

“The dispute was as warm as might reasonably be expected between a Frenchman, uncommonly violent even for a Frenchman, and an Englishman not remarkable for sang-froid; and, the result was, a declared resolution, on my part, to write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country, which pamphlet he pledged himself to answer; his pledge was forfeited; it is known that mine was not. Thus, sir [he is addressing Mr. Pitt], it was, that I became a writer on politics. ‘Happy for you,’ you will say, ‘if you had continued at your verbs and your nouns.’ Perhaps it would: but the fact absorbs the reflection; whether it was for my good, or otherwise, I entered on the career of political writing; and, without adverting to the circumstances under which others have entered on it, I think it will not be believed that the pen was ever taken up from a motive more pure and laudable. I could have no hope of gain from the proposed publication itself, but, on the contrary, was pretty certain to incur a loss; no hope of remuneration, for not only had I never seen any agent of the British government in America, but was not acquainted with any one British subject in the country. I was actuated, perhaps, by no very exalted notions of either loyalty or patriotism; the act was not much an act of refined reasoning, or of reflection; it arose merely from feeling, but it was that sort of feeling, that jealousy for the honour of my native country, which I am sure you will allow to have been highly meritorious, especially when you reflect on the circumstances of the times and the place in which I ventured before the public.

“Great praise, and still more, great success, are sure to operate, with young and zealous men, as an encouragement to further exertion. Both were, in this case, far beyond my hopes, and still farther beyond the intrinsic merits of my performance. The praise was, in fact, given to the boldness of the man who, after the American press had, for twenty years, been closed against every publication relative to England, in which England and her king were not censured and vilified, dared not only to defend but to eulogize and exalt them; and, the success was to be ascribed to that affection for England, and that just hatred of France, which, in spite of all the misrepresentations that had been so long circulated, were still alive in the bosoms of all the better part of the people; who openly to express their sentiments, only wanted the occasion and the example which were now afforded them.”

Joseph Priestley was one of the most estimable of men. Among those who have thrust back the barriers of Ignorance, he holds no mean place, whether as a student of natural philosophy, or as a Christian teacher. But he belongs to a period when the Pioneer had to suffer for his opinions.

Born in 1733, he early evinced the qualities of a thorough student, mastered several European and Eastern languages, spent his spare cash in scientific instruments, and entered the ministry as an inflexible opponent of the cruel notions of “eternal wrath.” He was a man rather inclined to take always the heterodox side of things, as one who had discovered that most popular doctrines, in politics and religion, were founded on baseless traditions. Priestley’s contributions to science brought him within the fold of the Royal Society; and he was pursuing his studies at the same time that he had charge of an important dissenting congregation at Birmingham, when the French Revolution broke out, in 1789. By this time he was known as an ardent and honest controversialist, and had numerous warm friendships among the advanced Liberals of London and Paris; and his position at Birmingham was becoming hazardous, on account of the denunciations he underwent on the part of the orthodox in Church and State. Matters came to a crisis in the summer of 1791; when, a feast being held for the purpose of celebrating the fall of the Bastille, a mob assembled, highly strung with loyalty; which, after disturbing the diners, broke the windows of the hotel, proceeded to demolish Priestley’s and another meeting-house, his dwelling, and the houses of several other influential dissenters. In short, there was a genuine riot, for which the county had to pay.

And Dr. Priestley had to leave Birmingham. Nor did three years of London life, with the fierce controversies of the day, serve to console him. Having succeeded his friend, the celebrated Dr. Richard Price, as pastor of a meeting at Hackney, he fought alternately with French sceptics and with English “divines;” but age was creeping upon him; his beloved scientific pursuits were being neglected; and he looked wistfully to the new land of liberty and toleration. His domestic hearth was a happy one, and he could at least take that with him wherever he went. So, in the spring of 1794, he set sail for America.

His departure, however, was the signal for a good deal of affectionate demonstration. Addresses were presented to him, and he left his native shores with the good wishes and the regrets of thousands. But, flattering as this was, it was nothing to the reception Priestley experienced on his arrival at New York. He found himself welcomed to “a country worthy of him;” to a land where reason had “successfully triumphed over the artificial distinctions of European policy and bigotry;” by those who had “beheld with the keenest sensibility the unparalleled persecutions” which had attended him in his native country.

So, the Philadelphia newspapers of June, 1794, published these addresses—the most noted of which were from the Tammany Society of New York, the Democratic Society of the same, the Republican Natives of Great Britain and Ireland resident in the City of New York, the Medical Society of New York, and the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia newspapers, ready for all sorts of fiery attack upon England, printed these addresses in full, along with Dr. Priestley’s grateful replies. One of Mr. Cobbett’s intelligent pupils, in his studious zeal, produces such a newspaper, that his English exercises may be presented in the English of the day. As one of his own omelettes, he will have his English served up fresh; no musty Addison nor dry Delolme for him; no stale oligarchical stuff, ready for hatching into villainy and oppression; but the sweet, new-laid principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Which principles, as exemplified in their latest fruits, Monsieur le Maître d’Anglais abhors, with all his heart and soul.

Accordingly, there forthwith appeared an anonymous pamphlet, under the title of “Observations on Priestley’s Emigration;” consisting of a review of the circumstances which had driven the Doctor from Birmingham, and eventually from England; and a running commentary upon the republican addresses which had been presented to him. The whole tenour of the tract, however, consisted in its expressed horror of the ruin and desolation which the theorists had brought upon France, and in pointing out what would be (in the mind of the writer) the logical result of the new ideas being disseminated in England. Priestley’s emigration, in point of fact, was made the peg on which to hang an anti-revolution tirade. Certain sound principles, however, were enunciated: an extract or two will serve to show this, and, by the felicitous terms in which they are conveyed, to display the wonderful command which Cobbett had already acquired over his native tongue.

“System-mongers are an unreasonable species of mortals; time, place, climate, nature itself, must give way. They must have the same governments in every quarter of the globe; when, perhaps, there are not two countries which can possibly admit of the same form of government at the same time. A thousand hidden causes, a thousand circumstances and unforeseen events, conspire to the forming of a government. It is always done by little and little. When completed, it presents nothing like a system; nothing like a thing composed, and written in a book. It is curious to hear people cite the American government as the summit of human perfection, while they decry the English; when it is absolutely nothing more than the government which the kings of England established here, with such little modifications as were necessary on account of the state of society and local circumstances. If, then, the Doctor is come here for a change of government and laws, he is the most disappointed of mortals. He will have the mortification to find in his ‘asylum’ the same laws as those from which he has fled, the same upright manner of administering them, the same punishment of the oppressor, and the same protection of the oppressed. In the courts of justice he will every day see precedents quoted from the English law-books; and (which to him may appear wonderful) we may venture to predict, that it will be very long before they will be supplanted by the bloody records of the revolutionary tribunal.”

“Even supposing his intended plan of improvement had been the best in the world, instead of the worst, the people of England had certainly a right to reject it. He claims as an indubitable right, the right of thinking for others, and yet he will not permit the people of England to think for themselves.… If the English choose to remain slaves, bigots, and idolaters, as the Doctor calls them, that was no business of his; he had nothing to do with them. He should have let them alone; and, perhaps in due time, the abuses of their government would have come to that ‘natural termination,’ which he trusts, ‘will guard against future abuses.’ But no, said the Doctor, I will reform you—I will enlighten you—I will make you free.—You shall not, say the people.—But I will! says the Doctor. By ——, say the people, you shall not! ‘And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died, and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.’”

“I am one of those who wish to believe that foreigners come to this country from choice, and not from necessity.… The most numerous, as well as the most useful, are mechanics. Perhaps a cobbler, with his hammer and awls, is a more valuable acquisition than a dozen philosophi-theologi-politi-cal empirics, with all their boasted apparatus.”

Mr. Thomas Bradford was again his publisher. The circumstance is fully related in the American autobiography:—

“When the ‘Observations’ on the Emigration of this ‘martyr to the cause of liberty’ were ready for the press, I did not, at first, offer them to Mr. Bradford. I knew him to retain a rooted hatred against Great Britain, and concluded, that his principles would prevent him from being instrumental in the publication of anything that tended to unveil one of its most bitter enemies. I therefore addressed myself to Mr. Carey.[1] This was, to make use of a culinary figure, jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. Mr. Carey received me as booksellers generally receive authors (I mean authors whom they hope to get but little by): he looked at the title from top to bottom, and then at me from head to foot.—‘No, my lad,’ says he, ‘I don’t think it will suit.’”—My lad! God in heaven forgive me! I believe that, at that moment, I wished for another yellow fever to strike the city; not to destroy the inhabitants, but to furnish me too with the subject of a pamphlet, that might make me rich. Mr. Carey has sold hundreds of the ‘Observations’ since that time, and therefore I dare say he highly approved of them, when he came to a perusal. At any rate, I must not forget to say, that he behaved honourably in the business; for, he promised not to make known the author, and he certainly kept his word, or the discovery would not have been reserved for the month of June, 1796. This circumstance, considering Mr. Carey’s politics, is greatly to his honour, and has almost wiped from my memory that contumelious ‘my lad.’

“From Mr. Carey I went to Mr. Bradford, and left the pamphlet for his perusal. The next day I went to him to know his determination. He hesitated, wanted to know if I could not make it a little more popular, adding that, unless I could, he feared that the publishing of it would endanger his windows. ‘More popular,’ I could not make it. I never was of an accommodating disposition in my life. The only alteration I would consent to was in the title. I had given the pamphlet the double title of ‘The Tartuffe Detected; or, Observations,’ &c. The former was suppressed, though, had I not been pretty certain that every press in the city was as little free as that to which I was sending it, the ‘Tartuffe Detected’ should have remained; for the person on whom it was bestowed merited it much better than the character so named by Molière.

“These difficulties, and these fears of the bookseller, at once opened my eyes with respect to the boasted liberty of the press. Because the laws of this country proclaim to the world, that every man may write and publish freely, and because I saw the newspapers filled with vaunts on the subject, I was fool enough to imagine that the press was really free for every one. I had not the least idea, that a man’s windows were in danger of being broken, if he published anything that was not popular. I did, indeed, see the words liberty and equality, the rights of man, the crimes of kings, and such like, in most of the booksellers’ windows; but I did not know that they were put there to save the glass, as a free republican Frenchman puts a cockade tricolor in his hat to save his head. I was ignorant of all these arcana of the liberty of the press.

“The work that it was feared would draw down punishment on the publisher, did not contain one untruth, one anarchical, indecent, immoral, or irreligious expression; and yet the bookseller feared for his windows! For what? Because it was not popular enough. A bookseller in a despotic state fears to publish a work that is ‘too popular,’ and one in a free state fears to publish a work that is not ‘popular enough.’ I leave it to the learned philosophers of the ‘Age of Reason’ to determine in which of these states there is the most liberty of the press; for, I must acknowledge, the point is too nice for me: fear is fear, whether inspired by a Sovereign Lord the King, or by a Sovereign People.

“The terms on which Mr. Bradford took the ‘Observations,’ were what booksellers call publishing it together. I beg the reader, if he foresees the possibility of his becoming an author, to recollect this phrase well. Publishing it together is thus managed: the bookseller takes the work, prints it, and defrays all expenses of paper, binding, &c. and the profits, if any, are divided between him and the author.—Long after the ‘Observations’ were sold off, Mr. Bradford rendered me an account (undoubtedly a very just one) of the sales. According to this account, my share of the profits (my share only) amounted to the enormous sum of one shilling and sevenpence halfpenny, currency of the State of Pennsylvania (or, about elevenpence three farthings sterling), quite entirely clear of all deductions whatsoever!

“Now, bulky as this sum appears in words at length, I presume, that when 1s. 7½d. is reduced to figures, no one will suppose it sufficient to put a coat upon my back. If my poor back were not too broad to be clothed with such a sum as this, God knows how I should bear all that has been, and is, and is to be, laid on it by the unmerciful democrats. Why! 1s. 7½d. would not cover the back of a Lilliputian; no, not even in rags, as they sell here.”

The allusion to the coat was occasioned by a report, which Cobbett thought fit to notice, that Mr. Bradford had provided him with the means of procuring one. Whether the “Observations” proved remunerative or not, it is certain that the tract was immediately reprinted in London, by Stockdale, and noticed in the magazines; and we will presently refer to the comments which were raised in England by the new politician.

Meanwhile the pamphlet was read, and became notorious; and its author had discovered where his strength lay. He would prepare another onslaught upon the anti-federalists.

In order, however, that we may understand the position which Cobbett soon came to occupy as a politician, it will be necessary to take a glimpse of the leading questions which were agitating the public mind of America. The chief cities of the United States, receiving, as they did, the overflowings of European ebullition, had also their own internal squabbles, and were become so many centres of revolutionary intrigue; and the perils and the strife thus engendered opened the field of political adventure to many an aspiring mind. It was a period of terrible personal animosities, both in Europe and America: men’s friendships, and men’s reputations, never had a harder lot, in the face of differences of opinion.