INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COBBETT. W PARENTAGE AND YOUTH. years. ITH respect to my ancestors, I shall go no farther back than my grandfather, and for this plain reason that I never heard talk of any prior to him. He was a day-laborer, and I have heard my father say that he worked for one farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death-upward of forty 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 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 neighboring heath, and her evening light was a rush dipped in grease. 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 two pence a day, and these his earnings were appropriated to the expenses of an eveningschool. What a village schoolmaster could be expected to teach he had learned, 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 neighbors. 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. 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 pease. When I first trudged afield 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 pease followed, and hence I arrived at the honor 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 good humor 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, for he had for an 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. boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen | lived near us. This was generally done with 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 learning me my letters. In the winter evenings my father learned 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 endeavors to learn us that necessarily failed; for though he thought he understood it, and though he made us get the rules by heart, we learned nothing at all of the principles. AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR. As to politics, we were like the rest of the country-people in England-that is to say, we neither knew nor thought anything about the matter. The shouts of victory or the murmurs at a defeat would now and then break in upon our tranquillity for a moment, but I do not remember ever having seen a newspaper in the house; and most certainly that privation did not render us less industrious, happy or free. After, however, the American war had continued for some time, and the cause and nature of it began to be understood, or rather misunderstood, by the lower classes of the people in England, we became a little better acquainted with subjects of this kind. It is well known that the people were, as to numbers, nearly equally divided in their opinions concerning that war and their wishes respecting the result of it. My father was a partisan of the Americans; he used frequently to dispute on the subject with the gardener of a nobleman who PURCHASES THE "TALE OF A TUB." 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. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens, and the gardener, who had just come from the king's gardens at Kew, gave such a description of them 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 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 a halfpenny which 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, on the outside of which was written: "Tale of a Tub. Price, 3d." The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence, 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 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, to give me victuals, find me lodging and set me to work. And it was during the period that I was at Kew that the present king (George IV.) and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress while I was sweeping the grass-plot 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 years old, lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds. This circumstance, trifling as it was, and childish as it may seem to relate it, has always endeared the recollection of Kew to me. HIS FIRST VIEW OF SHIPS. 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 been the theme of our praise and the burden of our songs. [This was written in 1796.] 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 in all its honors; yet these honors 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 dangers. A LAWYER'S CLERK AT GRAY'S INN. 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 pitchforks, 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; but save me from the desk of an attorney. COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE. When I first saw my wife, she was thirteen years old and I was within a month of twenty-one. She was the daughter of a sergeant-major of artillery and I was the sergeant-major of a regiment of foot, both stationed in forts near the city of St. John, in the province of New Brunswick. I sat in the same room with her for about an hour, in company with others, and I made up my mind that she was the very girl for me. That I thought her beautiful is certain, for that I had always said should be an indispensable qualification; but I saw in her what I deemed marks of that sobriety of conduct of which I have said so much, and which has been by far the greatest blessing of my life. It was now dead of winter, and of course the snow several feet deep on the ground and the weather piercing cold. It was my habit, when I had done my morning's writing, to go out at break of day to take a walk on a hill at the foot of which our barracks lay. In about three mornings after I had first seen her I had by an invitation to breakfast got up two young men to join me in my walk, and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out on the snow scrubbing out a washing-tub. "That's the girl for me," said I when we had got out of her hearing. One of these young men came to England soon afterward, and he who kept an inn in Yorkshire came over to Preston at the time of the election to verify whether I was the same man. When he found that I was, he appeared surprised; but what was his surprise when I told him that those tall young men whom he saw around me were the sons of that pretty little girl that he and I saw scrubbing out the washing-tub on the snow in New Brunswick at daybreak in the morning! From the day that I first spoke to her I never had a thought of her ever being the wife of any other man, more than I had a thought of her being transformed into a chest of drawers, and I formed my resolution at once to marry her as soon as we could get permission and to get out of the army as soon as I could; so that this matter was at once settled as firmly as if written in the book of Fate. At the end of about six months my regiment, and I along with it, were removed to Frederickton-a distance of one hundred miles up the river St. John and, which was worse, the artillery were expected to go off a year or two before our regiment. The artillery went, and she along with them; and now it was that I acted a part becoming a real and sensible lover. I was aware that when she got to that gay place Woolwich, the house of her father and mother, necessarily visited by numerous persons not the most select, might become unpleasant to her, and I did not like, besides, that she should continue to work hard. I had saved one hundred and fifty guineas, the earnings of my early hours in writing for the paymaster, the quartermaster, and others, in addition to the savings of my own pay. I sent her all my money before she sailed, and wrote to her to beg of her if she found her home uncomfortable to hire a lodging with respectable people, and, at any rate, not to spare the money by any means, but to buy herself good clothes and to live without hard work until I arrived in England; and I, in order to induce her to lay out the money, told her that I should get plenty more before I came home. We were kept abroad two years later than our time, Mr. Pitt-England not being then so tame as she is now-having knocked up a dust with Spain about Nootka Sound. Oh how I cursed Nootka Sound! and poor bawling Pitt too, I am afraid. At the end of four years, however, home I came, landed at Portsmouth and got my discharge from the army by the great kindness of poor Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who was then the major of my regiment. I found my little girl a little girl a servant-of-all-work-and hard work it was -in the house of a Captain Brisac, and without hardly saying a word about the matter she put hands the whole of my put into my one hundred and fifty guineas unbroken. Need I tell the reader what my feelings were? Need I tell kind-hearted English parents what effect this anecdote must have produced on the minds of our children? Need I attempt to describe what effect this example ought to have on every young woman who shall do me the honor to read this book? book? Admiration of her conduct and selfgratulation on this indubitable proof of the soundness of my own judgment were now added to my love of her beautiful person. are. Now, I do not say that there are not many young women of this country who would, under similar circumstances, have acted as my wife did in this case; on the contrary, I hope, and sincerely do believe, that there But when her age is considered; when we reflect that she was living in a place crowded-literally crowded-with gaylydressed and handsome young men, many of whom really were far richer and in higher rank than I was and scores of them ready to offer her their hand; when we reflect that she was living amongst young women who put upon their backs every shilling that they could come at; when we see her keeping the bag of gold untouched and working hard to provide herself with but mere necessary apparel, and doing all this while she was passing from fourteen to eighteen years of age; when we view the whole of the circumstances, we must say that here is an example which, while it reflects honor on her sex, ought to have weight with every young woman whose eyes or ears this relation shall reach. - HIS RESIDENCE IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNA., IN THE OLDEN TIME. Never in my whole life did I live in a house so clean, in such trim order, and never have I eaten or drunk or slept or dressed in a manner so perfectly to my taste, as I did |