WILLIAM COBBETT. [1762-1835.] 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." WILLIAM COBBETT was a native of Farnham in Surrey. He was born about 1762; the third son of a small farmer. After he had risen to cminence and distinction, it was his delight and his pride to refer to the honourable, if humble circumstances of his early life; to a father, whom, he says, "I ardently loved, and to whose every word I listened with admiration;" and to a "gentle, and tender-hearted, and affectionate mother." In one of his "Rural Rides," in which he was accompanied by one of his sons, then a mere boy, he says: "In coming from Moor Park to Farnham town, I stopped opposite the door of a little old house, where there appeared to be many children. There, Dick,' said I, 'when I was just such a little creature as that, whom you see in the doorway, I lived in this very Breakfasting at a little village in Sussex, he house with my grandmother Cobbett.'" He looks with fond complacency upon the landlady's was a bold, adventurous, hardy little chap, fond son: "A very pretty village, and a very nice of all manner of rural English sports, and the breakfast, in a very neat parlour of a very very "father to the man" he afterwards became. decent public-house. The landlady sent her son Cobbett, whatever were his faults, had a genial to get me some cream; and he was just such a temperament and great warmth of feeling. In chap as I was at his age, and dressed just in the one of his "Rural Rides," in which he was ac- same sort of way; his main garment being a blue companied by an elder son, he writes: smock-frock, faded from wear, and mended with pieces of new stuff, and, of course, not faded. The sight of this smock-frock brought to my recollection many things very dear to me." This is as fine as Burns gazing upon the cottage smoke in his morning walk to Blackford Hill with Dugald Stewart. One anecdote of his boyhood, related by himself, is so amusingly characteristic of the future man, that we have never forgotten it. He was not permitted to follow the hounds upon some occasion, and, in revenge, procured a salt herring, which he furtively drew over the ground where they were to throw off, thus to cast them off the scent. The trick took to admiration, and the boy as much exulted in his success as did the man in the discomfiture of his enemies, Ellensborough and Vickary Gibbs. "We went a little out of the way to go to a place called the Bourne, which lies in the heath at about a mile from Farnham. We went to Bourne, in order that I might show my son the spot where I received the rudiments of my 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. Our 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 In the introduction to one of his most delightful books-next, indeed, to the "Rural Rides" namely, his "Year's Residence in America," he says: "Early habits and affections seldom quit us while we have vigour of mind left. I was brought up under a father, whose talk was chiefly about his garden and his fields, with regard to which he was famed for his skill and his exemplary neatness. From my very infancy, from the age of six years, when I climbed up the side of a steep sand-rock, and there scooped me out a plot four feet square to make me a garden, and the soil for which I carried up in E the bosom of my little blue smock-frock, or hunting-shirt, I have never lost one particle of my passion for these healthy, and rational, and heart-cheering pursuits, in which every day presents something new, in which the spirits are never suffered to flag, and in which industry, skill, and care are sure to meet with their due reward. I have never, for any eight months together, during my whole life, been without a garden." In the same volume in his American journal this passage occurs: with Mr Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequences of bad, and no one to counsel me to good behaviour. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth, all became nothing in my eyes; and from that moment (less than a month after my arrival in England) I resolved never to bend before them." Cobbett, in his native place, and following the employments of his ancestors, must inevitably have been a "village Hampden." On looking at a little smock-frocked boy, in nailed shoes and clean coarse shirt, such as he had been, he very naturally remarks: "If accident had not taken me from a similar scene, how many villains and fools, who have been well teased and tormented, would have slept in peace by night, and fearlessly swaggered about by day!" Cobbett received so little school learning, that, in his case, it may be almost truly said, "Reading and writing came by nature." From eight years of age he was engaged in such rural occupations as picking hops and hautboys, weeding in gardens, and driving away the birds, and following the hounds; or getting upon horseback as often as he could, or digging after rabbits' nests, rolling down the sand-hills, and whipping the little efts that crept about in the heath. And this is the education which, upon reflection, he preferred. None of his own young children were ever sent from home to school. Reading and writing came to them from imitation. Throughout all Cobbett's writings (crotchets notwithstanding), excellent hints are scattered upon this important subject, but especially in his "Advice to Young Men." His controversy with the educators as a sect, was merely one of sound. No man could prize the advan "When I returned to England, in 1800, after an absence, from the country parts of it, of sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters, that I could jump over, called rivers! The Thames was but a 'creek!' But when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so pitifully small! I had to cross, in my post-chaise, the long and dreary heath of Bagshot; then, at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hungry Hill; and from that hill I knew that I should look down into the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to see all the scenes of my childhood; for I had learnt before, the death of my father and mother. There is a hill, not far from the town, called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat, in the form of a cone, and is planted with Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighbourhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as Crooksbury Hill' meant with us the utmost degree of height. Therefore, the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes!tages of education so highly as one who owed Literally speaking, I, for a moment, thought the famous hill removed, and a little heap put in its stead; for I had seen, in New Brunswick, a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and four or five times as high! The postboy, going down hill, and not a bad road, whisked me, in a few minutes, to the Bush Inn, from the garden of which I could see the prodigious sand-hill, where I had begun my gardening works. What a nothing! But now came rushing into my mind, all at once, my pretty little garden, my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons, that I used to feed out of my hands, the last kind words and tears of my gentle and tender-hearted and affectionate mother! I hastened back into the room. If I had looked a moment longer, I should have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! I looked down at my dress. What a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before at the Secretary of State's, in company all he knew to himself, and who had pursued knowledge unremittingly and under considerable difficulties. His first start from home he has described himself in this memorable passage: "At eleven years of age, my employment was clipping off 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 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 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 most largely in the more popular and enduring part of them, namely, the "Rural Rides," the "Year's Residence in America," and the "Advice to Young Men." In the latter work he says, in treating of education, and, in particular, of learning grammar: "The study need subtract from the hours of no business, nor, indeed, from the hours of necessary exercise; the hours usually spent on the tea and coffee slops and in the mere gossip which accompany them-those wasted hours of only one year employed in the study of English grammar would make you a correct speaker and writer for the rest of your life. You want no school, no room to study in, no expenses, and no troublesome circumstances of any sort. I learned grammar when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence a day. The edge of my berth or that of the guard-bed was my seat to study in, my knapsack was my bookcase, a bit of board lying on my lap was my writing-table, and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life. 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. And if I under such circumstances, and without parent or friend to advise or encourage me, accomplished this undertaking, what excuse can there be for any youth, however poor, however pressed with business, or however circumstanced as to room or other conveniences? 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 brawl the road, and one 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 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 the Kew Garden, where there stood a hay-stack. 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 sort of 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 Scotsman, 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 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 coulding of at least half a score of the most thoughtnot 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." At sixteen he attempted to make off to sea; at seventeen he went to London, where he supported himself for some time as a copying clerk; at twenty-two he enlisted as a private soldier, and rose to the rank of sergeant-major. His regiment was the 53d, then commanded by one of the king's sons, the Duke of Kent, and he went with it to British America. Thus, from a very tender age he was left entirely to his own guidance and mastership, and thus was nourished the self-depending, determined character which nerved him for his life-long struggle. The little illustrative snatches of personal history, especially of his young days, which he has incidentally given, are the most attractive part of his writings, and these, fortunately, mingle the less 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 again I say, if I, under circumstances like these, could encounter and overcome this task, is there, can there be, in the whole world a youth to find an excuse for the non-performance? What youth who shall read this will not be ashamed to say that he is not able to find time and opportunity for this most essential of all the branches of book-learning?" His natural disposition, prompt and active, made him fall easily into the better parts of military habits. The original maxim of the man who for forty years daily did so much, and who, having put his hand to the plough, never once looked back, was-Toujours prêt-always ready; and it ought to be the family motto of the Cobbetts. He says of himself: "For my part, I can truly say that I owe more of my great labours to my strict adherence to the precepts that I have here given you than to all the natural abilities with which I have been endowed, for these, whatever may have been their amount, would have been of comparatively little use, even aided by great sobriety and abstinence, if I had not in early life contracted the blessed habit of husbanding well my time. To this, more than to any other thing, I owed my very extraordinary promotion in the army. I was 'always ready;' if I had to mount guard at ten, I was ready at nine; never did any man, or anything, wait one moment for me. Being, at an age under twenty years, raised from corporal to sergeant-major at once, over the heads of thirty sergeants, I naturally should have been an object of envy and hatred; but this habit of early rising and of rigid adherence to the precepts which I have given you really subdued these passions, because every one felt that what I did he had never done, and never could do. Before my promotion, a clerk was wanted to make out the morning report of the regiment. I rendered the clerk unnecessary, and long before any other man was dressed for the parade, my work for the morning was all done, and I myself was on the parade, walking, in fine weather, for an hour perhaps. My custom was this: to get up in summer at daylight, and in winter at four o'clock-shave, dress, even to the putting of my sword-belt over my shoulder, and having my sword lying on the table before me ready to hang by my side. Then I ate a bit of cheese, or pork and bread. Then I prepared my report, which was filled up as fast as the companies brought me in the materials. After this I had an hour or two to read before the time came for any duty out of doors, unless when the regiment, or part of it, went out to exersise in the morning. When this was the case, and the matter was left to me, I always had it on the ground in such time as that the bayonets glistened in the rising sun, a sight which gave me delight, of which I often think, but which I should in vain endeavour to describe. If the officers were to go out, eight or ten o'clock was the hour, sweating the men in the heat of the day, breaking in upon the time for cooking their dinner, putting all things out of order and all men out of humour. When I was commander, the men had a long day of leisure before them; they could ramble into the town or into the woods, go to get raspberries, to catch birds, to catch fish, or to pursue any other recreation, and such of them as chose, and were qualified, to work at their trades." Much of the spare time of Cobbett was, in his younger years, devoted to a very miscellaneous kind of reading. He ran through all the books of a country circulating library, trash and all; and, contemptibly as he often affects to speak of literary pursuits, the fruits of these early studies are often revealed in the lively style and the fertility and happiness of allusion which distinguish all his writings. No one has abused Shakespeare so absurdly and truculently-for this was one of Cobbett's many crotchets; but, then, few have quoted the bard of many-coloured life so aptly and frequently. Shakespeare and the principal English poets were clearly at his finger ends, while, from wayward caprice, he affected ignorance, with contempt of them. Of the arts he knew nothing, not even the mechanic arts; and his tours in Scotland and Ireland show how little he possessed of what is called general information-the kind of knowledge which comes almost of itself, and which he despised much more than was needful. Yet, his acquaintance with English classical literature, and even with contemporary authors, must have been extensive, and gradually accumulating, in the gardens of Kew, in London, and in New Brunswick, and to the last hour of his life. The "Tale of a Tub" had introduced the boy to the writings of Swift; and we have been informed by an officer who joined the 53d Regiment shortly after Cobbett left it, that he had written out in some of the regimental books, "Directions for a Sergeant-Major," or an orderly, in the manner of Swift's "Advice to Servants," which were full of admirable humour and grave irony. The officers of the 53d and the corps were, as we have reason to know, exceedingly proud of their clever sergeant-major after he became famous; and so, indeed, was the whole army, from the period he became a party writer in Philadelphia. He was particularly distinguished by His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent. In the "Advice to Young Men," which may be called his confessions, Cobbett has related his own love-story, and a delightful one it is-possessing at once the tenderness and simplicity of nature, and no little of the charm of romance. The scene of it was New Brunswick. But there is a collateral flirtation also, involving what Cobbett terms the only serious sin he ever committed against the female sex, and which he relates in warning to young men. We shall take it first, and that, too, in the language of his own narrative. "The province of New Brunswick, in North America, in which I passed my years from the age of eighteen to that of twenty-six, consists, in general, of heaps of rocks, in the interstices of which grow the pine, the spruce, and various sorts of fir trees, or, where the woods have been burnt down, the bushes of the raspberry or those of the huckle-berry. The province is cut asunder lengthwise, by a great river, called the St John, about two hundred miles in length, and, at half way from the mouth, full a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable smaller rivers, there called creeks. On the sides of these creeks, the land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places generally good and productive; the trees that grow here are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class; natural meadows here and there present themselves; and some of these spots far surpass in rural beauty any other that my eyes ever beheld; the creeks abounding towards their sources in waterfalls of endless variety, as well in form as in magnitude, and always teeming with fish, while water-fowl enliven their surface, and while wild pigeons, of the gayest plumage, flutter, in thousands upon thousands, amongst the branches of the beautiful trees, which, sometimes for miles together, form an arch over the creeks. "I, in one of my rambles in the woods, in which I took great delight, came to a spot at a very short distance from the source of one of these creeks. Here was everything to delight the eye, and especially of one like me, who seem to have been born to love rural life, and trees and plants of all sorts. Here were about two hundred acres of natural meadow, interspersed with patches of maple trees, in various forms and of various extent; the creek came down in cascades, for any one of which many a nobleman in England would, if he could transfer it, give a good slice of his fertile estate; and, in the creek, at the foot of the cascades, there were, in the season, salmon the finest in the world, and so abundant, and so easily taken, as to be used for manuring the land. "If nature, in her very best humour, had made a spot for the express purpose of captivating me, she could not have exceeded the efforts which she had here made. But I found something here besides these rude works of nature; I found something in the fashioning of which man had had something to do. I found a large and well-built log dwelling-house, standing (in the month of September) on the edge of a very good field of Indian corn, by the side of which there was a piece of buck-wheat just then mowed. I found a homestead, and some very pretty cows. I found all the things by which an easy and happy farmer is surrounded; and I found still something besides all these-something that was destined to give me a great deal of pleasure and also a great deal of pain, both in their extreme degree; and both of which, in spite of the lapse of forty years, now make an attempt to rush back into my heart. "Partly from misinformation, and partly from miscalculation, I had lost my way; and, quite alone, but armed with my sword and a brace of pistols, to defend myself against the bears, I arrived at the log-house in the middle of a moonlight night, the hoar-frost covering the trees and the grass. A stout and clamorous dog, kept off by the gleaming of my sword, waked the master of the house, who got up, received me with great hospitality, got me something to eat, and put me into a feather. bed, a thing that I had been a stranger to for some years. I, being very tired, had tried to pass the night in the woods, between the trunks of two large trees which had fallen side by side, and within a yard of each other. I had made a nest for myself of dry fern, and had made a covering by laying boughs of spruce across the trunks of the trees. But, unable to sleep on account of the cold; becoming sick from the great quantity of water that I had drank during the heat of the day, and being, moreover, alarmed at the noise of the bears, and lest one of them should find me in a defenceless state, I had roused myself up, and had crept along as well as I could. So that no hero of Eastern romance ever experienced a more enchanting change. "I had got into the house of one of those Yankee loyalists, who, at the close of the revolutionary war (which, until it had succeeded, was called a rebellion), had accepted of grants of land in the king's province of New Brunswick; and who, to the great honour of England, had been furnished with all the means of making new and comfortable settlements. I was suffered to sleep till breakfast time, when I found a table, the like of which I have since seen so many times in the United States, loaded with good things. The master and the mistress of the house, aged about fifty, were like what an English farmer and his wife were half a century ago. There were two sons, tall and stout, who ap peared to have come in from work, and the youngest of whom was about my age, then twenty-three. But there was another member of the family, aged nineteen, who (dressed according to the neat and simple fashion of New England, whence she had come with her parents five or six years before) had her long light-brown hair twisted nicely up, and fastened on the top of her head, in which head were a pair of lively blue eyes, associated with features of which that softness and that sweetness, so characteristic of American girls, were the predominant expressions, the whole being set off by a complexion indicative of glowing health, and forming-figure, movements, and all taken together—an assemblage of beauties, far surpassing any that I had ever seen but once in my life. That once was, too, two years agone; and, in such a case and at such an age, two years, two whole years, is a long, long while! It was a space as long as the eleventh part of my then life! Here was the present against the absent; here was the power of the eyes pitted against that of the memory; here were all the senses up in arms to subdue the influence of the thoughts; here was vanity, here was passion, here was the spot of all spots |