in the world, and here were also the life, and the manners, and the habits, and the pursuits that I delighted in; here was everything that imagination can conceive-united in a conspiracy against the poor little brunette in England! What, then, did I fall in love at once with this bouquet of lilies and roses? Oh! by no means. I was, however, so enchanted with the place; I so much enjoyed its tranquillity, the shade of the maple trees, the business of the farm, the sports of the water and of the woods, that I stayed at it to the last possible minute, promising, at my departure, to come again as often as I possibly could-a promise which I most punctually fulfilled.

"Winter is the great season for jaunting and dancing (called frolicking) in America. In this province, the river and the creeks were the only roads from settlement to settlement. In summer we travelled in canoes; in winter in sleighs on the ice or snow. During more than two years, I spent all the time I could with my Yankee friends: they were all fond of me: I talked to them about country affairs, my evident delight in which they took as a compliment to themselves: the father and mother treated me as one of their children, the sons as a brother, and the daughter, who was as modest and as full of sensibility as she was beautiful, in a way to which a chap much less sanguine than I was, would have given the tenderest interpretation; which treatment I, especially in the last-mentioned case, most cordially repaid.

"Yet I was not a deceiver; for my affection for her was very great: I spent no really pleasant hours but with her: I was uneasy if she showed the slightest regard for any other young man: I was unhappy if the smallest matter affected her health or spirits: I quitted her in dejection, and returned to her with eager delight: many a time, when I could get leave but for a day, I paddled in a canoe two whole succeeding nights, in order to pass that day with her. If this was not love, it was first cousin to it; for, as to any criminal intention, I no more thought of it, in her case, than if she had been my sister. Many times I put to myself the questions: What am I at? Is not this wrong? Why do I go?' But still I went.

"The last parting came; and now came my just punishment! The time was known to everybody, and was irrevocably fixed; for I had to move with a regiment, and the embarkation of a regiment is an epoch in a thinly-settled province. To describe this parting would be too painful even at this distant day, and with this frost of age upon my head. The kind and virtuous father came forty miles to see me just as I was going on board in the river. His looks and words I have never forgotten. As the vessel descended, she passed the mouth of that creek which I had so often entered with delight; and, though England, and all that England con

tained, were before me, I lost sight of this creek with an aching heart.

"On what trifles turn the great events in the life of man! If I had received a cool letter from my intended wife; if I had only heard a rumour of anything from which fickleness in her might have been inferred; if I had found in her any, even the smallest, abatement of affection; if she had but let go any one of the hundred strings by which she held my heart; if any one of these, never would the world have heard of me. Young as I was; able as I was as a soldier; proud as I was of the admiration and commendations of which I was the object; fond as I was, too, of the command, which, at so early an age, my rare conduct and great natural talents had given me; sanguine as was my mind, and brilliant as were my prospects; yet I had seen so much of the meannesses, the unjust partialities, the insolent pomposity, the disgusting dissipations of that way of life, that I was weary of it: I longed exchanging my fine laced coat for the Yankee farmer's home-spun, to be where I should never behold the supple crouch of servility, and never hear the hectoring voice of authority again; and, on the lonely banks of this branch-covered creek, which contained (she out of the question) everything congenial to my taste and dear to my heart, I, unapplauded, unfeared, unenvied, and uncalumniated, should have lived and died.”

The fair cause of this "serious sin," the little brunette in England, had first been seen some years before in America, and after this charming manner: "When I first saw my wife, she was thirteen years old, and I was within about a month of twenty-one. She was the daughter of a sergeant of artillery, and I was the sergeantmajor 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 with me, 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 afterwards; and he, who keeps an inn in York

shire, came over to Preston, at the time of the election, to verify whether I were 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.

"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 a hundred miles up the river of St John; and, which was worse, the artillery were expected to go off to England 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 a 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.

"As the malignity of the devil would have it, we were kept abroad two years longer than our time, Mr Pitt (England not being so tame then 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 servant of all work (and hard work it was), at five pounds a year, in the house of a Captain Brisac; and, without hardly saying a word about the matter, she put into my hands the whole of my 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?"

After his marriage, Cobbett lived with his wife for some time in France, studying the language; and then they went to Philadelphia, where he began to teach English to Frenchmen; and, as his first work, composed his French and English grammar. He remained between Philadelphia and New York for about eight years, and, during most of this time, had a printing establishment and a book store.

In the "Advice to Young Men" he pictures his domestic character and habits at this period in the most engaging manner; and, we daresay, not too much en beau, for all is so simply right and so perfectly natural. But this, as has been remarked, is the sanctified life of the fireside"the porcupine with his quills sheathed." He says:

"I began my young marriage days in and near Philadelphia. At one of those times to which I have just alluded, in the middle of the burning hot month of July, I was greatly afraid of fatal consequences to my wife for want of sleep, she not having, after the great danger was over, had any sleep for more than forty-eight hours. All great cities in hot countries are, I believe, full of dogs; and they in the very hot weather keep up during the night a horrible barking and fighting and howling. Upon the particular occasion to which I am adverting they made a noise so terrible and so unremitted that it was next to impossible that even a person in full health and free from pain should obtain a minute's sleep. I was, about nine in the evening, sitting by the bed. 'I do think,' said she, that I could go to sleep now, if it were not for the dogs.' Downstairs I went, and out I sallied in my shirt and trousers, and without shoes and stockings; and going to a heap of stones lying beside the road, set to work upon the dogs, going backward and forward and keeping them at two or three hundred yards' distance from the house. I walked thus the whole night, barefooted, lest the noise of my shoes might possibly reach her ears; and I remember that the bricks of the causeway were, even in the night, so hot as to be disagreeable to my feet. My exertions produced the desired effect, a sleep of several hours was the consequence, and at eight o'clock in the morning off went I to a day's business, which was to end at six in the evening.

"Women are all patriots of the soil, and when her neighbours used to ask my wife whether all English husbands were like hers, she boldly answered in the affirmative. I had business to occupy the whole of my time, Sundays and week-days, except sleeping hours; but I used to make time to assist her in the taking care of her baby, and in all sorts of things-get up, light her fire, boil her tea-kettle, carry her up warm water in cold weather, take the child while she dressed herself and got the breakfast ready, then breakfast, get her in water and wood for the day, then dress myself neatly and sally forth to

A leading event in Cobbett's life was the severe fine and long imprisonment to which he was subjected, for daring to give way to the impulse which led him to denounce in warm, but only fitting terms, the flogging of Englishmen under the bayonets and sabres of Hanoverians. He was at this time living in the bosom of his family on his farm of Botley, in the midst of domestic enjoyment of no ordinary kind, and leading no inglorious or useless life. His long imprisonment, and the ruin of his affairs, left deep traces in a quick and resentful, but certainly not an ungenerous mind.

Cobbett never pretended to forgive his persecutors. He denied that this was a Christian duty; but, as his glowing resentment was surely not without cause, it is not without excuse. After a picture of domestic life, which must charm everybody, and which is well worth the attentive study of every man and woman who has a family to train, he winds up:

"In this happy state we lived, until the year 1810, when the Government laid its merciless fangs upon me, dragged me from these delights, and crammed me into a jail amongst felons; of which I shall have to speak more fully, when, in the last number, I come to speak of the duties of the citizen. This added to the difficulties of my task of teaching; for now I was snatched away from the only scene in which it could, as I thought, properly be executed. But even these difficulties were got over. The blow was, to be sure, a terrible one; and, O God! how was it felt by these poor children? It was in -the month of July when the horrible sentence was passed upon me. My wife, having left her children in the care of her good and affectionate sister, was in London, waiting to know the doom of her husband. When the news arrived at Botley, the three boys-one eleven, another nine, and the other seven years old-were hoeing cabbages in that garden which had been the source of so much delight. When the account of the savage sentence was brought to them, the youngest could not, for some time, be made to understand what a jail was; and, when he did, he, all in a tremor, exclaimed, 'Now, I'm sure, William, that papa is not in a place like that!' The other, in order to disguise his tears and smother his sobs, fell to work with the hoe, and chopped about like a blind person. This account, when it reached me, affected me more, filled me with deeper resentment, than any other circumstance. And, oh! how I despise the wretches who talk of my vindictiveness-of my exultation at the confusion of those who inflicted those sufferings! How I despise the base creatures, the crawling slaves, the callous and cowardly hypocrites, who affect to be 'shocked' (tender souls !) at my expressions of joy at the death of Gibbs, Ellenborough, Percival, Liverpool, Canning, and the rest of the tribe that I have already seen out, and at the

fatal workings of that system, for endeavouring to check which I was thus punished!"

When the spy system had produced the horrors of 1817 and the Six Acts, Cobbett, who was still under heavy recognisances, thought it prudent for himself and his sureties to withdraw for a time to America. He imagined, not without cause, that one of the Six Acts was directly aimed at him; and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act made his situation very perilous. Cobbett therefore made the best of his way to Liverpool, with his large young family; and from thence, upon the 26th March 1817, he addressed the public in these terms:

"My departure for America will surprise nobody but those who do not reflect. A full and explicit statement of my reasons will appear in a few days, probably the 5th of April. In the meanwhile, I think it necessary for me to make known, that I have fully empowered a person of respectability to manage and settle all my affairs in England. I owe my countrymen sincere regard, which I shall always entertain for them in a higher degree than towards any other people upon earth. I carry nothing from my country but my wife and my children, and surely they are my own, at any rate. I shall always love England better than any other country-I will never become a subject or citizen of any other state; but I and mine were not born under a Government having the absolute power to imprison us at its pleasure; and, if we can avoid it, we will never live nor die under such an order of things. When this order of things shall cease, then shall I again see England."

By the disposal of his property at Botley, upon which he must have expended a great deal, and other transactions at this time, added to his ruinous imprisonment, law expenses, and that heavy fine of a thousand pounds, his pecuniary affairs suffered serious derangement, from which they probably never recovered.

In America he took a farm, or, at least, a house in the country with some land, resumed his indefatigable habits, and opened a seed-store in New York. The Registers came regularly across the Atlantic, and were eagerly expected. Another of Cobbett's books, the "Year's Residence in America," now appeared in parts.

Cobbett returned to England as soon as the Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill had expired; and, settling at Kensington, recommenced his labours as a journalist. These were, indeed, never suspended, save while he was at sea.

In the autumn of 1822, he began his "Rural Rides," which he continued for five different seasons, and in which he indulged his natural love for rural objects, and everything connected with country life. He seems to have had a true and lively feeling for the beautiful in nature, and the pure and simple taste which is ever the attendant of this kind of sensibility. He always travelled on horseback, accompanied by one or