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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.