So highly delighted were the magistrates with the results of this experiment, that they incorporated the industrial laws with the older statutes of Newgate, conferred upon the ladies' committee certain discretionary powers, and undertook to assist in the support of the matron.

For a year the committee continued their benevolent exertions, and established to a demonstration the enlightened and practical character of their plans. Newgate ceased to be the rendezvous of the vicious, the national tap-room provided for the use of brigands, the school of thieves and bravoes, and the resort of fortune-tellers.

WILLIAM COBBETT; THE CHAMPION OF THE PRESS.

IN the spring of the year 1762, in a small cottage in the town of Farnham, Surrey, was born William Cobbett, one of the most remarkable self-taught men of whom England can boast. His father was a farmer: though he had received no very brilliant education, he was learned for a man in his rank of life. When a little boy, he drove the plough for twopence a day; and these, his earnings, were appropriated to the expenses of an evening school... He understood land-surveying well, and was often chosen to draw the plans of disputed territory; in short, he had the reputation of possessing experience and understanding, which never fails in England to give a man in a country place some little weight with his neighbours. He was honest, industrious, and frugal; it was not, therefore, wonderful that he should be situated in a good farm, and happy in a wife of his own rank, like him beloved and respected.

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"A father like ours," says William, "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. 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 boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. Honest pride, and happy days!... I have some faint recollection of going to school

to an old woman, who, I believe, did not succeed in teaching me my letters. In the winter evenings my father taught us all to read and write, and gave us a pretty tolerable knowledge of arithmetic; grammar he did not perfectly understand himself, and therefore his endeavors to teach 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.

"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 the bosom of my little blue smockfrock 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.

"At eleven years of age, my employment was clipping boxedgings 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 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 half-pence 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 half-penny 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. 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

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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 a lodging, and set me to work."

Cobbett subsequently spent some time in a lawyer's office, but so great a distaste had he for the drudgery of his occupation, that he quitted it, and enlisted in the army. The colonel of the regiment showed him great kindness, and gave him supernumerary duties in the way of keeping accounts. Mr. Cobbett continues :

"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 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 unremitting 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 ascribe 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."

His steadiness and regularity soon led to promotion. In a very short time he was made corporal - no great advance it may be thought; but to him, at that stage of his progress, a most notable event, seeing that it raised his small income " a clear twopence per diem." A few months after his enlist

ment, the detachment to which he belonged sailed from Gravesend for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he joined his regiment, and from which he proceeded with it to St. John's and New Brunswick shortly afterwards... By the end of his third year in the army, he was promoted to the rank of sergeantmajor, over the heads of thirty sergeants; and this promotion appears to have been mainly owing to the excellent character he had acquired for early rising, and extraordinary attention to the duties of his profession.

At the end of four years he came home, got his discharge, and married an excellent woman. After spending six months in France, he once more turned his thoughts to America. He landed at New York in the month of October without any very clear notion as to how he was to earn his living.

Cobbett was not the man to despond however. With the knowledge of French which he had acquired, and his mastery of English grammar, he deemed himself sufficiently qualified to offer his services to Frenchmen as a teacher of English, and accordingly he took up his abode in Philadelphia with the intention of earning his bread by that means. "And never in my whole life," says he, "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 then. ... I had a great deal of business to attend to, that took me a great part of the day from home; but whenever I could spare a minute from business, the child was in my arms. I rendered the mother's labor as light as I could; any bit of food satisfied me... When watching was necessary, we shared it between us; that famous grammar for teaching French people English was written by me, in hours not employed in business, and in great part during my share of the night-watchings over a sick, and then only child, who, after lingering many months, died in my arms. This was the way that we went on this was the way that we began our married life."

It was in the summer of 1794, a year and a half after he landed in the United States, that William Cobbett commenced his career as a political writer, and from that time till his death the pen was seldom out of his hand... He was then in his thirty-third year, had seen a good deal of the world, and had witnessed the volcanic outburst of the French Revolution, which must have made a deep and lasting impression upon such a mind as his. That strong love of order, and firm sense of duty, which he always preserved; his warm attachment to his native land and all its institutions, inspired his pen.

The fame which Cobbett acquired as an anonymous author,

though quite enough for any ordinary man, was not enough to satisfy him. With his indomitable pugnacity and inordinate self-esteem, he could not bear to remain in the background much longer, and therefore he resolved to commence business as a bookseller, and come forward openly as the publisher of his own works: a step to which he was doubtless all the more strongly tempted by the knowledge that his pamphlets sold exceedingly well, and that he had not received so large a share of the profits as he fancied he ought to have.

Soon after he had opened his shop, he commenced a daily newspaper, under the title of "Porcupine's Gazette," in which he carried on the war against French republicanism and American democracy with unrelenting hostility.

Considering the amount of personal feeling with which Cobbett was inspired in almost all his writings, it was natural to expect that he would, sooner or later, come under the lash of the law. He was twice prosecuted for libel during his residence in America, but on only one occasion was he found guilty, and that verdict turned his eyes once more towards his native land.

On the first of June, 1800, Mr. Cobbett sailed from New York for England, after publishing a highly characteristic farewell address to the people of the United States, in the Philadelphia papers... No sooner had he landed in England, than he began to make preparations for the publication of a daily newspaper.

The first number of the Weekly Political Register, with which Cobbett's fame as a writer is so intimately associated, appeared in January 1802, from which time up till 1835, the year of his death, that faithful record of his delightful egotism, his extreme opinionativeness, his matchless invective against all public offenders, and his numberless schemes for putting public affairs in perfect order, was kept up to the last, with unabated vigor, by the marvellous force of his single pen. News and dull official documents were thrust aside to make room for the sparkling, racy, and everwelcome letters from his own pen on all the engrossing topics of the day In his style he has been compared to Swift, to Defoe, and sometimes to Franklin: but, along with much of the circumstantial, graphic, narration-talent of Defoe, the charming simplicity and homely wisdom of Franklin, the idiomatic terseness and humor of Swift, there is an abounding heartiness and a garrulity in most of his writings,