and enrich the imagination, and to quicken whatever is dormant in the sensibility to beauty: or, to express myself still more plainly, the value of the incidents seems to me to arise chiefly from their tendency to entice the young reader into that fairy-land of poetry, where the scenes of romance are laid.- -Nor is it to the young alone that I would confine these observations exclusively. Instances have frequently occurred of individuals, in whom the Power of Imagination has, at a more advanced period of life, been found susceptible of culture to a wonderful degree. In such men, what an accession is gained to their most refined pleasures! What enchantments are added to their most ordinary perceptions! The mind awakening, as if from a trance, to a new existence, becomes habituated to the most interesting aspects of life and of nature; the intellectual eye is 'purged of its film;' and things the most familiar and unnoticed, disclose charms invisible before. objects and events which were lately beheld with indifference, occupy now all the powers and capacities of the soul; the contrast between the present and the past serving only to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. . . .

The same

And here, may I be allowed to recommend, in a more particular manner, the pleasures of imagination to such of my readers, as have hitherto been wholly engrossed with the study of the severer sciences, or who have been hurried, at too early a period, into active and busy life? Abstracting from the tendency which a relish for these pleasures obviously has to adorn the more solid acquisitions of the one class, and to ennoble, with liberality and light, the habits of the other, they may both be assured, that it will open to them sources of enjoyment hitherto inexperienced, and communicate the exercise of powers of which they are yet unconscious. It was said, with truth, by Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, that

he who was ignorant of the arithmetical art was but half a man;-un homme à demi. With how much greater force may a similar expression be applied to him, who carries to his grave, the neglected and unprofitable seeds of faculties, which it depended on himself to have reared to maturity, and of which the fruits bring accessions to human happiness, more precious than all the gratifications which power or wealth can command! I speak not of the laborious orders of society, to whom this class of pleasures must, from their condition, be, in a great measure, necessarily denied; but of men destined for the higher and more independent walks of life, who are too often led, by an ignorance of their own possible attainments, to exhaust all their toil on one little field of study, while they leave, in a state of nature, by far the most valuable portion of the intellectual inheritance to which they were born.-Essay on the Culture of certain Intellectual Habits.

XLIX.

WILLIAM COBBETT.

1762-1835.

WILLIAM COBBETT was born in 1762, near Farnham in Surrey. The remotest ancestor he had ever heard of was his grandfather -a day labourer, who had worked with the same farmer from his marriage to his death. His father, by economy, ability, and thrift, raised himself from the position of a labourer to that of a farmer. Cobbett's childhood was passed in the fields-scaring birds, weeding crops, leading a horse, harvesting, and finally driving the team and holding the plough, were his occupations. At eleven years of age, as told in one of the extracts given, he made his first flight into the world in search of adventures-at sixteen he determined to go to sea, but could get no captain to take him— at seventeen he finally started for the great city of London, where he supported himself for a time as a copying clerk. When about twenty-two, he enlisted as a private soldier, and rose by merit to the rank of Sergeant-Major. On returning

to England with his regiment in 1791, after a four years' stay in America, he obtained his discharge, having served eight years, during seven of which he was a non-commissioned officer. Early in 1792 he married and went to France, but in a few months, at the outbreak of the Revolution, he embarked at Havre for America, where he resided for eight years. He there commenced his career as an author and editor, and also underwent his first prosecution for the violence of his attacks on the personal and political characters of public men. He returned to England in 1800, and started first the Porcupine and then the Weekly Register, which was continued till his death, at first as a

In

high Tory publication, and later, after Cobbett's own change of political views, as an ultra-Radical journal. He was twice prosecuted and fined for libel on different members of the Government, and in 1809 fined and imprisoned in Newgate for two years. His mode of life while there is described in one of the extracts. 1817, to avoid a fourth prosecution under the 'Six Acts Bill,' he fled to America, where he remained for two years, till the repeal of the Act which had driven him into exile. A final prosecution in 1830 failed, the jury being unable to agree upon a verdict, and Cobbett gained reputation by the trial, which may be said to have closed the contest waged by the Government with the Press since 1809. He twice vainly endeavoured to enter Parliament, and finally, in 1832, after the passing of the Reform Bill, was elected Member for Oldham. He died in 1835.

Besides his voluminous political works and his writings as a journalist, Cobbett published numerous popular Treatises, among which are his Cottage Economy, his English Grammar, and his History of the Protestant Reformation. His Rural Rides abounds with descriptive passages of great beauty. As a political writer, he was celebrated for the vividness of his expression, the raciness of his diction, the vehemence of his language, and a certain rough vigour of style. It would be difficult to put together more pithy sentences, or more picturesque abuse, than is to be found in many of his attacks—which were also singularly effective from their humour and their personality when directed against his own enemies. Cobbett's instincts were all for bustle and strife, and his life was full of it. The predominant idea that ran through his career was a hatred for tyranny. In spite of all his changes of opinion, he was always to be found fighting on the side of the minority. He was heartily devoted to the interests of his country, and desired beyond all things to see her great and prosperous, and her people healthy, brave and free. The immense number of all his publications sold immediately on their appearance proves the popularity of his style. Cobbett himself said that 'his popularity was owing to his giving truth in clear language,' and his writings have always the merit of rendering his meaning with perfect precision.

1. The Institution of Property.

THUS, then, we see that labour must have been the foundation of all property. Mr. Tull, who was a very learned lawyer, as well as the greatest writer on agriculture that ever lived, claimed an exclusive right to the produce of his book, because he had written it,—because it was something proceeding from the labour of his own mind; and thereupon he says, 'There is no property of any description, if it be rightfully held, which had not its foundation in labour.' And it must have been thus, because men never could have been so foolish, so lost to all sense of self-preservation, as to suffer a few persons, comparatively, to take possession of the whole earth, which God had given to all of them for a common possession, unless these comparatively few persons had first performed, or their progenitors had performed, some labour upon these several spots of earth, the like of which labour, or a part of which labour, had not been performed by men in general.

When the earth came to be more peopled than it had been for a long time, the common benefit of all demanded that some agreement should be entered into, which would secure to the possessors of particular parcels of land the exclusive possession and enjoyment of them and of their fruits, and that there should be laws to protect them in that enjoyment. When this state of things came, it was called civil society; and laws, made by the common assent of any community of men, came to supply the place of the law of nature. These laws of civil society restrained individuals from following, in certain cases, the dictates of their own will; they protected the industrious against the depredations of the lazy; they protected the weak against the violence of