It was morning, and not very early morning, when the House divided, and the Attorney-General had not much time to spare for rest before setting off for one of the law courts to conduct a prosecution which the Government had thought it well to institute against a man who held a most prominent position in England at that time, and whose name, it is safe to say, will be remembered as long as good {155} English prose is studied. This man was William Cobbett, and he had just aroused the anger of the Government by a published article in which he vindicated the conduct of those who had set fire to hayricks and destroyed farm buildings in various parts of the country. William Cobbett had begun life as the son of a small farmer, who was himself the son of a day laborer. He had lived a strange and varied life. In his boyish days he had run away from a little farm in Surrey and had flung himself upon the world of London. He had found employment, for a while, in the humblest kind of drudgery as a junior copying clerk in an attorney's office, and then he had enlisted in a regiment of foot. He was quartered for a year at Chatham, and he devoted all his leisure moments to reading, for which he had a passion which lasted him all his lifetime. He is said to have exhausted the whole contents of a lending library in the neighborhood, for he preferred reading anything to reading nothing. He was especially fond of historical and scientific studies, but he had a love for literature of a less severe kind also, and he studied with intense eagerness the works of Swift, on whose style he seems to have moulded his own with much success and without any servile imitation. Then he was quartered with his regiment for some time in New Brunswick, and after various vicissitudes he made his way to Philadelphia. During his stay in New Brunswick he had studied French, and had many opportunities of conversing in it with French-Canadians, and when settled for a time in Philadelphia he occupied himself by teaching English to some refugees from France. Now and again he went backward and forward between America and England, but it was in Philadelphia that he was first known as a writer. Under the signature of Peter Porcupine he published the "Porcupine Papers," which were chiefly made up of sarcastic and vehement attacks upon public men. Cobbett had begun as a sort of Tory, or, at all events, as a professed enemy of all Radical agitators, but he gradually became a Radical agitator himself, and when he finally settled in England he soon began to be recognized as one of the most powerful {156} advocates of the Radical cause in or out of Parliament. He wrote a strong, simple Anglo-Saxon style, and indeed it is not too much to say that, after Swift himself, no man ever wrote clearer English prose than that of William Cobbett. He had tried to get into Parliament twice without success; but at last he succeeded in obtaining a seat as the