The married life of Fichte was very happy. His wife proved a true and highminded helpmate. During the War of Liberation she was assiduous in her attention to the wounded in the hospitals, where she caught a malignant fever, which nearly carried her off. Fichte himself caught the same disease, and was for a time completely prostrated; but he lived for a few more years and died at the early age of fifty-two, consumed by his own fire. What a contrast does the courtship and married life of the blunt and practical William Cobbett present to the aesthetical and sentimental love of these highly refined Germans! Not less honest, not less true, but, as some would think, comparatively coarse and vulgar. When he first set eyes upon the girl that was afterwards to become his wife, she was only thirteen years old, and he was twenty-one--a sergeant-major in a foot regiment stationed at St. John's in New Brunswick. He was passing the door of her father's house one day in winter, and saw the girl out in the snow, scrubbing a washing-tub. He said at once to himself, "That's the girl for me." He made her acquaintance, and resolved that she should be his wife so soon as he could get discharged from the army. On the eve of the girl's return to Woolwich with her father, who was a sergeant-major in the artillery, Cobbett sent her a hundred and fifty guineas which he had saved, in order that she might be able to live without hard work until his return to England. The girl departed, taking with her the money; and five years later Cobbett obtained his discharge. On reaching London, he made haste to call upon the sergeant-major's daughter. "I found," he says, "my little girl a servant-of-all-work [20and 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." Admiration of her conduct was now added to love of her person, and Cobbett shortly after married the girl, who proved an excellent wife. He was, indeed, never tired of speaking her praises, and it was his pride to attribute to her all the comfort and much of the success of his after-life.