"By what we have said above, and much more that we could add of the happiness of these people and of their peculiar attachment to each other, we may account for what has been matter of much surprise to the friends of our hero, viz., his strong attachment, for the space of about forty years, to this community, and his refusing the large offers that have been made to quit their society." Carew himself met with nothing but success in his various impersonations of Tom o' Bedlam, a rat-catcher, a non-juring clergyman, a shipwrecked Quaker, and an aged woman with three orphan grandchildren. He was elected King of the Beggars, and lost the dignity only by deliberate abdication. "The restraints of a town not suiting him after the free rambling life he had led, he took a house in the country, and having acquired some property on the decease of a relation, he was in a position to purchase a residence more suited to his taste, and lived for some years a quiet life 'respected best by those who knew him best.'" A very different literary hero of Borrow's was William Cobbett, in spite of his radical opinions. Cobbett was a man who wrote, as it were, with his fist, not the tips of his fingers. When I begin to read him I think at once of a small country town where men talk loudly to one another at a distance or as they walk along in opposite directions, and the voices ring as their heels do on the cobbles. He is not a man of arguments, but of convictions. He is so full of convictions that, though not an indolent man, he has no time for arguments. "On this stiff ground," he says in North Wiltshire, "they grow a good many beans and give them to the pigs with whey; which makes excellent pork for the _Londoners_; but which must meet with a pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire." When he was being shouted down at Lewes in 1822, and someone moved that he should be put out of the room, he says: "I rose that they might see the man that they had to put out." The hand that holds the bridle holds the pen. The night after he has been hare-hunting--Friday, November the sixteenth, 1821, at Old Hall, in Herefordshire--he writes down this note of it: