Another noisy reformer, if he be not better described as a pig-headed lover of the past, who was Tory and Radical by turns, had a glimpse of Kew, about or soon after the time that Horne Tooke left Brentford. In the farther corner of Surrey there was then living a sturdy little peasant who, with a smattering of the three R’s, went to work in the fine gardens of Waverley Abbey, then got another job of clipping and weeding at the Bishop’s Palace of Farnham. He could hardly have entered his teens, though the date is not made clear in his story, when a gardener came that way who had just left the King’s Gardens at Kew, and gave such a glowing account of them that nothing would serve the boy but setting off to seek a place there. This was not a lad to let the grass grow under his feet, when he had a purpose in mind; and he at once left an episcopal service in hand for a royal one in the bush. It was William Cobbett, who now made his first acquaintance with the writings of an old sojourner in his own country nook, the sullen dependent of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Jonathan Swift, whose downright diction this boy lived to copy through his long series of _Political Registers_. The next morning, without saying a word to anyone, off I set; with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on, 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 one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other left three pence 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. I had the three pence, 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 I had ever read before: it was something so _new_ to my mind, that, though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a sort of 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,