'I was trudging through Richmond,' he writes, 'in my blue smock-frock, and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eyes fell upon a little book in a bookseller's window, on the outside of which was written, "_Tale of a Tub_, price threepence." The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited.... 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 of supper or bed.' Cobbett adds, that having read till he could see no longer, he put the volume in his pocket, and 'tumbled down' by the side of a haystack, 'where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awakened me in the morning; when off I started to Kew, reading my little book.' One of the greatest masters of prose in the language has also recorded the impression made upon him by this wonderful book. At the age of eighty-three Landor wrote: 'I am reading once more the work I have read oftener than any other prose work in our language.... What a writer! Not the most imaginative or the most simple, not Bacon or Goldsmith had the power of saying more forcibly or completely whatever he meant to say.' 'Simplicity,' said Swift, 'is the best and truest ornament of most things in human life;' and Landor, commenting on Swift's style, observes that 'he never attempted to round his sentences by redundant words, aware that from the simplest and the fewest arise the secret springs of genuine harmony.'