At this stage of the proceedings, just as the dinner was done, one of the two friends by whom he was accompanied gave Cobbett’s health. This, naïvely adds the arch-agitator, ‘was of course followed by a _speech_; and, as the reader will readily suppose, to have an opportunity of making a speech was the main motive for my going to dine at _an inn_, at any hour, and especially at _seven o’clock_ at night.’ That, at any rate, is frank enough. After he had been thus holding forth on ruin, past, present, and to come, for half an hour or so, it seems to have occurred to the landlord that the company upstairs were drinking very little for so large a concourse, and he accordingly forced his way through the crowd, up the staircase, and along the passage into the dining-room. Cobbett had already cast an unfavourable eye upon that licensed victualler, and describes him as ‘one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who wore a round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a dirty white apron tied round his middle, and with no coat on; having a look the _eagerest_ and the _sharpest_ that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole lifetime; having an air of authority and of mastership, which, to a stranger, as I was, seemed quite incompatible with the meanness of his dress and the vulgarity of his manners: and there being, visible to every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty even contest between the servility of avarice and the insolence of wealth.’ The person who called forth this severe description having forced his way into the room, some one called out that he was causing an interruption, to which he replied that that was, in fact, what he had come to do, because all this speechifying injured the sale of his liquor! Can it be doubted that this roused all the lion in Cobbett’s breast? He first of all tells us that ‘the disgust and abhorrence which such conduct could not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to quit the room and the house, and even a proposition to that effect. But, after a minute or so, to reflect, the company resolved not to quit the room, but to turn him out of it who had caused the interruption; and the old fellow, finding himself _tackled_, saved the labour of shoving, or kicking, him out of the room, by retreating out of the doorway, with all the activity of which he was master.’ [Sidenote: _WEYHILL FAIR_]