But these were paltry excuses: the mere shuffles of quackery; for what do we know now? Why, that in _hundreds_ of instances, persons Cowpoxed by JENNER HIMSELF, have taken the real Smallpox afterwards, and have either died from the disorder or narrowly escaped with their lives! I will mention two instances. The first is Sir Richard Phillips, whose son, several years after Jenner had given him the insuring matter, had a very hard struggle for life, under the hands of the old-fashioned, seam-giving, and dimple-dipping Smallpox. The second is Philip Codd, Esq., of Rumstead Court, near Maidstone, whose son had a very narrow escape under the real Smallpox, and who also had been Cowpoxed _by Jenner himself_. Mr. Codd I have known, and have most sincerely respected, from the time of our both being eighteen years of age. When the young gentleman, his son, was very young, I, having him on my knee one day, asked his kind and excellent mother whether he had been _inoculated_. “Oh, no!” said she, “we are going to have him _vaccinated_.” Whereupon I, going into the garden to the father, said, “I do hope, Codd, that you are not going to have that beastly cow-stuff put into that fine boy.” “Why,” said he, “you see, Cobbett, it is to be done by _Jenner himself_.” What answer I gave, what names and epithets I bestowed upon Jenner and his quackery, I will leave the reader to imagine. Now, here are instances enough; but every reader has heard of, if not seen, scores of others. Young Mr. Codd caught Smallpox at a school; and if I recollect rightly, there were several other vaccinated youths who did the same at the same time. Quackery, however, has always a shuffle left. Now that Cowpox has been proved to be no guarantee against Smallpox, it makes it _milder_ when it comes! A pretty shuffle, indeed, this! You are to be all your life in fear of it, having as your sole consolation, that when it comes (and it may overtake you in a camp or on the seas) it will be milder! It was not too mild to kill at Ringwood, and its mildness, in the case of young Mr. Codd, did not restrain it from blinding him for a suitable number of days. I shall not easily forget the alarm and anxiety of Mr. and Mrs. Codd on this occasion--both of them the best of parents, and both of them punished for having yielded to fashionable quackery. I will not say _justly_ punished; for affection for their children, in which respect they were never surpassed by any parents on earth, was the cause of their listening to the danger-obviating quackery. This, too, is the case with other parents; but parents should be under the influence of _reason_ and _experience_, as well as under that of affection; and _now_, at any rate, they ought to set this really dangerous quackery at naught.