No sooner, however, was his discharge accomplished, than he set himself to work to expose and bring to justice several of the officers of his regiment, who had systematically mulcted the soldiers in their companies of their wretched pay. His thorough knowledge of the regimental accounts made him a formidable accuser; and, after looking into the matter, the then Judge-Advocate-General agreed to prosecute, and a court-martial was summoned at Woolwich for the purpose in 1792. But Cobbett did not appear. He found that it would be necessary to call his clerks, still serving in the regiment, and the consequences to them in those days were likely to be so serious, that he preferred to abandon his attempt. Accordingly, he did not appear, and the fact was bitterly used against him in later days by his political opponents. The whole story is worth reading, and is very fairly given by Mr. Smith. He had now made a happy marriage with the girl to whom he had entrusted all his savings years before, and started with her to Paris; but, hearing on the way of the king’s dethronement, and the Bastile riots, he turned aside and embarked for America. He arrived in Philadelphia in October 1792, enthusiastic for the land of liberty, and an ardent student of Paine’s works, and set to work to gain his living by teaching English to the French emigrants there, and by such literary work as he could get. In both he was very successful, but soon found himself in fierce antagonism with the American press, and, after publishing several pamphlets, “A Kick for a Bite,” “A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats,” &c., established his first famous periodical, “Peter Porcupine,” which soon gained him the reputation in England as well as America of a staunch and able loyalist, and severe critic of Republican institutions. The only serious mistake in his American career was his attack on Dr. Priestly, then also an emigrant in Philadelphia. The States had become an undesirable place of residence for him before 1798, when an intimation reached him through the British Embassy that the English Government were sensible of the obligations they owed him, and were prepared to advance his interests. These overtures he steadily refused; but, finding a Royalist’s life was becoming too hot, and having been beaten in a libel suit, which nearly ruined him (though his expenses were nominally defrayed by the subscriptions of his American admirers), he closed the brilliant career of “Peter Porcupine’s Gazette,” and returned to England, having at last, to use his own phrase, “got the better of all diffidence in my own capacity.”