He reached home in 1800, and found himself at once courted and famous. He was entertained by Ministers of State and publishers, but after looking round him in his own sturdy fashion, and finding the condition of the political and literary world by no means to his mind, while that of the great body of the people was becoming worse every day, he resisted all temptations and started on the career which he followed faithfully till his death. In 1802 appeared the first number of “Cobbett’s Political Register,” which (with the break of two months in 1817, when he fled from the new Gagging Act to America) continued to appear weekly till June 1835, and remains a wonderful witness to the strength and the weaknesses of the Sussex ploughboy. During those long years, and all the fierce controversies which marked them, he was grandly faithful, according to his lights, to the cause of the poor:—“I for my part should not be at all surprised,” he wrote in 1806, “if some one were to propose selling the poor, or mortgaging them to the fund-holders. Ah! you may wince; you may cry Jacobin or leveller as long as you please. I wish to see the poor men of England what the poor men of England were when I was born; and from endeavoring to accomplish this wish nothing but the want of means shall make me desist.” And loyally he maintained the fight against sinecures, place-hunting, and corruption of all kinds until his death, full of years, the member for Oldham, and the popular leader of the widest influence among the Liberal party of the first Reform period. For the incidents of the long struggle—how the government press turned savagely on the man whom they had hailed on his return from America as one “whom no corruption can seduce nor any personal danger intimidate from the performance of his duty;” how Attorney-Generals watched him and prosecuted; how he insisted on conducting his own causes, and so spent two years in jail, and was mulcted again and again in heavy damages; how he fought through it all, and tended his farm and fruit-trees, and wrote his “Rural Rides” and “Cottage Economy,” and was a tender and loving man in his own home, and retained the warm regard of such men as Wyndham and Lord Radnor, while he was the best hated and abused man in England—we must refer all (and we hope there are many) who care to know about them to the second volume of Edward Smith’s life of Cobbett. There are few lives that we know of better worth careful study in these times. We have no space here to do more than quote the best estimate of the man’s work which has ever come from one of those classes who for thirty-five years looked on him as their most dangerous enemy:— “I know him well, on every side Walled round with wilful prejudice; A self-taught peasant rough in speech, Self-taught, and confident to teach, In blame not overwise.