Such was the offending pamphlet: on the 3rd of June, 1809, a notice appears in the “Political Register,” of its publication, evidently under the sanction of Government; also, that Mr. Cobbett will take the earliest opportunity of giving a full account of the matter. He repudiates positively every insinuation of having acted, at any time of his life, dishonestly or dishonourably; at the same time, had the whole of the papers connected with this affair been published without misrepresentation he never would have noticed the thing at all, but have left the documents to speak for themselves. A fortnight later a double number of the “Register” contains the full account, with a great deal more in the shape of commentary, touching the topics of the day;--it occupies the fifth of a series of Letters to the people of Hampshire, which Cobbett was then writing, on the subject of Parliamentary Reform. And it is necessary, in order to do justice to the whole story, to reproduce a great portion of it here. After repeating the tale of his honourable discharge from the army, he proceeds to say:-- “The object of my thus quitting the army, to which I was, perhaps, more attached than any man that ever lived in the world, was to bring certain officers to justice for having, in various ways, wronged both the public and the soldier. With this object in view, I went straight to London the moment I had obtained my liberty and secured my _personal safety_, which, as you will readily conceive, would not have been the case if I had not first got my discharge.… This project was conceived so early as the year 1787, when an affair happened that first gave an insight into regimental justice. It was shortly this: that the quarter-master, who had the issuing of the men’s provisions to them, _kept about a fourth part of it to himself_. This, the old sergeants told me, had been the case for _many years_; and they were quite astonished and terrified at the idea of my complaining of it. This I did, however; but the reception I met with convinced me that I must never make another complaint, till I got safe to England, and safe out of the reach of that most curious of courts, a COURT-MARTIAL. From this time forward I began to collect materials for an exposure, upon my return to England. I had ample opportunities for this, being the keeper of all the books, of every sort, in the regiment, and knowing the whole of its affairs better than any other man. But the winter previous to our return to England, I thought it necessary to make extracts from books, lest the books themselves should be destroyed. And here begins the history of the famous court-martial. In order to be able to _prove_ that these extracts were correct, it was necessary that I should have a _witness_ as to their being _true copies_. This was a very ticklish point. One foolish step here would have