“In the printed account of my life, there is a small chasm. When I published that account I was in the midst of the revilers of England, and particularly of the English army; or, I should have then stated, that the primary cause of my leaving the army, that the circumstance which first disgusted me, and that finally made me resolve to tear myself from a service, to which my whole mind and heart were devoted, was, the abuses, the _shocking_ abuses as to money-matters, the _peculation_, in short, which I had witnessed in it, and which I had, in vain, endeavoured to correct. What those abuses were, by whom they were committed, and how, after I quitted the army, I failed in obtaining redress, it would not now, after many of the parties are dead, be proper for me to state; but, if the ‘Society of Gentlemen’ have, as it is more than probable they have, access to the records of the War Office, and can obtain leave to publish the correspondence upon the subject, the public will then see that I have all my life, and in all situations, been the enemy of peculation. It is, however, incumbent upon me to state, that I have good reason to believe that my failure upon that occasion was in no way to be ascribed to Mr. Pitt, who, as far as a person in so obscure and perfectly friendless a situation as I then was, could judge, was, as to the matter in question, the friend of fair inquiry and of justice.” We may safely dismiss this matter. Should the reader find it worth his while to rake up this old pamphlet, and compare it with Cobbett’s “full account,” he may find a stray divergence of date or of trifling fact; but nothing more than, as a careless omission, will serve to establish the good faith of the man--a class of evidence which is often as serviceable as a statement clear and unfaltering to the minutest detail. Why the affair went off as it did is obvious to any one who knows the world, and the rules of society, better than Cobbett did: it was a hopeless task, from the very first, to undertake it upon his own responsibility, without professional assistance. A mistake, however, which he seldom corrected through life; and the consequence being that he as seldom succeeded in gaining a cause: he persisted, to the very last, in being his own advocate--and with the proverbial result. Let us turn, then, to another incident of this year. An incident which has given the biographer a good deal of trouble; as it presents an occasion upon which it has seemed difficult to reconcile two statements which, at first sight, seem to vary.