It was six years before another opportunity occurred of meeting a popular constituency, with any prospect of success. But the question was kept alive, of a seat in Parliament. Reformers were sanguine that the franchise was on the eve of being broadened; and the yeomanry were beginning to join them,--a circumstance which brought into being a more influential class of adherents to Mr. Cobbett and his views. One of the more zealous and active of these new friends was Sir Thomas Beevor, a young baronet of Norfolk. He had read the _Register_ for the first time, during the American exile; and his admiration for the courageous writer so grew upon him, that he at last publicly declared himself a Cobbettite and raised a reform camp in his own county. A proposal was at length made,[2] to hold a meeting in London in support of Cobbett’s claims to a seat in Parliament; but it was relinquished, for the present, upon Cobbett’s suggestion that they might properly wait until there was a certain prospect of a dissolution. Meanwhile, all the matters upon which the moderate reformers had set their hearts were canvassed in the _Political Register_ from time to time: the Game laws and iniquities, Catholic emancipation, the freedom of public speech, the continued distress of the Agricultural interest; along with minor topics, from the hypocrisies in Parliament, to the extortions of the toll-farmers. Much of Mr. Cobbett’s influence had been imperilled by his last American trip, and some of its consequences. But his espousal of the cause of Queen Caroline appears to have completely restored him to his place in the popular mind; and, from that period onward, not all the base slanders which were still showered upon him, nor even his own extravagant vehemence, could rob him of his power. In the beginning of the year 1826, a renewed effort was made, led by Sir Thomas Beevor, to bring Mr. Cobbett before some constituency. A meeting was held in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, of a very enthusiastic character; and, in a few weeks, several hundred pounds were subscribed. Cobbett, on his part, was determined to make a good fight this time; and he announced that, if elected at all, he must be chosen by persons who chose him for the good of the country, and not for their own profit: that if returned at all, it must be by no corrupt or infamous means; and must be for a place “where some considerable number of the people have something to say in the matter.”