and, shouting, "No Peel!" "Down
with the raw lobsters!" (the new police); "This way, my lads; we'll give
it them!" At the back of the menageries at Charing Cross the police
rushed upon them, and after a skirmish put them to flight. At seven
o'clock the vast crowd by Temple Bar compelled every coachman and
passenger in a coach, as a passport, to pull off his hat and shout
"Huzza!" Stones were thrown, and attempts were made to close the gates
of the Bar. The City marshals, however, compelled them to be re-opened,
and opposed the passage of the mob to the Strand, but the pass was soon
forced. The rioters in Pickett Place pelted the police with stones and
pieces of wood, broken from the scaffolding of the Law Institute, then
building in Chancery Lane. Another mob of about 500 persons ran up
Piccadilly to Apsley House and hissed and hooted the stubborn,
unprogressive old Duke, Mr. Peel, and the police; the constables,
however, soon dispersed them. The same evening dangerous mobs collected
in Bethnal Green, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel, one party of them
displaying tricoloured flags. They broke a lamp and a window or two,
but did little else. Alas for poor Sir Claudius and his profound
computations! His 2,284 fighting loyal men dwindled down to 600,
including even those strange hybrids, the firemen-watermen; and as for
the gallant Lumber Troop, they were nowhere visible to the naked eye.

To Bolt Court that scourge of King George III., William Cobbett, came
from Fleet Street to sell his Indian corn, for which no one cared, and
to print and publish his twopenny _Political Register_, for which the
London Radicals of that day hungered. Nearly opposite the office of
"this good hater," says Mr. Timbs, Wright (late Kearsley) kept shop, and
published a searching criticism on Cobbett's excellent English Grammar
as soon as it appeared. We only wonder that Cobbett did not reply to him
as Johnson did to a friend after he knocked Osborne (the grubbing
bookseller of Gray's Inn Gate) down with a blow--"Sir, he was
impertinent, and I beat him."

A short biographical sketch of Cobbett will not be inappropriate here.
This sturdy Englishman, born in the year 1762, was the son of an honest
and industrious yeoman, who kept an inn called the "Jolly Farmer," at
Farnham, in Surrey. "My first occupation," says Cobbett, "was driving
the small birds from the turnip seed and the rooks from the peas. When I
first trudged a-field with my wooden bottle