and my satchel over my
shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles." In 1783 the
restless lad (a plant grown too high for the pot) ran away to London,
and turned lawyer's clerk. At the end of nine months he enlisted, and
sailed for Nova Scotia. Before long he became sergeant-major, over the
heads of thirty other non-commissioned officers. Frugal and diligent,
the young soldier soon educated himself. Discharged at his own request
in 1791, he married a respectable girl, to whom he had before entrusted
L150 hard-earned savings. Obtaining a trial against four officers of his
late regiment for embezzlement of stores, for some strange reason
Cobbett fled to France on the eve of the trial, but finding the king of
that country dethroned, he started at once for America. At Philadelphia
he boldly began as a high Tory bookseller, and denounced Democracy in
his virulent "Porcupine Papers." Finally, overwhelmed with actions for
libel, Cobbett in 1800 returned to England. Failing with a daily paper
and a bookseller's shop, Cobbett then started his _Weekly Register_,
which for thirty years continued to express the changes of his honest
but impulsive and vindictive mind. Gradually--it is said, owing to some
slight shown him by Pitt (more probably from real conviction)--Cobbett
grew Radical and progressive, and in 1809 was fined L500 for libels on
the Irish Government. In 1817 he was fined L1,000 and imprisoned two
years for violent remarks about some Ely militiamen who had been flogged
under a guard of fixed bayonets. This punishment he never forgave. He
followed up his _Register_ by his _Twopenny Trash_, of which he
eventually sold 100,000 a number. The Six Acts being passed--as he
boasted, to gag him--he fled, in 1817, again to America. The persecuted
man returned to England in 1819, bringing with him, much to the
amusement of the Tory lampooners, the bones of that foul man, Tom Paine,
the infidel, whom (in 1796) this changeful politician had branded as
"base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous." During the
Queen Caroline trial Cobbett worked heart and soul for that questionable
martyr. He went out to Shooter's Hill to welcome her to London, and
boasted of having waved a laurel bough above her head.

In 1825 he wrote a scurrilous "History of the Reformation" (by many
still attributed to a priest), in which he declared Luther, Calvin, and
Beza to be the greatest ruffians that ever disgraced the world. In h