TYPES OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LIFE.
I.
A Peasant Politician.
(Golden Hours, 1874.)
WILLIAM COBBETT.
Cobbett was perhaps the most perfect specimen of the typical "John Bull" this country ever produced. Born and bred in Surrey, he knew every inch of the county, traversing it in a way scarcely any other man ever did, and coming at last to end his days there. His father was a small farmer at Farnham, and here, in a house now marked out with pride by his fellow-townsmen, William Cobbett first saw the light on the 9th of March 1762.
"With respect to my ancestors," he says in a graphic bit of autobiography which he gave his foes in America, "I shall go no further back than my grandfather, and for this plain reason—that I never heard talk of any prior to him. He was a day labourer, and I have heard my father say that he worked for one farmer from the day of his marriage to that of his death, upwards of forty years. He died before I was born, but I have often slept beneath the same roof that sheltered him, and where his widow dwelt for several years after his death. It was a little thatched cottage with a garden before the door. It had but two windows—a damson tree shaded one, and a clump of filberts the other. Here I and my brothers went every Christmas and Whitsuntide to spend a week or two, and torment the poor old woman with our noise and dilapidations. She used to give us bread-and-milk for breakfast, an apple-pudding for dinner, and a piece of bread and
