which done the man drew his sword, and put an helmet upon his head, and rushed toward the door upon the armed men who kept it, who laid upon him with deadly force; but he, not at all discouraged, fell to cutting and hacking most fiercely. So after he had received and given many wounds to those that attempted to keep him out, he cut his way through them all, and pressed forward into the palace."
But alas for the great cause Cobbett represented! The House of Commons proved to him not a palace, but a tomb. The close confinement, the late hours, the strain of an unnatural social life, was too much for the man who had for threescore years and ten lived on fresh air and cultivated early habits. He threw himself into his new life with his usual ardour. In the House he showed himself the same as he had been out of it. He would not bow down to its idols: he attacked Macaulay in his first speech; and in another proposed that Sir Robert Peel should be removed from the Privy Council. Just as he had stood up fearlessly against the tumultuous curses of a market-room, he now maintained himself against the contemptuous clamour of the House of Commons.
On one occasion members grew impatient when he attempted to speak; but he told them that they should not proceed to a division for two hours unless they consented to hear him.
But it was long before he could believe that even his wonderful health was beginning to give way. To the public, as usual, he poured out his complaints. "Why," he says, "are 658 of us crammed into a space that allows to each of us no more than a foot and a half square?"
How often do we find men of heart who have passed tumultuous lives yearning in moments of depression for the scenes of their childhood. Like David, they long for a drink of the water of the well at Bethlehem. A touch of this home-sickness seems now to have come upon William Cobbett.
He took a farm at Normandy, a small straggling village on the verge of Bagshot Heath, where for many a mile nothing is to be seen but sandy common, covered with furze, and dotted with ranges of fir-trees. Cobbett hoped at Normandy Farm to refresh body and soul by recalling, if it were possible, the time
