Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

WILLIAM COBBETT.

[graphic]

N the second year of George III.'s reign-when Edmund Burke was editing the Annual Register at a salary of L.50 a year-when Dr Johnson's friends were busily at work urging ministers to obtain a pension for him from the amiable young monarch

-when Horace Walpole was entertaining his numerous correspondents with that delightful gossip about the new court and young Queen Charlotte, which, after nearly a century, still preserves its charm -when William Pitt was learning the alphabet,__and Charles James Fox was making Latin verses at Eton, little dreaming of the important part which he and his young rival were destined to play in the world's history in the spring of that year (1762), in a small cottage in the town of Farnham, in Surrey, William Cobbett, one of the most remarkable self-taught men of whom England can boast,

No. 66.

1

6

first saw the light. With respect to my ancestors,' he says in his Adventures of Peter Porcupine, 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 had 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 milk and bread for breakfast, an apple-pudding for our dinner, and a piece of bread and cheese for supper. Her fire was made of turf, cut from the neighbouring heath, and her evening light was a rush dipped in grease.

"My father, when I was born, was a farmer. The reader will easily believe, from the poverty of his parents, that he had received no very brilliant education; he was, however, learned for a man in his rank of life. When a little boy, he drove the plough for twopence a day; and these, his earnings, were appropriated to the expenses of an evening-school. What a village schoolmaster could be expected to teach, he had learned; and had, besides, considerably improved himself in several branches of the mathematics. He understood land-surveying well, and was often chosen to draw the plans of disputed territory; in short, he had the reputation of possessing experience and understanding, which never fails in England to give a man in a country place some little weight with his neighbours. He was honest, industrious, and frugal; it was not, therefore, wonderful that he should be situated in a good farm, and happy in a wife of his own rank, like him beloved and respected.

A father like ours, it will be readily supposed, did not suffer us to eat the bread of idleness. I do not remember the time when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving the small birds from the turnip-seed, and the rooks from the pease. When I first trudged a field, with my wooden bottle and my satchel swung over my shoulders, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles; and at the close of the day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty. My next employment was weeding wheat, and leading a single horse at harrowing barley. Hoeing pease followed; and hence I arrived at the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving the team, and holding the plough. We were all of us strong and laborious; and my father used to boast that he had four boys, the eldest of whom was but fifteen years old, who did as much work as any three men in the parish of Farnham. Honest pride, and happy days! I have some faint

recollection of going to school to an old woman, who, I believe, did not succeed in learning me my letters. In the winter evenings, my father learned us all to read and write, and gave us a pretty tolerable knowledge of arithmetic. Grammar he did not perfectly understand himself, and therefore his endeavours to learn us that necessarily failed; for though he thought he understood it, and though he made us get the rules by heart, we learned nothing at all of the principles.

'Our religion was that of the Church of England, to which I have ever remained attached; the more so, perhaps, as it bears the name of my country. As to politics, we were like the rest of the country-people in England; that is to say, we neither knew nor thought anything about the matter. The shouts of victory, or the murmurs at a defeat, would now and then break in upon our tranquillity for a moment; but I do not remember ever having seen a newspaper in the house; and, most certainly, that privation did not render us less industrious, happy, or free. After, however, the American war had continued for some time, and the cause and nature of it began to be understood, or rather misunderstood, by the lower classes of the people in England, we became a little better acquainted with subjects of this kind. It is well known that the people were, as to numbers, nearly equally divided in their opinions concerning that war, and their wishes respecting the result of it. My father was a partisan of the Americans; he used frequently to dispute on the subject with the gardener of a nobleman who lived near us. This was generally done with goodhumour over a pot of our best ale; yet the disputants sometimes grew warm, and gave way to language that could not fail to attract our attention. My father was worsted, without doubt, as he had for an antagonist a shrewd and sensible old Scotchman, far his superior in political knowledge; but he pleaded before a partial audience: we thought there was but one wise man in the world, and that that one was our father.'

As he was in no humour, while writing his Life of Peter Porcupine, to indulge in much detail regarding the incidents of his boyhood, he skips over the whole of that period in a single sentence. It would be as useless as unentertaining,' he says, 'to dwell on the occupations and sports of a country-boy; to lead the reader to fairs, cricket-matches, and hare-hunts.' Under this impression, therefore, he takes a jump forward to 1782, when he must have been twenty years old. Of his early tastes and habits, however his love of gardening and of a country life, for example, which he always hankered after-we have many delightful reminiscences in almost every one of his books, and not unfrequently even in the midst of some of his most furious articles in the Political Register. From my very infancy,' he says, in the preface to A Year's Residence in America, 'from the age of six years, when I climbed up the side of a steep sand-rock, and there scooped me out a plot four feet square to make me a garden, and

the soil for which I carried up in the bosom of my little blue smock-frock or hunting-shirt, I have never lost one particle of my passion for these healthy and rational and heart-cheering pursuits, in which every day presents something new, in which the spirits are never suffered to flag, and in which industry, skill, and care, are sure to meet with their due reward. I have never, for any eight months together, during my whole life, been without a garden.' This love of gardening, which shews itself in many a part of his writings, especially in the Rural Rides, he traces to the home education he had received. He was brought up under a father whose talk was chiefly about his garden and his fields, with regard to which he was famed for his skill and neatness. The character of the district in which he was born and bred must have had also no small influence in strengthening his horticultural tendencies. He never tires of sounding the praises of the hopgardens of Farnham. The neatest in England, if not in the whole world. All there is a garden. The neat culture of the hop extends its influence to the fields round about. Hedges cut with shears, and every other mark of skill and care strike the eye at Farnham, and become fainter and fainter as you go from it in every direction.' His first start from home, at the early age of eleven, as he describes, in the following passage, which occurs in an Address to the Reformers, published in 1820, was inspired by a determination to see Kew Gardens, of which he had heard such a description as left him no rest till he had gone and seen that collection of horticultural marvels.

'At eleven years of age, my employment was clipping of boxedgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester, at the castle of Farnham. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens; and a gardener, who had just come from the king's gardens at Kew, gave such a description of them as made me instantly resolve to work in these gardens. The next morning, without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen half-pence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went from place to place inquiring my way thither. A long day-it was in June-brought me to Richmond in the afternoon. Two pennyworth of bread and cheese, and a pennyworth of smallbeer, which I had on the road, and a half-penny which I had lost somehow or other, left threepence in my pocket. With this for my whole fortune, I was trudging through Richmond in my blue smock-frock and my red garters tied under my knees, when, staring about me, my eye fell upon a little book in a bookseller's window, on the outside of which was written: "Tale of a Tub; price 3d." The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence, but then I could have no supper. In I went and got the little book, which I was so impatient to read, that I got over into a field at the upper corner of Kew Garden, where there stood a haystack; on the shady side of this I sat down to read. The book

was so different from anything that I had read before, it was something so new to my mind, that though I could not at all understand some of it, it delighted me beyond description; and it produced what I have always considered a birth of intellect. I read on till it was dark, without any thought about supper or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket, and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds in Kew Gardens awaked me in the morning, when off I started to Kew, reading my little book. The singularity of my dress, the simplicity of my manner, my confident and lively air, and, doubtless, his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotchman, to give me victuals, find me a lodging, and set me to work. And it was during the period that I was at Kew, that the present king (George IV.) and two of his brothers laughed at the oddness of my dress, while I was sweeping the grass-plot round the foot of the pagoda. The gardener, seeing me fond of books, lent me some gardening books to read; but these I could not relish after my Tale of a Tub, which I carried about with me wherever I went; and when I, at about twenty years old, lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, in North America, the loss gave me greater pain than I have ever felt at losing thousands of pounds. This circumstance, trifling as it was, and childish as it may seem to relate it, has always endeared the recollection of Kew

to me.'

What a pity that he did not leave us a few more such reminiscences of that period, trifling as he professed to consider them! After this delightful picture of his journey to Kew, we lose sight of him entirely for a number of years. How long he remained in the royal gardens, or how he was received when he went back to Farnham, has never been recorded. The next glimpse we have of young Cobbett is after he has arrived at manhood, in the autumn of 1782.

6

Having gone to visit a relation who lived in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, he first beheld the sea from the top of Portsdown, and immediately felt a strong desire to become a sailor. He could never account for this sudden impulse, except on the hypothesis that 'almost all English boys feel the same inclination: it would seem that, like young ducks, instinct leads them to rush on the bosom of the water.' But it was not the view of the ocean alone which had such an electric effect upon young Cobbett. The grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of Old England; I had formed my ideas of a ship and of a fleet; but what I now beheld so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors, of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and of all those memorable combats that good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The brave Rodney's victories over our natural enemies, the French and

« НазадПродовжити »