daughters of a Church dignitary, unwittingly crossed a hedge, and each was called upon by a bailiff in the evening and asked to pay a fine of three livres tournois—equal, we believe, to fourpence. This polite request was disregarded, and the parties were cited to appear next day in the school-house before the court. The court consisted of three farmers, one of whom was the very man who owned the field where the trespass had been committed! and who thus sat as judge in his own cause. The proceedings were in Norman-French, and commenced with a prayer, after which the court was declared to be constituted. One of the accused took a legal exception to the jurisdiction, but a blue document called an azur (we believe the summons) was read, and the plea was overruled. The two young ladies, being under age, were let off, and the bailiff was censured for summoning minors for trespass, but the rest were fined in some small sum each, which they never paid, threatening to appeal to the Royal Court of Guernsey; and one of them crossed from Sark afterwards in the same steamer as ourselves, a fugitive from justice.

The Court of Sark consists of the Seneschal or his deputy, the Prêvot, and the Greffier, who are all appointed by the Seigneur, and sworn in before the Royal Court of Guernsey. But besides this, there is another court, called the Court of Chefs Plaids, which makes ordinances for roads, rates, and police; and it is composed of the same officers as the Court of Sark, together with the holders of the forty tenements into which the island has been immemorially divided. We saw more than one painted board on which it was stated that 'the constables of Sark give notice, that any person damaging la Coupée, or any of the walls of Sark, will be liable to pay a penalty of 2/'

The language of the Sarkois is a patois, but more than half of the inhabitants speak English, and all of them understand French. In Little Sark we were obliged to speak French. The men are better looking than the women, and are really a handsome race. There is one church, one Wesleyan chapel, and one windmill in the island.

The Sunday is very strictly observed, and no one is allowed even to fish on that day under pain of a fine. We believe that there is such a thing as a prison, but it is so seldom used

that when it was last wanted to lock up an offender, it was necessary to send for a blacksmith to break open the lock, as the key could not be found.

O! fortunati nimium sua si bona norint.

In conclusion we will quote one or two passages from a letter in the Harleian Miscellany,' written in April, 1673, 'from a gentleman inhabiting the Isle of Serke, to his friend and kinsman in London,' and cited in 'Tupper's History.' of Sark :

He says

Yet Nature, as if she had here stored up some extraordinary treasure, seems to have been very solicitous to render it impregnable; being on every side surrounded with vast rocks and mighty cliffs, whose craggy tops, braving the clouds with their stupendous height, bid defiance to all that shall dream of forcing an entrance. Two only ascents or passages there are into it; the first, where all goods and commodities are received, called La Soguien. . . the other is La Fricherée (Eperqueries), where only passengers can land, climbing up a rock by certain steps or stairs cut therein, to a vast height, and somewhat dangerously; nor is it possible for above one person to come up at once. For belly timber our

three staple commodities are fish, fowl, and rabbits. . . . . . If all this rich fare will not content you, we have a most excellent pottage make of milk, bacon, coleworts, mackerel, and gooseberries! boiled together all to pieces, which our mode is to eat, not with the ceremony of a spoon, but the more beastly way of a great piece of bread furiously plying between your mouth and the kettle. Both sexes on festivals wear large ruffs, and the women, instead of hats or hoods, truss up their hair, the more genteel sort in a kind of cabbage-net [anticipation of the chignon?]; those of meaner fortunes in a piece of linen, perhaps an old dishclout turned out of service, or the fag-end of a table cloth that has escaped the persecution of washing ever since the Reformation. . . . . All this, though you read it not till Michaelmas, was told you at Serke, this first day of April, O. S., 1673.

We will only add that when we left Sark and crossed over to Guernsey, we met floating on the waves the dead body of a scaman or fisherman, with the head downwards; and it was suggestive of the perils of the navigation amidst those rocks, and tides, and currents, which guard Sark in its lonely solitude upon the deep.

409

WILLIAM COBBETT

I PROPOSE this evening to give you a sketch of the life, character, and writings of a remarkable man. Yet such is the vanity of human reputation that beyond the mere name little is known by the men of the present time of William Cobbett. They have heard of him as the great Radical of bygone days, and, remember that he wrote a grammar and edited the Weekly Register.' But the other books of which he was the author are almost forgotten, and few are familiar with the incidents of his active and turbulent life. In his recollections of a 'past life,' the late Sir Henry Holland speaks of the name and works of Cobbett as 'now nearly stranded on the stream of time, but they long exercised a powerful influence on the public mind in England,' and he says he well recollects the eagerness with which the 'Register' was looked for and read in the days of its publication. And yet Cobbett was a man whom in his early years Lord North regarded as the greatest political reasoner of his time, with whose genius Mr. Windham was in raptures, and who was so formidable a tribune of the people as to become-while he lived--something like one of the popular institutions of the country. As a writer he was one of the ablest in the whole range of the English language. Paradoxical as he was in many of his opinions and the slave of violent prejudice, he was, notwithstanding, full of vigorous common sense, and the master of a style which for sinewy strength and raciness has never been surpassed. In a series of Historical Characters,' published by the late Lord Dalling, better known by his former name of Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, he includes Cobbett under the head of 'The Contentious Man;' and the

A Lecture delivered before the Bath Literary and Philosophical Institution, December, 1873.

title is happily chosen, for no one ever had the organ of combativeness more strongly developed. No Irishman at Donnybrook Fair ever trailed his coat on the ground to provoke a fight with more eagerness than Cobbett sought to pick a quarrel with his pen. There was scarcely a single man of note in the political world whom he did not in the course of his life assail, and he sometimes contrived to fasten upon his opponent an epithet or nickname, which caught the popular fancy and stuck to him for life.

William Cobbett was born near Farnham, in Surrey, on the 9th of March, 1766. His grandfather and father were both labourers originally, but his father, by his industry and ability, had raised himself to the position of a small farmer or yeoman. He could read and write, accomplishments by no means common in those days. He had a smattering of mathematics and some knowledge of land surveying. Young William began life as a farmer's boy, and as such laid in that remarkable stock of knowledge he possessed of all that relates to agriculture, and also imbibed his passionate fondness for a rural life. At the age of sixteen, however, he was smitten by a desire to go to sea, but failed to engage a captain to take him. Next year he quitted home clandestinely and went on the top of a coach to London, where he became clerk to an attorney in Gray's Inn Lane. I suppose it was his experience in this office that caused his bitter hatred in after-life of law and lawyers, whom he sometimes calls, on account of their wigs, 'grey mare's tails,' although curiously enough two of his sons afterwards entered the profession, the one as an attorney, the other as a barrister. He soon, however, left what he designated an earthly hell,' and in 1784, like Coleridge at a later period, enlisted as a common soldier in a regiment intended to serve in Nova Scotia. During the period of three months, which he spent at Chatham while the regiment was waiting to embark, he made good use of a circulating library, and fell in love with the librarian's daughter. Unflinching industry and dogged perseverance were the characteristics of his nature, and at whatever he did work he worked like a horse. It is to this period and the voyage that followed it that we must refer his first study of grammar. 'I learned grammar,' he says 'when I was a private soldier on sixpence a day. The edge of my

berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to study on; my knapsack was my book-case, a bit of board lying on my lap was my table, and the task did not demand anything like a year of my life.' We shall see by-and-by that he not only learnt grammar, but wrote a grammar, of which he says, 'For me not to say that I deem my "English Grammar " the best book for teaching this science, would be affectation and neglect of duty besides, because I know that it is the best.' Cobbett remained a soldier in British America for nearly eight years, and attained the position of Sergeant-Major. When he applied for his discharge on the return of his regiment to Portsmouth in 1791, he was publicly complimented by General Frederick upon his behaviour and conduct during the time of his being in the regiment, and Major Lord Edward Fitzgerald added 'his most hearty thanks.' While in New Brunswick he met and fell in love with his future wife. She was the daughter of a sergeant of artillery, and the way in which his passion was kindled is characteristic and curious. She was engaged in an occupation something like that of Nausicaa, in the Odyssey,' with a difference. 'It was,' he says, in his 'Advice to Young Men,' 'hardly light, but she was out on the snow scrubbing out a washing-tub. “That's the girl for me," said I, when we had got out of her hearing.' And I may mention that never did husband bestow more hearty praise upon a wife than he does upon Mrs. Cobbett in many parts of his works, and she seems to have deserved his praise. He was obliged to leave America before he could marry, but his future wife had returned to England before him, and he sent her 150 guineas-the whole of his hardearned savings-begging her to make use of it by lodging with respectable people until his arrival. But the girl preferred to earn her own livelihood as a servant of all work, and when Cobbett came home at the end of four years and claimed his bride, she put the whole sum into his hands untouched. Well might he be proud of such a wife. But in the meantime a little episode had occurred which he tells with praiseworthy candour, as a warning to young men. During the absence of his betrothed, a colonial beauty led him astray, and we have to look at Cobbett, for the first time in his life, in the novel character of a gay Lothario. His description of the scenery