IV
On his arrival he settled in Philadelphia, and was soon joined by Mrs. Cobbett, who had not accompanied him out. His livelihood was at first procured by giving English lessons to French emigrants; and it is a fact not without interest that a celebrated person who figures amongst these sketches—M. de Talleyrand—wished to become one of his pupils. He refused, he says, to go to the ci-devant bishop’s house, but adds, in his usual style, that the lame fiend hopped over this difficulty at once by offering to come to his (Cobbett’s) house, an offer that was not accepted. About this time Doctor Priestley came to America. The enthusiasm with which the doctor was received roused the resentment of the British soldier, who moreover panted for a battle. He published then—though with some difficulty, booksellers objecting to the unpopularity of the subject, an objection at which the author was most indignant—a pamphlet called “Observations on Priestley’s Emigration.” This pamphlet, on account both of its ability and scurrility, made a sensation, and thus commenced the author’s reputation, though it only added 1s. 7½d. to his riches. But he was abusing, he was abused. This was to be in his element, and he rose at once, so far as the power and peculiarity of his style were concerned, to a foremost place amongst political writers. This style had been formed at an early period of life, and perhaps unconsciously to himself.
“At eleven years of age,” he says in an article in the Evening Post, calling upon the reformers to pay for returning him to Parliament, “my employment was clipping of box-edgings and weeding beds of flowers in the garden of the Bishop of Winchester at the castle of Farnham, my native town. I had always been fond of beautiful gardens, and a gardener who had just come from the King’s gardens at Kew gave me such a description of them as made me instantly resolve to work in those gardens. The next morning” (this is the early adventure I have previously spoken of), “without saying a word to any one, off I set, with no clothes except those upon my back, and with thirteen halfpence in my pocket. I found that I must go to Richmond, and I accordingly went on 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 small beer which I had on the road, and one halfpenny that I had lost somehow or other, left three pence 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 ‘The Tale of a Tub, price 3d.’ The title was so odd that my curiosity was excited. I had the threepence; but then I could not have any 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 Gardens, 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 ever read before, it was something so new to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect.
“I read on until it was dark without any thought of 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 the Kew Gardens awakened 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 lively and confident air, and doubtless his own compassion besides, induced the gardener, who was a Scotchman, I remember, to give me victuals, find me lodging, and set me to work; and it was during the period that I was at Kew that 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 since felt at losing thousands of pounds.”