e her acquaintance, and resolved that
she should be his wife so soon as he could get discharged from the army.

On the eve of the girl's return to Woolwich with her father, who was a
sergeant-major in the artillery, Cobbett sent her a hundred and fifty
guineas which he had saved, in order that she might be able to live
without hard work until his return to England. The girl departed, taking
with her the money; and five years later Cobbett obtained his discharge.
On reaching London, he made haste to call upon the sergeant-major's
daughter. "I found," he says, "my little girl a servant-of-all-work
[20and hard work it was], at five pounds a year, in the house of a Captain
Brisac; and, without hardly saying a word about the matter, she put
into my hands the whole of my hundred and fifty guineas, unbroken."
Admiration of her conduct was now added to love of her person, and
Cobbett shortly after married the girl, who proved an excellent wife. He
was, indeed, never tired of speaking her praises, and it was his pride
to attribute to her all the comfort and much of the success of his
after-life.

Though Cobbett was regarded by many in his lifetime as a coarse, hard,
practical man, full of prejudices, there was yet a strong undercurrent
of poetry in his nature; and, while he declaimed against sentiment,
there were few men more thoroughly imbued with sentiment of the best
kind. He had the tenderest regard for the character of woman. He
respected her purity and her virtue, and in his 'Advice to Young
Men,' he has painted the true womanly woman--the helpful, cheerful,
affectionate wife--with a vividness and brightness, and, at the same
time, a force of good sense, that has never been surpassed by any
English writer. Cobbett was anything but refined, in the conventional
sense of the word; but he was pure, temperate, self-denying,
industrious, vigorous, and energetic, in an eminent degree. Many of his
views were, no doubt, wrong, but they were his own, for he insisted on
thinking for himself in everything. Though few men took a firmer grasp
of the real than he did, perhaps still fewer were more swayed by the
ideal. In word-pictures of his own emotions, he is unsurpassed. Indeed,
Cobbett might almost be regarded as one of the greatest prose poets of
English real life.

CHAPTER XII--THE DISCIPLINE OF EXPERIENCE.

"I would the great would grow like thee.
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, b