by the delivery of long orations on the elementary principle of
reform. The second reading of the Bill was carried by 367 votes in its
favor and 231 votes against it--that is to say, by a majority of 136
for the Bill. Therefore everybody saw that, as far as the House of
Commons in the new Parliament was concerned, there was a large majority
in support of the measure brought forward by the Government.

[Sidenote: 1831--William Cobbett]

It was morning, and not very early morning, when the House divided, and
the Attorney-General had not much time to spare for rest before setting
off for one of the law courts to conduct a prosecution which the
Government had thought it well to institute against a man who held a
most prominent position in England at that time, and whose name, it is
safe to say, will be remembered as long as good {155} English prose is
studied. This man was William Cobbett, and he had just aroused the
anger of the Government by a published article in which he vindicated
the conduct of those who had set fire to hayricks and destroyed farm
buildings in various parts of the country. William Cobbett had begun
life as the son of a small farmer, who was himself the son of a day
laborer. He had lived a strange and varied life. In his boyish days
he had run away from a little farm in Surrey and had flung himself upon
the world of London. He had found employment, for a while, in the
humblest kind of drudgery as a junior copying clerk in an attorney's
office, and then he had enlisted in a regiment of foot. He was
quartered for a year at Chatham, and he devoted all his leisure moments
to reading, for which he had a passion which lasted him all his
lifetime. He is said to have exhausted the whole contents of a lending
library in the neighborhood, for he preferred reading anything to
reading nothing. He was especially fond of historical and scientific
studies, but he had a love for literature of a less severe kind also,
and he studied with intense eagerness the works of Swift, on whose
style he seems to have moulded his own with much success and without
any servile imitation. Then he was quartered with his regiment for
some time in New Brunswick, and after various vicissitudes he made his
way to Philadelphia. During his stay in New Brunswick he had studied
French, and had many opportunities of conversing in it with
French-Canadians, and when settled for a time in Philadelphia he
occupied himself by teaching