WILLIAM COBBETT. 



Major^ or aii orderly, in the manner of Swift's Advice to 

 Seivants, which Avere full of admirable humour and grave 

 irony. The officers of the 53d and the corps were, as we have 

 reason to know, exceedingly proud of their clever sergeant- 

 major after he became famous ; and so, indeed, was the whole 

 army, from the period he became a party writer in Philadelphia. 

 He was particularly distinguished by his Royal Highness the 

 Duke of Kent. 



In the Advice to Young Men, which may be called his con- 

 fessions, Cobbett has related his own love story; and a 

 delightful one it is, possessing at once the tenderness and 

 simplicity of nature, and no little of the charm of romance. 

 The scene of it was New Brunswick. But there is a collateral 

 flirtation also, involving what Cobbett terms the only serious 

 sin he ever committed against the female sex, and which he 

 relates in warning to young men. We shall take it first, and 

 that, too, in the language of his own narrative. 



' The province of New Brunswick, in North America, in 

 which I passed my years from the age of eighteen to that of 

 twenty-six, consists, in general, of heaps of rocks, in the inter- 

 stices of which grow the pine, the spruce, and various sorts of 

 fir trees, or, where the woods have been burnt down, the bushes 

 of the raspberry or those of the huckle-berry. The province is 

 cut asunder lengthwise by a great river, called the St. John, 

 about two hundred miles in length and at half-way from the 

 mouth, fully a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable 

 smaller rivers, there called creeks. On the sides of these 

 creeks the land Is, in places, clear of rocks ; it is in these 

 places generally good and productive : the trees that grow here 

 are the birch, the maple, and others of the deciduous class ; 

 natural meadows here and there present themselves ; and some 



