98 RISEN B V FERSE VERANCE. 



manifest to her, Dafticularly at those times when Ufa is 

 always more or less in danger.' 



Cobbett left America in fierce wrath, after being prose- 

 cuted for a libel on Dr. Rush. His offence was marked; 

 but his punishment for so free a country was, to say the 

 least, not lenient. The case originated in his interference 

 with the manner in which Dr. Rush treated his patients in 

 the yellow fever. He accused him of Sangrado practice, 

 or a too free use of the lancet; and it is amusingly 

 characteristic of the witty and humourous malice of the 

 man, to find him many years afterwards, when self-exiled 

 to America, concluding a double-barrelled paragraph of his 

 journal in these terms : * An American counts the cost of 

 powder and shot. If he is deliberate in everything else, 

 this habit will hardly forsake him in the act of shooting. 

 When the sentimental flesh-eaters hear the report of his 

 gun, they may begin to pull out their white handkerchiefs; 

 for death follows the pull of the trigger with perhaps even 

 more certainty than it used to follow the lancet of Dr. 

 Rush.' 



A leading event in Cobbett's life was the severe fine and 

 long imprisonment to which he was subjected, for daring to 

 give way to the impulse which led him to denounce in warm, 

 but only fitting terms, the flogging of Englishmen under the 

 bayonets and sabres of Hanoverians. He was at this time 

 living in the bosom of his family on his farm of Botley, in 

 the midst of domestic enjoyment of no ordinary kind, and 

 leading no inglorious or useless life. His long imprison- 

 ment, and the ruin of his affairs, left deep traces in a quick 

 and resentful, but certainly not an ungenerous mind. 



After a picture of domestic life which must charm every- 



