Page:The English Peasant.djvu/282

 some said, cried Peccavi. It was a moment of human weakness, very natural to a man of such intense and contending sympathies. On the one hand there was the conviction that he had a work to do—a work which, look at it how he might, or we may, was the same in reality as that of the old Hebrew judges—a call to the high and perilous task of delivering his people; on the other, he was a typical Englishman, never more happy than at his own fireside, alone with his wife and children.

Of that wife he wrote several years after his marriage as the being "to whose gentleness, prudence, and fortitude I owe whatever I enjoy of pleasure, of fortune, or of reputation;" while Miss Mitford, who visited the Cobbetts when they lived at Botley, in Hampshire, speaks of her as a "sweet motherly woman, realizing our notion of one of Scott's most charming characters, Alie Dinmont, in her simplicity, her kindness, and her devotion to her husband and children."

The house Cobbett had bought at Botley was one of those ugly red-bricked mansions so common in the Georgian era. It stood on an eminence, and had "a beautiful lawn and gardens sweeping down to the river." Miss Mitford is enthusiastic in her description of the place. "His fields," she says, "might have been shown to a foreigner as a specimen of the richest and loveliest English scenery. In the cultivation of his garden, too, he displayed the same taste." She eulogizes his green Indian corn, his Carolina beans, his water-melons, and his wall-fruit; and concludes by declaring that she "never saw a more glowing or a more fragrant autumn garden than that at Botley, with its pyramids of hollyhocks, and its masses of China asters, of foxgloves, of mignonette, and of varied geranium."

The house, she says, was full of guests of almost all ranks and descriptions. There was "room for all, and the hearts of the owners would have had room for three times the number. I never saw hospitality more genuine, more simple, or more thoroughly successful in the great end of hospitality—the putting everybody completely at ease. There was not the slightest attempt at finery, or display, or gentility. They called it a farmhouse, and everything was in accordance with the largest idea of a great English yeoman of the old time."