Page:The English Peasant.djvu/301

 crowd, and pretty nearly in the dark, held her towards me to shake hands with her; and then, taking her down, said, 'Theere, now, th'ast shooken honds wi' th' cleverest mon in England.'"

But all this popular enthusiasm was of no avail against the territorial influence of the Stanleys. Cobbett stood lowest on the poll. But so far from being disheartened, he averred that numerically he was the real representative of the town, and such was the faith the people had in him that he returned home, to use his own powerful language, "through forty miles of huzzas from the lips of a hundred thousand people."

"You are always in spirits, Cobbett!" "To be sure: for why should I not be? Poverty I have always set at defiance, and I could therefore defy the temptations of riches; and as to home and children, I had taken care to provide myself with an inexhaustible store of that sobriety;—the truth is, that throughout nearly forty years of troubles, losses, and crosses, assailed all the while by more numerous and powerful enemies than ever man had before to contend with, and performing at the same time labours greater than man ever before performed—all these labours requiring mental exertion, and some of them mental exertion of the highest order,—the truth is, that throughout the whole of this long time of troubles and labours I have never known a single hour of real anxiety; the troubles have been no troubles to me; I have not known what lowness of spirits meaned; have been more gay, and felt less care than any bachelor that ever lived."

"A merry heart doeth good like medicine," and surely the man who undertakes to do battle for the poor and the oppressed needs to have a constant supply of this medicine, or else the world of trouble he has taken upon himself will produce "that sorrow of heart" by which the wise man says "the spirit is broken." For Cobbett, above all men, needed this never-failing spring of joyousness. His latter years were cast in the very darkest days of all the sad history of the English agricultural poor. Since the termination of the war things had got worse and worse. In various counties their wages averaged from 7s. to 12s. Labourers on the lower wage could not get enough food to work upon. The unhappy men grew mad with hunger and despair. In 1830 incendiary fires began to break out in Wiltshire, in Hampshire, in