as merely meaning the "submerged tenth"; but the poor farmer, for instance, as much as the poor labourer. To the last he remained an enthusiastic mediaevalist, never tired of insisting on the greatness and happiness of England in the olden times.
"If I am an extraordinary man," he says in one of his writings, "as I have been called by some persons who ought to have found a different epithet, I was a still more extraordinary boy." For if he was wilful, he was independent—two qualities not always linked together.
To judge from the many inns and public-houses which to our own day attract custom under the sign of "The Rodney," that naval commander would appear to have been one of the most popular of our sea-kings. In April 1782 he obtained a great victory over the French in the Carribee Islands. No doubt it was the national enthusiasm which this victory evoked that aroused in young Cobbett's mind the desire to become a sailor. In the autumn of 1782 he went down to Portsmouth to visit his uncle. At Portsdown he caught sight of the sea for the first time, and the sight caused his heart to glow with patriotic fire.
For two years Gibraltar had been besieged by the Spaniards, and just at the very time that young Cobbett arrived at Portsdown, the fleet under Lord Howe intended for its relief lay at Spithead. "It was not," he says, "the sea alone that I saw; the grand fleet was riding at anchor at Spithead. I had heard of the wooden walls of old England; I had formed my ideas of a ship, and of a fleet: but what I now beheld so far surpassed what I had ever been able to form a conception of, that I stood lost between astonishment and admiration. I had heard talk of the glorious deeds of our admirals and sailors, of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and of all those memorable combats that good and true Englishmen never fail to relate to their children about a hundred times a year. The brave Rodney's victories over our natural enemies, the French and the Spaniards, have long been the theme of our praise and the burden of our songs. The sight of our fleet brought all these into my mind—in confused order, it is true, but with irresistible force. My heart was inflated with national pride. The sailors were my countrymen; the fleet belonged to my country; and surely I had my part in it, and in all its honours:
