influences, on magical powers and talismans. … I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all the world a deception, my fellow angels, by a playful device, concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." Alongside of this poetic revelation may be placed Cobbett's sketch of himself: a sturdy country lad of eleven, in a blue smock and red garters, standing before the bookseller's shop in Richmond, with an empty stomach, three-pence in his pocket, and a certain little book called The Tale of a Tub contending with his hunger for the possession of that last bit of money. In the end, mind conquered matter: the threepence was invested in the volume, and the homeless little reader curled himself under a haystack, and forgot all about his supper in the strange, new pleasure he was enjoying. "The book was so different," he writes, "from anything that I had ever read before, it was something so fresh to my mind, that, though I could not understand some parts of it, it delighted me beyond description, and produced what I have always considered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till
