pupils soon become very numerous, so that ere long he was making four or five hundred pounds a year. Amongst those who sought to enlist his services was the celebrated M. de Talleyrand, who offered him twenty dollars a month; but Cobbett, suspecting his intentions, resolutely refused. "I did not want," he said, "a French spy to take a survey either of my desk or my house." The exercises that he wrote for his pupils became a grammar, which he published in Philadelphia under the title of the "Maitre d'Anglais." It had a large sale in America, and soon became known in France, so that it was ordered to be used in the public schools. A certain individual named Du Roure, who afterwards edited it, and sent forth five editions in Paris, sought in the fifth edition to deny Cobbett's claim to be its author; but in vol. 33 of the Register the latter fully exposed the Frenchman's attempt to deprive him of the paternity of his first-born literary child.
The event which first brought Cobbett before the world as a political writer was the arrival of Dr Priestley in New York. Burnt out of house and home by the turbulent friends of " King and Church" in Birmingham, this friend of freedom determined to go to the United States. Cobbett, who regarded him as one of the leaders of English Jacobinism, made up his mind to salute his arrival with a broadside. He accordingly attacked him in a pamphlet, which he proposed to call "The Tartuffe detected; or. Observations on the Emigration of a Martyr to the Cause of Liberty." The pamphlet was, however, published without the first title, and became the commencement of that celebrated series afterwards known as The Works of Peter Porcupine, a pseudonym which had its origin in some correspondent accusing Cobbett of writing as savagely as if his pen was the quill of an porcupine. These productions soon made manifest his wonderful talent for writing plain but racy English, as well as for finding out witty titles, and for fastening clever nicknames on every one of his victims. Thus his next pamphlet was entitled "A Bone to gnaw for the Democrats; another, "A Kick for a Bite;" and so on.
Finding his writings sell, he determined to set up in business for himself. Accordingly, in the spring of 1796 he took a house for the purpose in Second Street, Philadelphia, and celebrated
