The host she describes as "a tall, stout, man, fair and sunburnt, with a bright smile, and an air compounded of the soldier and the farmer, to which his habit of wearing a red waistcoat contributed not a little. He was, I think, the most athletic and vigorous person that I have ever known. Nothing could tire him. At home in the morning he would begin his active day by mowing his own lawn, beating his gardener Robinson, the best mower except himself in the parish, at that fatiguing work." Samuel Bamford, the author of "Passages in the Life of a Radical," who saw him under very different circumstances, namely, at a political meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London, gives essentially the same impression of him. "Had I met him," he says, "anywhere save in that room and on that occasion, I should have taken him for a gentleman farming his own broad estate. He seemed to have that kind of self-possession and ease about him, together with a certain bantering jollity, which are so natural to fast-handed and well-housed lords of the soil. He was, I suppose, not less than six feet in height, portly, with a fresh, clear, and round cheek, and a small grey eye, twinkling with good-humoured archness. He was dressed in a blue coat, yellow swans-down waistcoat, drab kersey small-clothes, and top-boots. His hair was grey, and his cravat and linen were fine, and very white. In short he was a perfect representative of what he always wished to be, an English gentleman farmer."
In his "Advice to Young Men," Cobbett has given a beautiful picture of the family life he sought to cultivate at Botley. "My first duty," he says, "was to make [my family] healthy and strong, if I could, and to give them as much enjoyment of life as possible. Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that they should be bred up in it too. … I effected everything without scolding, and even without command. My children are a family of scholars; each sex has its appropriate species of learning; and I could safely take my oath that I never ordered a child of mine, son or daughter, to look into a book in my life. … I accomplished my purpose indirectly. The first thing of all was health, which was secured by the deeply interesting and never-ending sports of the field and pleasures of the garden. Luckily these things were treated of in books and pictures of endless variety
