Note 6 — Chapter XIV · “I NEVER SAT MYSELF DOWN ANYWHERE, WITHOUT MAKING THE FRUITS AND FLOWERS TO GROW.”

This is with reference to a glorious newspaper squabble, especially entertaining on account alike of the circumstances which aroused it and of the combatants engaged. The first attempt to defame the Princess of Wales had just been made, and the Morning Post took up the illustrious lady and the “infamous calumny” into its protecting breast. The fulsome style, and the dark insinuations conveyed, aroused Mr. Cobbett, and he, while asserting his indifference to the question until there was really some charge, on one side or the other, upon which to comment, wanted to know what the Post meant by stating that the Princess had been guilty of no levities, but such as no woman in the land was free from. Ever the champion of the sex, he begged for an explanation. Week after week the question was put, and reiterated with new zest. There was no answer; but only column after column of abuse upon the head of the “gross and abominable writer,” “this low-bred man,” this “modern Jack Cade,” &c. “This gross and abominable writer is exposed to the merited detestation of all classes, especially the more elevated, whom this writer has, in his revolutionary cant, described as the well-dressed rabble of the readers of the Morning Post. We hope the Attorney-General will look to this.” A very silly and abusive pamphlet followed, under the wing of the Post: “Strictures on Cobbett’s Unmanly Observations relative to the Delicate Investigation; and a Reply to the Answer to an Admonitory Letter to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, containing an Account of the True Cause why the Commissioners’ Report has not yet been Published, and many other Additional Facts, &c.” (London, 1806). Here is one of the additional facts:—“Vain, contemptible slanderer! where in all thy calumnious pages is one unanswerable argument.”