forthcoming, a verdict of 'Found drowned' was
returned. No mark of external violence could be
discovered on the body."

I have no certain evidence that this was
Browden's body, just as I have no evidence
that he was guilty of the crime that I
imputed to him. But I have told, plainly and
truly, those things which led me to believe
that my trip to the Turon Diggings was
made in such company as few men would
have cared to choose, and that my partner
reposes in a murderer's grave.

THE BRIGHT LITTLE GIRL.

SONG TO AN IRISH TUNE.

Her blue eyes they beam and they twinkle;
   Her lips have made smiling more fair;
On cheek and on brow there's no wrinkle,
   But thousands of curls in her hair.

She's little—you don't wish her taller;
  Just half through the teens is her age:
And lady, or baby, to call her,
  Were something to puzzle a sage.

Her walk is far better than dancing,
  She speaks as another might sing;
And all by an innocent chancing,
   Like lambkins and birds in the spring.

Unskilled in the airs of the city,
  She's perfect in natural grace;
She's gentle, and truthful, and witty,
  And ne'er spends a thought on her face—

Her face, with the fine glow that's in it,
  As fresh as an apple-tree bloom:
And O! when she comes, in a minute,
  Like sunbeams, she brightens the room.

As taking in mind as in feature.
   How many will sigh for her sake!
I wonder, the sweet little creature,
  What sort of a wife she would make!

KENSINGTON WORTHIES.

Nearly opposite the new Vestry Hall, in
the house now occupied by Mr. Wright, an
ironmonger, lived for some years the once
celebrated political writer, William Cobbett.

Cobbett, as many of our readers may
remember, was a self-taught man of great
natural abilities, who—from excess of self-
esteem, defect of sympathy out of the pale of
his own sphere, and a want of that scholarly
"discipline of humanity," of which such men
stand particularly in need—went from one
extreme in politics to another with anything
but misgiving; injured the good which he
otherwise did to Reform, by a long course of
obloquy and exaggeration; brought his
courage, and even his principles into question,
by retreats before his opponents, and apparent
compromises with Government; and
ended a life of indomitable industry, by
obtaining the reputation rather of a powerful
and amusing than estimable or lasting writer.
Readers of his Political Register will not
easily forget how he lorded it over public
men, as if they knew nothing and he knew
everything; or what letters he addressed to
them, in a style beyond the unceremonious—
such as those to the Bishop of London,
beginning "Bishop," and to Sir Robert Peel,
whom he addressed as "Peel's-Bill-Peel," and
saluted simply by his surname:—

             "TO PEEL'S-BILL-PEEL.
  "PEEL," &c.

Hazlitt said of him, that, had everything
been done as he desired, in Church and State,
he would have differed with it all next day,
out of the pure pleasure of opposition.

Cobbett's worst propensity was to exult
over the fallen. His implied curses of the
hapless George the Third, who had nothing
to do with the fine and imprisonment which
produced them, are too shocking to be
repeated. He crowed unmercifully over the
suicide of Lord Castlereagh; and, ridiculously
as ungenerously, pronounced Walter Scott,
during his decline, and after the bankruptcy
which he laboured so heroically to avert, to
have been nothing but a "humbug!"

But the vigour which he thus abused was
not to be denied. Bating an occasional
parade of the little scholarship which he had
acquired, and which sometimes betrayed him
into incorrectnesses even of the grammar
which he professed to teach, nothing could
surpass the pure, vigorous, idiomatical style
of his general writing, or the graphical
descriptions he would give both of men and
things, whether in artificial life, or in matters
connected with his agricultural experience.
A volume of select passages from his writings,
chiefly of this kind, might be of permanent
service to his name; which otherwise will be
stifled under the load of rubbish with which
he mixed it.

At the back of his house in Kensington, in
ground now devoted to other purposes, and
also at a farm which he possessed at the same
time, not far off (at Barn Elm), Cobbett
cultivated his Indian corn, his American forest-
trees, his pigs, poultry, and butchers' meat—
all which he pronounced to be the best that
was ever beheld: but the aristocratic suburb
did not prove a congenial soil; and he
quitted it, a bankrupt. He appears,
nevertheless, to have succeeded, upon the whole,
in the worldly point of view, and ultimately
made his way into Parliament—a triumph,
however, which was probably the death of
him, owing to the late hours and bad air for
which he exchanged his farming habits of
life. At all events he did not survive it long.
Like many men who make a great noise in
public, he seems to have been a good, quiet
sort of man in private; occasionally blustering
a little, perhaps, at his workmen, and
more dictatorial to them than he would have
liked others to be to himself; but a good