Star.
London, England, 1830-02-15 00:00:00

MR. COBBETT'S NORTHERN 7►OUR.

~'•:ls'`{~,

I

•

On Monday, the Ist of February, I delivered the third
lei t%re at Sheffield ; and, on Tuesday morning, or rather,
nuon, set off for Nottingham through Chesterfield and
hia;isiield, carrying with me the most grateful recollec-
titai of•tho very kind treatment which ['received at Shef-
field; and my son and daughter not forgetting the beau-
tiful eight which they had beheld in those exhibitions,
called the show-rooms in that place of wonderful inge-
nuity and industry. The weather was very severe when
we left Sheffield, and we saw the poor partridges in the
fields very lord pushed for any thing to support life. I
eaw one covey amongst a flock of sheep, living upon the
seeds of the hay which had been given to the latter. The,
sheep themselves. do not mind cold and snow if they have
food, but, in many places, they were scraping the snow
in order to get at the grass. They are of the Leicester
breed, and, in spite of the weather, seem to look very
well.

As we proceeded on towards Nottingham, we found
:he country more a farming country, with large barns
and ricks about them ; and, until we came to Sherwood
Forest, it seemed, as far as we could judge, to be a coun-
try rather fertile than otherwise. We arrived at Notting-
ham about six o'clock on Tuesday evening, and found a
committee of gentlemen ready to receive us, and to give
es an invitation to a public breakfast to be held the next
morning at nine o'clock, in the Thurland Hall, which is
said to have been the banquetting-room of King Charles
the First, and which, in some sharing of the good things
of this country, fell to the. lot of the fortunate Duke of
Newcastle, who is also, it seems, the present owner of a
fine tract, called Nottingham Park, and of other for-
merly crown property in and about this ancient and beau-
tiful town. The breakfast took place at nine o'clock in
the morning of Wednesday, the 3d of February. There
were present not much short of two hundred gentlemen ;
and this, never having seen one of the parties before in
my life to my knowledge, except two gentlemen from
Derby and one from Manchester, I felt to be the greatest
honour that I had ever received in the whole course of
my life. Here was no personal attachment at work ; for
none of the parties had ever seen me that I knew of : it
was purely the respect shown by this number of sensible
and well-educated men, not to me personally, but to
those exertions for which I had endured twenty long
years of calumnies from all the bribed and base reptiles

of the country.
I felt the full weight of this upon my mind, when I
rose to say a few words in the way of thanks for the ho-
nour conferred upon me ; in those few words, I observed
that the mere getting upon the table was enough; that
they, the.company, were too well instructed to need in-
struction from me ; that my business there was to show
them the man who had so long fought, and at last over-
come, the hydra of stupidity and oppression; and that
their business there was to join me in rejoicing upon the

_ .
occasion. The breakfast itself, upon any occasion,
would not have been of much value to the far greater
part of us ; but it was, in all respects, worthy of the do-
nors, worthy of the town, which, in almost all respects
that I can mention, exceeds all the towns that I ever saw
in my life. A fine, most extensive, and most beautiful
market-place; lofty, strong, and neat buildings; elegant
shops, clean-dressed people, active and intelligent men,
and sprightly and beautiful women. The environs of the
town are as fine as the town itself. Open on all sides;

fine prospects ; the town itself presents great inequality
of hill and dale ; and all this without any of that beg-
garly, any of that squalid misery, which to me has been
the great drawback in the merits of so many other places.
As to my own treatment, and that of the members of my
family who were with me, it would be invidious to make
distinctions,
.in a case where the kindness, the hospitality,
and generosity, have been uniform; but, at Nottingham
we had more leisure, the tour being, in some sort, at an
end ; and the attentions which we received were in pro-
portion to that leisure ; and excited in a particular man-
ner, perhaps, by the hoarseness which I still retain from
my cold 'caught in Yorkshire, and which seemed to re-
quire more than ordinary attention. Where there are so
many persons to whom so many acknowledgments are
due from me and my family, I am restrained from naming
any ; but every one will be well assured that hie or her
kindness to me, and my sons and daughter, have been
duly appreciated, and will never be forgotten. After
three lectures on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday
night:, we prepired to quit Nottingham for Leicester;
but, before we came off, it being Saturday, and the mar-
ket day morning, a gentleman took me to see the meat-
market, which was the finest, with regard to the quality
of the meat, its cutting-up, its cleanness and every other
thing belonging to it, that I had ever seen in my life.
This is a matter of which I am a very competent judge,
having seen the London markets sad that of Philadel-
phia, and being a great connoisseur with regard to the
article of meat. I saw here a greater number of fine
sirloins of beef than I had ever seen in any one market
before. After I got back to the inn, I hankered after
one of these sirloins of beef, went back, had it sewed up
in cloths, and brought it to London. It was not one of
the largest size ; but, with the third part of the suet left
in it, it weighed 61 lbs. and was whiter and fatter than
any one of the same sire that I ever saw before. The
butchers told me that the oxen were bought in Lincoln-
shire, and that a great part of the sirloins had that
morning been sent off to London, sewed up in cloths. I
have always sought for this Lincolnshire beef in New-
gate market : it comes sewed up in cloths, the rump and
sirloin in one piece.
We got to Leicester, through very rough weather, on
Saturday evening, Gth of February, and I intended• to
give a lecture in a work-room which had been prepared
fot the purpose 7 but we had omitted to write from Not-
tingham, and, owing to that omission,•no notice of the
lecture had been given. Our friends wanted us to stop
until Monday ; but my appointments at home rendered
that impossible.
On Sunday morning, the 7th of February, we found
that a thaw had come in the night ; and when we got to
Birchill, were we slept on Sunday, we found there bad
been a heavy rain. On Monday morning, we set off for
Kensington, finding less and less snow as we aproached
London ; and when I got to Barn-Elm, which I did be-
fore it was dark, scarcely a bit of snow was to be seen ;
so that, during the fifty-three days of my absence, the
frost and snow lasted all but the last day ; thus terminated
a journey of 667 biles, during which I made seven and
twenty speeches, occupying, in the whole, about sixty-
one hours, and returning on the very day that the frost
broke bp, and made it, in some measure, necessary that
I should be again at home—Register.

• A fire broke out about six o'clock on Saturday morn-
ing, at the Waggon arid Hones public-house, opposite
the Alms 'Houses, Newington. Information of the car-
CUlnatanCe was received by .the firemen at the moment
they hid: extinguished the fire. in Chester-place, and
they, with a body of police, repelled to the spot with the
engines. A considerable quantity of 'property was de-
stroyed, put the peonies sustained only partial injury.