While we were there, a grand display of English games, especially of single-stick and wrestling, took place under Mr. Cobbett's auspices. Players came from all parts of the country--the south, the west, and the north--to contend for fame and glory, and also, I believe, for a well-filled purse; and this exhibition which--quite forgetting the precedent set by a certain princess, _de jure_, called Rosalind, and another princess, _de facto_, called Celia--she termed barbarous, was the cause of his quarrel with my mamma that might have been, Mrs. Blamire.
In my life I never saw two people in a greater passion. Each was thoroughly persuaded of being in the right, either would have gone to the stake upon it, and of course the longer they argued the more determined became their conviction. They said all manner of uncivil things; they called each other very unpretty names; she got very near to saying, "Sir, you're a savage;" he did say, "Ma'am, you're a fine lady;" they talked, both at once, until they could talk no longer, and I have always considered it as one of the greatest pieces of Christian forgiveness that I ever met with, when Mr. Cobbett, after they had both rather cooled down a little, invited Mrs. Blamire to dine at his house the next day. She, less charitable, declined the invitation, and we parted.
As I have said, my father and he had too much of the hearty English character in common not to be great friends; I myself was somewhat of a favorite (I think because of my love for poetry, though he always said not), and I shall never forget the earnestness with which he congratulated us both on our escape from such a wife and such a mother. "She'd have been the death of you!" quoth he, and he believed it. Doubtless, she, when we were gone, spoke quite as ill of him, and believed it also. Nevertheless, excellent persons were they both; only they had quarreled about the propriety or the impropriety of a bout at single-stick! Such a thing is anger!
In my childhood I knew many of the numerous colony which took refuge in London from the horrors of the First French Revolution. The lady at whose school I was educated, and he was so much the more efficient partner that it was his school rather than hers, had married a Frenchman, who had been secretary to the Comte de Moustiers, one of the last embassadors, if not the very last, from Louis Seize to the Court of St. James's. Of course he knew many emigrants of the highest rank, and indeed of all ranks; and being a lively, kind-hearted man, with a liberal hand, and a social temper, it was his delight to assemble as many as he could of his poor countrymen and countrywomen around his hospitable supper-table.