SOURCE: "A Scarce Book," in The National Review, London, Vol. V, No. 27, May, 1885, pp. 413-28.

[In the following excerpt, Egerton discusses Rural Rides, citing several lengthy quotations to illustrate Cobbett's handling of various concerns and emphases.]

Were the well-meaning persons to have their way who long for the establishment of an English Academy, one wonders what would be the attitude of such an august body towards a writer like Cobbett. And yet his claim to rank as a classic admits, I suppose, of little question. The position he holds among the immortals he has taken, as it were, by storm; and what no favour of literary clique helped to gain, no passing whim of favour can take away. It is indeed possible that as the English language comes more and more to savour of the dissecting-room and the studio, and the form of its literature to sink beneath the weight of its matter, criticism may attach a yet greater importance to the style as opposed to the substance of an author, and the surrounding desert render yet more gracious such wells as still exist of "English pure and undefiled." But of the merits of Cobbett's style there can be no question. In his moods of most frantic violence, dancing a war-dance around Lord Castlereagh's dead body, or covering with the foulest abuse the honoured name of Burke, the manner of his writing never lacks in skill. We may not approve the music it gives forth, but we cannot but allow that the pipe is never out of tune. Nor is the secret of the merits of his style far to seek. Of none other does the saying of Buffon hold more profoundly true that "le style c'est I'homme." His very weaknesses as a man lent strength to his writing. Because he was obstinate, narrow-minded, and could see only the one side of a question, therefore his sight had nothing to distract it from seeing what he did see with perfect distinctness, and from describing that with perfect accuracy. It is surely no mere coincidence that in our times a similar intellectual soil has produced for us a similar intellectual harvest, and that the greatest of living English orators recalls in his obstinacy and in his self-sufficiency, no less than by the spell of his eloquence, the memory of Cobbett.

To good writing, profound knowledge is often a hindrance rather than a help. The author's sentences become loaded with parentheses, because his mind is being crossed by contrary currents of thought. The panting expression toils in vain after the conception; the most notable instance of which tendency is to be found in the style of Thucydides, the rush of whose meaning, very often, scarcely contains itself within the banks of grammar. So, too, we have been lately told that the strange vocabulary of "immensities," "eternities," &c. which Carlyle was continually employing, was in great measure due to the awkwardness with which he approached subjects too deep for words.

No such difficulty attended the steps of Cobbett. The native hue of his argument, in all conscience resolute enough, is never sicklied o'er by any pale cast of thought. "His Minerva is born in panoply." "The twilight of dubiety never falls upon him." "Res duplex." But could Cobbett have understood the saying he would have answered, "Yes, to the double-faced." Of all writers who have lived, he is the most frankly and completely materialist. "In the groves of his academy at the end of every visto we see nothing but"—the stomach. "Whose God is their belly." Only it is but fair to say that, himself the most frugal of men, it is for the belly of others that he is concerned. "I have observed, and I beseech you to attend to it," he wrote to the English people,

that the words liberty, freedom, rights, and the rest of the catalogue, which hypocritical knaves send rolling off the tongue, are worth nothing at all. It is things that we want. Those men who make a fuss about sorts of Government, and who tell us about the good things which arise from the Republican Government of America, deceive themselves or deceive others. It is not because the government is Republican, but because it is cheap; and it is cheap not because it is Republican, but because the people choose those who make the laws and vote the taxes. If the President of America were called King of America instead of being called President, it would be of no consequence to the people, if the King cost no more than the President now costs. Nothing is worth looking at; nothing is worth talking about but the cost, because it is this that comes and takes the dinner from the labourer and that takes the coat off his back.

It is not surprising that a writer of this stamp should be neglected at the present day. Alike in his merits and in his faults Cobbett appeals but little to a modern taste. The gulf which divides Gillray from Tenniel, is not wider than that which separates Cobbett from the modern controversialist. We may have become, as he complained, "a hollow and trivial nation," "frivolous, effeminate, and senseless," but at least we have the qualities of our defects, and are not, like him, brutal. Some of us are, perhaps, still capable of removing our neighbour's land-mark, but we are careful to do so with "agricultural implements." Moreover, Cobbett was, to the very depths of his innermost being, a Philistine of the Philistines, and we are nothing if not "cultured." In his youth, when in America, and fighting single-handed the battles of the English people and Constitution, he heard himself described one day by the English Consul as "a wild fellow." It is as "a wild fellow" that he takes his place in the republic of letters, and, therefore, it is no wonder that the guides and cicerones of that republic should prefer to give him a wide berth.

After all, however, the main reason of the neglect which has overtaken Cobbett lies in what, when he was alive, undoubtedly constituted his strength, namely, his exclusive attention to politics. Now, freshness being desirable in all things, there is, perhaps, nothing so unsavoury as stale politics. And the political beliefs of Cobbett belong, and have for many years belonged, to the limbo of the past; gone, if not "to the tomb of all the Capulets," perhaps to a warmer place! That the English people were once free, prosperous, and contented: that it was "this vile paper-money and funding system; this system of Dutch descent, begotten by Bishop Burnett, and born in Hell," which had changed that state of things: that to support this system (the tendency of which was to divert their estates into the hands of Jews and money-jobbers), the aristocracy had to be bribed by places and pensions; that its maintenance involved so grievous a burden of taxation upon all the necessaries of life, as to reduce the labouring classes to very starvation. That the remedy lay in such an "equitable adjustment" as should give, to the public creditor and the public pensioner, only what remained after that the condition of the people had been rendered tolerable; that such an equitable adjustment could only be obtained in a Reformed Parliament, and that, therefore, and for no other reason, Reform was desirable. In these propositions may be roughly summarised the main articles of Cobbett's political creed. But the mere statement of them proves better than the most eloquent argument how wholly they belong to the past. There may be much that still requires remedy in the condition of the labouring classes, but no honest man can say that it is the result of excessive taxation falling upon the necessaries of life. And the "facts and fallacies" of the "Financial Reform Almanack" are at most the mere ground-swell of what was once an angry sea. Quisque suos manes patimur; but a society which has survived the cannonading of Cobbett may await, perhaps, with confidence the Greek fire of Messrs. Chamberlain and Henry George.

It follows from what has been said that the task of commenting on any book written by Cobbett, without continually trespassing upon the field of politics, is one of no little difficulty; yet in the case of his Rural Rides it may be attempted. The fate of this book very strongly bears out my statement as to the neglect of Cobbett's writing by the general public. The shelves of Mudie know it not, and it has become so scarce, that a book published at the price of a few shillings can now with difficulty be obtained for thirty. It was, I believe, the intention of a lately-deceased publisher to issue a new edition of the work. Whether such an undertaking would be rewarded with much success is, I think, very questionable. Let no one expect in Cobbett the account of a mere tour of pleasure. The stern utilitarian who, somewhere, tells us that he had never in his life gone for a walk save with an object at the end of it, was not likely to ride, as he did, many hundreds of miles through England merely to enjoy the views and afterwards to describe them. "My object was not to see inns and turn-pike roads, but to see the country; to see the farmers at home and to see the labourers in the fields, and to do this you must travel on foot or on horseback. With a gig you cannot get about among bye-ways and across fields, through bridle-ways and hunting-gates." Again: "I wish to see many people, and to talk to them; and there are a great many people who wish to see and talk to me. What better reason can be given for a man's going about the country and dining at fairs and markets." "Thus, Sir," in another place he writes, "I have led you about the country. All sorts of things have I talked of, to be sure, but there are very few of these things which have not their interest one way or another. At the end of a hundred miles or two of travelling, stopping here and there, talking freely with everybody; hearing what gentlemen, farmers, tradesmen, journeymen, labourers, women, girls, boys, and all have to say; reasoning with some, laughing with others, and observing all that passes; and especially if your manner be such as to remove every kind of reserve from every class; at the end of a tramp like this you get impressed upon your mind a true picture not only of the taste of the country, but of the state of the people's minds throughout the country."

Nevertheless, freely granting that his main object is political, there is much in the book which the most frivolous readers cannot fail to find very entertaining. To begin with, it abounds in those autobiographical references, which, to lovers of Cobbett, form one great charm of his writings. His moral ideals were, as has been already hinted, very far from the highest; but, unlike nearly all professional moralists, his practice corresponded with his precepts. In widening the area of the affections there is, without doubt, grave danger lest we diminish their depth. Most people will prefer Cobbett to Rousseau; the lover of his kindred to the lover of his kind; the indifferent citizen of the world to the fervid philanthropist, who left his children to the tender mercies of the public hospital. The following passage throws a flood of very pleasant light upon the burly demagogue in his family relations.

Before we [i.e. his son Richard and he] got this supply of bread and cheese, we, though in ordinary times a couple of singularly jovial companions, and seldom going a hundred yards (except going very fast) without one or the other speaking, began to grow dull, or, rather, glum. The way seemed long, and when I had to speak in answer to Richard, the speaking was as brief as might be. Unfortunately just at this critical period, one of the loops that held the straps of Richard's little portmanteau broke, and it became necessary for me to fasten the portmanteau on before me, upon my saddle. This, which was not the work of more than five minutes, would, had I had a breakfast, have been nothing at all, indeed, matter for laughter. But now it was something. It was his 'fault" for capering and jerking about "so." I jumped off, saying, "Here, I'll carry it myself" And then I began to take off the remaining strap, pulling with great violence and in great haste. Just at this time, my eye met his, in which I saw great surprise; and feeling the just rebuke, feeling heartily ashamed of myself, I instantly changed my tone and manner, cast the blame upon the saddles, and talked of the effectual means which we would take to prevent the like in future.

Although Cobbett is divided, toto cceo, from the landscape wordpainters of our own day, no one had a keener eye for the beautiful or a more vivid pen in its description. Witness the following examples:—

Woodland countries are interesting on many accounts, not so much on account of their masses of green leaves, as on account of the variety of sights and sounds and incidents that they afford. Even in winter the coppices are beautiful to the eye, while they comfort the mind with the idea of shelter and warmth. In spring they change their hue from day to day during two whole months, which is about the time from the first appearance of the delicate leaves of the birch to the full expansion of those of the ash; and even before the leaves come at all to intercept the view, what in the vegetable creation is so delightful to behold as the beds of a coppice bespangled with primroses and bluebells? The opening of the birch leaves is the signal for the pheasant to begin to crow, for the blackbird to whistle and the thrush to sing; and just when the oak buds begin to look reddish, and not a day before, the whole tribes of finches burst forth in song from every bough, while the lark, imitating them all, carries the joyous sound to the sky.

The custom is, in this part of Hertfordshire (and I am told it continues into Bedfordshire) to leave a border round the ploughed part of the fields to bear grass, and to make hay from, so that the grass being now made into hay, every corn-field has a closely-mowed grass-walk about ten feet wide all round it, between the corn and the hedge. This is most beautiful! The hedges are full now of the shepherd's rose, honeysuckle, and all sorts of wild flowers, so that you are upon a grass-walk with this most beautiful of all flowergardens and shrubberies on your one hand, and with the corn on the other. And thus you go from field to field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedgerows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasuregrounds, indeed! What that man ever invented under the name of pleasure-grounds can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?

Upon the songs and habits of birds, we may add the following:—

There is one deficiency, and that, with me, a great one, throughout this county of corn and grass and oxen and sheep, that I have come over during the last three weeks, namely, the want of singing birds. We are now just in that season when they sing most. Here, in all this county, I have seen and heard only about four skylarks, and not one other singing bird of any description; and of the small birds that do not sing I have seen only one yellow-hammer, and it was perched on the rail of a pond between Boston and Sibrey. Oh! the thousands of linnets all singing together on one tree in the sand-hills of Surrey! Oh! the carolling in the coppices and dingles of Hampshire and Sussex and Kent! At this moment (five o'clock in the morning) the groves at Barn Elm are echoing with the warbling of thousands upon thousands of birds. The thrush begins a little before it is light; next the blackbird; next the larks begin to rise; all the rest begin the moment the sun gives the signal; and from the hedges, the bushes, from the middle and the topmost twigs of the trees, comes the singing of endless variety; from the long dead grass comes the sound of the sweet and soft voice of the white-throat or nettle-tom, while the loud and merry song of the lark (the songster himself out of sight) seems to descend from the skies. Milton, in his description of Paradise, has not omitted the "song of earliest birds."

Here I heard the first singing of the birds this year; and I here observed an instance of that petticoat government which apparently pervades the whole of animated nature. A lark very near to me in a ploughed field rose from the ground, and was saluting the sun with his delightful song. He was got about as high as the dome of St. Paul's (having me for a motionless and admiring auditor) when the hen started up from nearly the same spot whence the cock had risen, flew up and passed close by him. I could not hear what she said, but supposed that she must have given him a pretty smart reprimand, for down she came upon the ground, and he, ceasing to sing, took a twirl in the air and came down after her. Others have, I dare say, seen this a thousand times over; but I never observed it before.

It is pleasant to know that the practice referred to in the following paragraph still holds amongst English labourers:—

You see here (i.e. Buckinghamshire), as in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire, and, indeed, in almost every part of England, that most interesting of all objects, that which is such an honour to England, and that which distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, namely, those neatly kept and productive little gardens round the labourers' houses, which are seldom unornamented with more or less of flowers. We have only to look at these to know what sort of people English labourers are. These gardens are the answer to the Malthuses and the Scarletts. Shut your mouths, you Scotch economists; cease bawling, Mr. Brougham and you Edinburgh Reviewers, till you can show us something, not like, but approaching towards a likeness of this!

Apropos of Scotchmen, here is his opinion of that canny race:—

Scotchmen toil hard enough in Scotland, but when they go from home it is not to work, if you please. They are found in gardens, and especially in gentlemen's gardens. Tying up flowers, picking dead leaves off exotics, peeping into melon-frames, publishing the banns of marriage between the "male" and "female" blossoms, tap-tap-tapping against a wall with a hammer that weighs half-an-ounce. They have backs as straight, and shoulders as square, as heroes of Waterloo; and who can blame them? The digging, the mowing, the carrying of loads; all the break-back and sweat-extracting work, they leave to be performed by those who have less prudence than they have. The great purpose of human art, the great end of human study, is to obtain ease, to throw the burden of labour from our own shoulders, and to fix it on those of others.

He has already been compared in some respects to Mr. Bright, but, to judge from the following, such a comparison would have seemed to him far from flattering. He is speaking of the Quakers.

Here is a sect of non-labourers. One would think that their religion bound them under a curse not to work. Some part of the people of all other sects work, sweat at work; do something that is useful to other people; but here is a sect of buyers and sellers. They make nothing, they cause nothing to come; they breed as well as other sects, but they make none of the raiment or houses, and cause none of the food to come. In order to justify some measure for paring the nails of this greedy sect, it is enough to say of them, which we may with perfect truth, that, if all the other sects were to act like them, the community must perish. This is quite enough to say of this sect, of the monstrous privileges of whom we shall, I hope, one of these days see an end. If I had the dealing of them, I would soon teach them to use the spade, and the plough, and the musket too when necessary.

Very seasonable just now appears his general appreciation of middle-men. "Does not everyone see, in a minute, how the exchanging of fairs and markets for shops creates idlers and traffickers, creates those locusts called middle-men, who create nothing, who add to the value of nothing, who improve nothing, but who live in idleness and who live well, too, out of the labour of the producer and the consumer. The fair and the market, those wise institutions of our forefathers, and with regard to the management of which they were so scrupulously careful; the fair and the market bring the producer and the consumer in contact with each other. Whatever is gained, is at any rate gained by one or the other of these. The fair and the market bring them together, and enable them to act for their mutual interest and convenience. The shop and the trafficker keep them apart; the shop hides from both producer and consumer the real state of matters. The fair and market lay everything open. Going to either, you see the state of things at once, and the transactions are fair and just; not disfigured, too, by falsehood, and by those attempts at deception which disgrace trafficking in general."

Here, as so often, Cobbett makes the great mistake of wishing to put back the clock of history; nevertheless, the evil to which he alludes is a very real one, and to remedy it would be to supply the answer to what is undoubtedly one of the most pressing social questions of the day.

In reading Cobbett, one must always bear in mind the character of the times in which he lived. It is this which explains, and in a great measure justifies, his attitude towards the Church Establishment. A not wholly base indignation may have moved him, when he saw that estate of the Church, which Mr. Disraeli termed "the estate of the poor," diverted from its rightful purpose, and serving to maintain absentee parsons in the assembly rooms of Bath and Cheltenham. "This parish," he writes, probably with exaggeration, but with a certain substratum of truth, "of Weston is remarkable for having a rector who has constantly resided for twenty years! I do not believe that there is an instance to match this in the whole kingdom." "It is very true that the labouring people have in a great measure ceased to go to church. There were scarcely any of that class in this (Goudhurst) great country church to-day. I do not believe there were ten."

What would have been Cobbett's opinion (assuming always, as I see no reason to doubt, that he honestly held the views he professed) upon the question of the Established Church, could he have lived to witness that great revival by which its dry bones have become animated with new being and new life, it were idle to inquire. Probably his prejudices had become too deeply rooted to be extirpated. On many questions, however, his views, starting from very different premises, curiously anticipate those of the later High Church party.

"Let it be observed," he writes,

that when these churches were built, people had not yet thought of cramming them with pews, as a stable is filled with stalls. Those who built these churches had no idea that worshipping God meant going to sit to hear a man talk out what he called preaching. By worship, they meant very different things; and, above all things, when they had made a fine and noble building, they did not dream of disfiguring the inside of it by filling its floors with large and deep boxes made of deal boards. In short, the floor was the place for worshippers to stand or to kneel, and there was no distinction; no high place, and no low place; all were upon a level before God at any rate. Some were not stuck into pews lined with green or red cloth, while others were crammed into corners, to stand erect or sit on the floor. These odious distinctions are of Protestant origin and growth. The lazy lolling in pews we owe to what is called the Reformation.

Again,

St. Botolph, to whom this church (Boston) is dedicated, while he (if Saints see and hear what is passing on earth) must lament that the piety-inspiring mass has been in this noble edifice supplanted by the monstrous humming of an oaken hutch, has not the mortification of seeing his church treated in a manner as if the new possessors sighed for the hour of its destruction. It is taken great care of; and though it has suffered from Protestant repairs; though the images are gone and the stained glass, and though the glazing is now in squares instead of lozenges; though the nave is stuffed with pens called pews; and though other changes have taken place, detracting from the beauty of the edifice, great care is taken of it, as it now is, and the inside is not disfigured and disgraced by a gallery, that great characteristic mark of Protestant taste, which, as nearly as may be, makes a church like a playhouse.

In this connection we may note the following:—

Hearing the bells of the Cathedral, I took Richard to show him that ancient and most magnificent pile, and particularly to show him the tomb of that famous Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykham, who was the chancellor and minister of that great and glorious King, Edward III.; who sprang from poor parents in the little village of Wykham, three miles from Botley; and who, amongst other great and most munificent deeds, founded the famous college, or school, of Winchester, and also one of the colleges at Oxford. I told Richard about this, as we went from the inn down to the Cathedral; and when I showed him the tomb where the bishop lies on his back, in his Catholic robes, with his mitre on his head, his shepherd's crook by his side, with little children at his feet, their hands put together in a praying attitude, he looked with a degree of inquisitive earnestness that pleased me very much. I took him, as far as I could, about the cathedral. The "service" was now begun. There is a dean, and God knows how many prebends, belonging to this immensely rich bishopric and chapter; and there were at this 'service' two or three men and five or six boys in white surplices, with a congregation of fifteen women and four men. Gracious God! If William of Wykham could at that moment have been raised from his tomb! If St. Swithin, whose name the Cathedral bears, or Alfred the Great, to whom St. Swithin was tutor: if either of these could have come or had been told that that was what was now carried on, by men who talked of the "damnable errors" of those who founded that very Church! …

For my part I could not look up at the spire and at the whole of the Church of Salisbury without feeling that I lived in degenerate times. Such a thing never could be made now. We feel that, as we look at the building. It really does appear that if our forefathers had not made these buildings, we should have forgotten before now what the Christian religion was!

Of course it would be easy to make too much of all this. Where Cobbett is, there, we may be sure, politics are not far off. And his enthusiasm for William of Wykham is mainly due to the fact that in the times of that worthy there were as yet no poor rates. It would be an idle, as well as somewhat ludicrous endeavour, to wrap his brawny form in a ritualist cassock, or represent the man who brought Tom Paine's body home to England as a Tractarian born out of due time: nevertheless, the form in which his natural tastes and instincts embodied his attacks upon the Church of his day is, I think, not a little curious.

Upon the subject of sport, Cobbett is always good reading. He was, his son tells us, while at Botley for years a strict preserver of game, though no "shot," keeping sometimes from thirty to forty dogs, greyhounds, pointers, setters, and spaniels. He had a cart's bed, full of live hares, brought from Yorkshire, to turn down on his own farms.

At Uphusband, in Hampshire, he is reminded how he once saw at Netherhaven, Mr. Hick Beech's, an "acre of hares." "Mr. Beech received us very politely. He took us into a wheat stubble close by his paddock; his son took a gallop round, cracking his whip at the same time; the hares (which were very thickly in sight before) started all over the field, ran into a flock like sheep, and we all agreed that the flock did cover an acre of ground." …

The attitude of Cobbett towards the "landed interest" was one altogether peculiar to himself. His natural prejudices were in favour of the old country squire, as. opposed to the "lord of the loom" and the loanmonger. He speaks with respect and enthusiasm of "a resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost, practising hospitality without ceremony, from habit and not on calculation." But on the other hand the interests of the aristocracy seemed closely identified with those of the "system," and with "the system" Cobbett had declared war to the death. And so it happened that he became the most bitter enemy of his natural friends, constituted under a commission signed and sealed by his own arrogance to be a "scourge and minister." But, just as in his quarrel with the Church we found him curiously anticipating the notes of the Oxford movement, so, in his opinions upon social questions he is often the precursor of the "Young England" party.

Hume and other historians rail against the feudal system, and we "enlightened" and "free" creatures, as we are, look back with contempt, or at least with surprise and pity, to the "vassalage" of our forefathers. But if the matter were well inquired into, not slurred over, but well and truly examined, we should find that the people of these villages were as free in the days of William Rufus, as are the people of the present day; and that vassalage, only under other names, exists now as completely as it existed then. Well, but out of this, if true, arises another question, namely, whether the million would derive any benefit from being transferred from these great lords, who possess them by hundreds, to Jews and jobbers who would possess them by halfdozens or by couples? … Talk of vassals! talk of villains! talk of serfs! Are there any of them, or did feudal times ever see any of them, so debased, so absolutely slaves, as the poor creatures who, in the "enlightened" North, are compelled to work fourteen hours in a day, in a heat of eighty-four degrees, and who are liable to punishment for looking out at a window of the factory!

Different as was in many ways the England of Cobbett from the England of to-day, there are yet some observations in Rural Rides that would apply very well to the state of things around us. "Agricultural distress," he writes in 1821, "is the great topic of general conversation." And the burden of the following lament is still heard in the land.

Those [i.e. the farm-houses] that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress within, who is stuck up in a place she calls a parlour, with, if she have children, the "young ladies and gentlemen" about her: some showy chairs and a sofa (a sofa by all means); half a dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better educated than she; two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make a show not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever to work. They are all to be gentle-folks. Go to plough? Good God! What! young gentlemen go to plough! They become clerks, or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty work, as cunning horses do from the bridle.

The following passage upon the working of the old Poor Law, is worthy to be placed beside the memorable account, in Past and Present, of what Carlyle saw outside the workhouse at St. Ives. It detracts nothing from the merit of Cobbett's description that he altogether misread the moral of the picture, and fiercely opposed that change in the law which was to render such a state of things for the future impossible.

Here we found a parcel of labourers at parish work. Amongst them was an old playmate of mine. The account they gave of their situation was very dismal. The harvest was over early; the hop-picking is now over; and now they are employed by the parish, that is to say, not absolutely digging holes one day and filling them up the next, but, at the expense of half-ruined farmers, and tradesmen, and landlords, to break stones into very small pieces, to make nice smooth roads, lest the jolting in going along them should create bile in the stomach of the over-fed tax-eaters. I call upon mankind to witness this scene, and to say whether ever the like of this was heard of before. It is a state of things wherein all is out of order; where selfpreservation, that great law of nature, seems to be set at defiance; for here are farmers unable to pay men for working for them, and yet compelled to pay them for working in doing that which is really of no use to any human being. There lie the hop-poles unstripped. You see a hundred things in the neighbouring fields that want doing. The fences are not nearly what they ought to be. The very meadows to our right and left in crossing this little valley would occupy these men advantageously until the setting in of the frost; and here are they not, as I said before, actually digging holes one day and filling them up the next, but to all intents and purposes as uselessly employed.

Even in his maladies Cobbett could not be like other people, nor would it be wise to try as a remedy for the whooping cough, the riding wet to the skin two or three hours amongst the clouds on the South Downs, because in his case it appears to have been efficacious. The dogged obstinacy which was his characteristic finds an amusing illustration in the story of his ride from Hambledon to Thursley. If he had taken the regular road he would have passed over Hindhead, which he was determined to avoid. He accomplishes his object as far as a village called Headley, by going across a forest. But from Headley his troubles begin. He rashly sets out in the dark with a guide who manages to lose his way. The end of it being that they arrive at Thursley, but only after having crossed Hindhead. Whereupon Cobbett, more suo, refuses the guide the three shillings that he had agreed to give him for showing him the way. "Either you did not know the way well," he says, "or you did: if the former, it was dishonest in you to undertake to guide me; if the latter, you have wilfully led me miles out of my way." "The guide grumbled, but off he went!"

This experience suggests to him the old moral "how differently one is affected by the same sight under different circumstances. At the 'Holly Bush' at Headley, there was a room full of fellows in white smock-frocks, drinking and smoking and talking, and I, who was then dry and warm, moralized within myself on their folly in spending their time in such a way. But when I got down from Hindhead to the public-house at Road Lane, with my skin soaking and my teeth chattering, I thought just such another group, whom I saw through the window, sitting round a good fire, with pipes in their mouths, the wisest assembly I had ever set my eyes on. A real collective wisdom!" In the manufacture of nick-names or of "catch" sentences Cobbett was proverbially happy. Little did Gambetta think, when he coined the famous expression "Se sommettre ou se demettre," that he was merely putting into French Cobbett's advice to Sir Francis Burdett, which occurs in the Rural Rides, that he must "turn to or turn out."

In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made to give, by means of copious extracts, some idea of a book now scarce, written by an author now, I believe, neglected; but who, in the memory of men still living, was a great power in the land. Fifty years have well nigh passed since Cobbett's death, and the country people whom he loved well, if not wisely, are at last entering upon that promised land of political citizenship which is, they are told, to be flowing for them with the milk and honey of others' storing. And men are awaiting, some with insolent exultation and others with fear and trembling, and others yet again with hope not unmixed with apprehension, the event. At such a time an additional interest lends itself to the one eminent author whom the farm-labourers of England can claim as their own. The grandson of a day-labourer, the son of a small farmer, in his youth himself a plough-boy, growing up, a common soldier among comrades recruited from the lowest classes, Cobbett, with all his individual peculiarities, yet everywhere smacks of the deep clays and sands of his native Surrey. To him may we apply with truth the expression of Balzac "II pue le peuple." What light then, however fitful and dubious, do Cobbett's writings throw upon the probable action of our new masters? In the first place, if we are to accept him as security, the Pall Mall Gazette is clearly right, and Manchester Liberalism will soon, at the hands of an enfranchised Democracy, receive its quietus. Talk of war and empire being the dreams of an idle aristocracy! Why, Cobbett considered that the first act of a Reformed Parliament, after settling the question of the Debt, should be to build such a fleet as should curb once and for ever the insolence of cousin Jonathan! Upon the grave question how far the Democracy will be able to keep clear of the dangerous rocks of Socialism, the answer from Cobbett is less certain. Upon the one hand he has all a Democracy's hatred and contempt for political economy, for that "feelosophy" which he does not care to comprehend. He believes that the condition of the people may in many ways be bettered by Acts of Parliament, and very often he comes very near to Socialism; but on the other hand his roots grow deep in the past; he has the Englishman's contempt for Utopian system-mongers (witness the way in which he speaks of "Owen that 'humane' half-mad fellow"), and the English tolerance of what is logically anomalous, so long as in fact it works well; he may assume the rags and ribbons of Jacobin Paris, but the smock-frock of his fathers is his natural wear. With all his violence there is in him not a little of that English "good humour" which Clarendon has noted in a sentence which Bolingbroke could never read without tears. Thus musing, one seems to discern, hardly and indistinctly, through the dense fog of bygone controversies, the figure of another Cobbett, whom neglect has not piqued, nor persecution maddened; a figure not wholly inauspicious for the success of our new departure. These, however, are high themes, upon which I have neither the desire nor the capacity to enter. Enough to have been allowed to suspend in the temple of Toryism a wreath, however short-lived, to the memory of one with whom, a Radical of Radicals, we have this much in common, that he did not love the Whigs, and that he loved England.