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But to any one who feels literature as human, the empty chair of Cobbett is more solemn and significant than the throne. With him died the sort of democracy that was a return to Nature, and which only poets and mobs can understand. After him Radicalism is urban and Toryism suburban. Going through green Warwickshire, Cobbett might have thought of the crops and Shelley of the clouds.
Cobbett sticks close to them, inspects the component parts, and keeps fast hold of the smallest advantages they afford him. Or, if I might here be indulged in a pastoral allusion, Paine tries to enclose his ideas in a fold for security and repose; Cobbett lets his pour out upon the plain like a flock of sheep to feed and batten.
It had been agriculturally worked up in 1818 by Cobbett, whose example was now followed by Shirreff and others. In 1839, George Combe subjected us to phrenological treatment, and had the frankness to acknowledge that it was impossible for an individual to properly describe a great nation.
Such a writer is William Cobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised into a kind of creed. His power is undeniable; his diction, though he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page after page of his writing suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal waste of good English.
But, since Cobbett, men who could not be accused of partisanship and exaggeration have published authentic accounts of the unbounded rapacity of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, in England particularly, which all impartial men are bound to respect, and not attribute to any unworthy motive, since they are supported even by Protestant authorities.
There was no more chance of Reform under the existing régime than of 'a thaw in Zembla, to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour of monarchical government than anything which had happened since the days of Cromwell.
I turn to a man who was in some ways the most complete antithesis to Owen. Cobbett, declares the Edinburgh Review in July 1807, has more influence than all the other journalists put together. He had won it, as the reviewer thought, by his force of character, although he had changed his politics completely 'within the last six months. The fact was more significant than was then apparent.
Cobbett, both in Wiltshire and Hampshire, at all the public meetings that had been held in these counties; I had placed implicit and unbounded confidence in him, and I thought that on his part such feelings had been reciprocal; but a thousand occurrences which hitherto had made no impression on me now rushed upon my mind, and half convinced me that I had been deceived.
Paine said on some occasion, 'What I have written, I have written' as rendering any further declaration of his principles unnecessary. Not so Mr. Cobbett. What he has written is no rule to him what he is to write maintain the opinions of the last six days against friend or foe.
If I said anything against the church, it was merely for a bit of corollary, as Master William Cobbett would say; the quarrel with the church belongs to this fellow in black; so let him carry it on. However," he continued suddenly, "I won't slink from the matter either; it shall never be said by the fine fellows on the quay of New York, that I wouldn't fight against the Church of England.
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