INTRODUCTION. n 



tried to shout him down, but the lust of battle was in the 

 very marrow of his bones. Opposition only stimulated him. 



" The people, I say, expected that some measure should be 

 proposed by Ministers for their relief ; instead of which they 

 asked for the power of throwing the people into dungeons. 

 (Great confusion.} If I be not heard I shall move an adjournment ! 

 I will not spare you one word. You shall hear every word that 

 I have to say ... I have a very sacred duty to perform, and if 

 the House be determined not to hear me to-night I will certainly 

 bring it forward to-morrow ; and if the House will not hear me 

 to-morrow, I will then bring it forward the day after. The 

 statement that I have to make I am determined to make." 



And he did. The House was forced to listen to Cobbett 

 talking on a subject of which few members knew anything. 

 The subject was the condition of the poor. 



" Your religion seems to be altogether political," said 

 a parson to Cobbett, who promptly retorted : " Very much 

 so, indeed ; and well it may since I have been furnished with 

 a creed which makes part of an Act of Parliament." 



Behind Cobbett 's bracing egotism always loomed the 

 spectre of the dispossessed. 



It seems strange that Cobbett managed to escape the 

 pedantry of the self-educated man who sets up as school- 

 master to every living being. He seems to have plucked the 

 bones and sinews out of syntax and made from them a living 

 masterpiece when he sat down to write. He wrote like 

 one talking to a friend in a gale of wind. He spoke and 

 wrote as no one ever spoke and wrote before. We know that 

 with his intensely English nature Cobbett repudiated all 

 claims to genius, which he seems to have regarded as some- 

 thing lower than industry. But was there not after all a 

 streak of genius in Cobbett ? Who but one who had the eye 

 of a literary genius could visualise wretched girls working 

 in fields as " ragged as colts and as pale as ashes." Who but 

 a genius with a colossal ignorance of philosophical writings 

 could have written in a book on grammar : " It is the mind 

 that lives ; and the length of life ought to be measured by the 

 numbers and importance of our ideas and not by the number 

 of our days." 



Cobbett's ambition was to write a history of England. 



