474 History of the English Landed Interest. 



the humble circumstances of his training, the milk sop for 

 breakfast, the apple pudding for dinner, the hunch of bread 

 and morsel of cheese for supper, the fire of turf cut from the 

 neighbouring waste, and the evening light of a rush soaked in 

 grease. At the age when Mill was reading Greek, Cobbett 

 was crawling home after a day's rook-scaring, almost too 

 fatigued to scale the gates and stiles in Ms path, and hungry 

 enough when he got there to follow his granny's behests, and 

 make a palatable supper off the bread by merely smelling at 

 the cheese. Mill tells us regretfully that he " never was a 

 boy"; there was something in the petulance and inconsistency 

 of Cobbett's matured manhood that leads one to infer that he 

 was hardly ever anything else. Even in the former's pursuit 

 of recreation, viz., the "peripatetic oral examinations " with 

 his father, he was learning the philosophy of calmness and 

 self-control, while at the same age the latter was playing un- 

 worthy tricks to spite Bradley the huntsman by drawing a 

 red herring across the trail of his hare. During the most 

 impressionable years of human existence Cobbett was picking 

 up the rough practical lessons of life's economy in the turnip 

 field, the barrack room, and even the gaol. Mill, on the con- 

 trary, was all this while the constant associate of the poet and 

 the philosopher. Prolonged intercourse with inferiors brought 

 out and developed in Cobbett all the hereditary vulgarities 

 common to the rustic. Apologising once for his roughness, he 

 said : "I have so long had the misfortune to keep a parcel of 

 badger-hided fellows in order, that I am like a drummer that 

 has been used to flog old offenders. I have become heavy- 

 handed." Mill's early training, on the contrary, repressed 

 freedom of utterance, and rendered him diffident and modest 

 when before the public. 



The minds of both, however, though influenced by opposite 

 forces, were firmly set against the monopolies of landed pro- 

 perty. Each took his own method of showing his hostility, 

 and letting the community into the secret of the weak points 

 in the enemy's harness. The onslaughts of Cobbett were like 

 a wild beast's, those of Mill like the overpowering advance of 

 some noiseless machine. The former rushed forward with 



