Cobbett and Mill. 475 



tooth and nail, and attacked the squires in their own parks ; 

 the latter sat at his desk, and moved up with pitiless logic 

 argument after argument, until he made his final dash at some 

 stronghold of seignorial power. Cobbett went up and down 

 the land making word-pictures of what he saw with his own 

 eyes. Mill studied some instance of landed monopoly with 

 the mental vision of the utilitarian, and forced even an oppo- 

 nent to acknowledge the justice of his reasoning. 



There is something tremendously convincing in the terse, 

 forcible English of Cobbett, the practical eye-witness, but 

 there is even more danger to the owners of the soil in the 

 calm, unbiassed language of Mill, the theorist. It would be 

 difficult to decide whether Cobbett during his Rural Rides did 

 more harm to the Landed Interest by sowing discord in its 

 ranks, than Mill did by opening the eyes of outsiders to the 

 evils of the whole system in his Principles of Political Economy. 

 There is no poetry, and very little elegance of diction, in the 

 Rural Rides^ but the descriptions of country life are danger- 

 ously realistic. Very few people, excepting the labouring 

 class, are sacred from their author's caustic tongue, and 

 nothing, however trivial, seems to escape his roving eye. 



He rides along the lanes, and keeps a sharp look-out over 

 the hedges. Now some neglectful piece of husbandry detains 

 the quondam ploughman, and anon something ludicrous arrests 

 the attention of the satirist. Of all varieties of the genus 

 squire, the " fundlord," as he calls him, raises his ire the 

 most. One day he passes through a locality where one of 

 these new landed capitalists has just pitched his tent. " Came 

 through a place," he says, " called a park. Of all the ridicu- 

 lous things I ever saw in my life, this place is the most ridicu- 

 lous." We wonder what could have started him in this strain, 

 and find that the new proprietor has invested some of the 

 proceeds of his late merchandise in building a Gothic dwelling- 

 house, and laying out the grounds in a picturesque style. 

 The unfortunate man is accused of impiety because he has 

 decorated a few gable ends with crosses, and formed an empty 

 saint's niche in a fir-wood arch. There is a swamp which has 

 been turned into a pond ; its sides have been laid out after the 



